Unhook3d said..Meg1122 said...
Funny but in Darwin they have their large population of crocodiles that were once hunted with numbers being reduced to an unsustainable level.
Condolences to the young guys family and friends. RIP young soul.
As for the debate about culling, u do realise that crocodiles are again reaching out of control numbers and possibly need to be hunted again to control wildlife levels.
Same goes for sharks. Let's get some figures on the numbers and if local fisherman are anything to go by, I think you'll find that there are simply excessive amounts of sharks and a cull would be beneficial to society. No one on either side of the debate wants them extinct, just controlled.
The reality is that we exploit and manage just about every living thing on the planet as far as possible. We seek to destroy harmful viruses, bacteria, insects. The manage domestic animals exclusively for our use. We kill many fish in the ocean including sharks for a multitude of reasons. Arguments that sharks are just doing what comes naturally dont get tabled when it comes to dealing with the Ebola virus. The problem when we use invalid analogies is that we lose sight of the fact that we dont understand enough about shark behaviour to make effective decisions, the technology currently in use, like tagging, could itself be an aggravating factor. There is a huge amount of data publicly available that is not dumbed down news reports but it appears that almost noone spends any time studying this to try and address to issues caused by ignorance.
The South Africans had a similar issue around 2005 similar to the one facing WA today. Following a spate of attacks between 2001-2004 they realised there was no single owner of the problem, which they fixed with input from relevant stakeholders and then implemented quite effective measures including the spotters. In WA there are Fisheries whose job is to protect fish, lifesaving whose job is to protect people, and government whose job it is to get re-elected, and the anti cull groups. No single body with any mandate exists to coordinate all involved parties, take a hard look at the science, the available and still limited knowledge on shark behavior and propose a way forward. It means that much time is wasted and facts obscured because of the infighting. South Africa largely addressed this around 10 years ago, WA might catchup and implement a similar body, but there is a lot of flaky and dangerous science involved, a lot of emotion and politics. The truth is usually the first casualty in scenarios like this. Here is the outcome, a lot of the primary research for this is also available.
http://sharkspotters.org.za/facts/FindingaBalance.pdf