Shark Stories
Thanks for vote of confidence but no extra financial input required-its part of my job remit,
Just takes a lot of time to trawl through scientific papers making detailed notes and cross referencing as you go and calibrating with other data sets.
It's not any original science, just lay meta-analysis of existing research.
Some of the science involved here is very fluffy and verging on advocacy imo.
Science (should) proceed via falsifiable theories and hypotheses. If reality contradicts your theory or hypothesis you discard or modify it.
Europeans thought swans were white.
The first black swan observed - just a single black swan- meant that theory was now falsified and had to be discarded.
Despite millions of observations of white swans- a single black swan, falsified the assertion that swans were white.
Thats how science should work. Empirical data which contradicts your theory requires the theory to be discarded or modified.
Theories which have poor predictive power also should be modified or discarded.
Even today, it's continually asserted that white shark attacks are mistaken identity, humans are subject to only investigative bites and then spat out.
Just the most basic perusal of recent and historic attacks shows a high proportion of white shark attacks where there is full or partial consumption of the victim, with no body recovered.
These are not bite and spit or investigative bites.
A four fold increase in attacks since 2000, focussed on Northern NSW, also requires explanation which is not served by existing theories.
Look, I'm not a disinterested observer either. Motivated reasoning is a bitch. You look for evidence which fits your views/theories and discard the rest.
My community has been heavily affected, so I have to be extra careful about cherry picking data and neglecting contradictory information.
Looking forward to it FR. You're the man for the job
Must be a way to improve shark nets so they dont kill just deter......amazing how they work when they dont go the the seabed and only stretch so far.............but they work....but how.....is it really just breaking up the swim pattern of a shark ?
Great stuff FR!!
Hey thought this might b worth looking into. Remember back in the early 2000's when the fishos were landing juvie pointers off the beach at Stockton. Turns out they tagged a heap of them. Would b interesting to know what happened to any data on those tagged sharks.
*sorry double post. Bloody internet
This bloke is fishing the same stretch of beach. His is a modern take; attached a go pro to the bait for all of his viewers...
Yeah bro has had some success with drone delivering a bait and camera to offshore reef outcrops 200-400m out where he is, only sees things like trumpeter and pinkies though - it makes for awesome footage.
Guys were doing that off the beach here for a bit- kayaking big baits out and catching whites off the beach before DPI shut it down.
Words from a Legend Qld Surfer / Shaper
We as Australian surfers should demand a 1 kilometer wide strip of ocean around our country to be made shark free. Anything over 10 ft power head to the noggin and off to the cat food factory. It might take 10 years but they will learn that there mates that ventured into the shallows never return. Farrk they own 2/3 of the world's surface as it is. We may even feed them a few tree hugger now and then if they behave themselves and fall into line..
Curse those tree-huggers, what have they ever done for the world??
simba wrote:Must be a way to improve shark nets so they dont kill just deter......amazing how they work when they dont go the the seabed and only stretch so far.............but they work....but how.....is it really just breaking up the swim pattern of a shark ?
. Not sure what the Mesh size is but if it's small enough to entangle a sea turtle or dolphin that's just stupid,after all they're not used to "catch" sharks anymore. Use thicker twine and make the Mesh size 4foot by 4foot. Or make it much,much smaller like heavy duty flyscreen
udo wrote:Words from a Legend Qld Surfer / Shaper
We as Australian surfers should demand a 1 kilometer wide strip of ocean around our country to be made shark free. Anything over 10 ft power head to the noggin and off to the cat food factory. It might take 10 years but they will learn that there mates that ventured into the shallows never return. Farrk they own 2/3 of the world's surface as it is. We may even feed them a few tree hugger now and then if they behave themselves and fall into line..
Interesting take, but does sound pretty entitled though.
udo wrote:Words from a Legend Qld Surfer / Shaper
We as Australian surfers should demand a 1 kilometer wide strip of ocean around our country to be made shark free. Anything over 10 ft power head to the noggin and off to the cat food factory. It might take 10 years but they will learn that there mates that ventured into the shallows never return. Farrk they own 2/3 of the world's surface as it is. We may even feed them a few tree hugger now and then if they behave themselves and fall into line..
Think i saw this. Bourton?
Luv that!...Entitlement provoked the Beast!
Reckon tbb can work with that!
[ SLSA #1 Lore ] No shark has every attacked a free surfer within our flagged netted pens.
How is it that only Surfcraft hunt in packs to forever maim & rob free surfers in flagged netted pens.
Lifes a Beach! Careful wot you wish for...
We free surfers dream of being a rancid bait pack or be pounded as a wavepool crabbie pattie
Surf outside the flags or gauge a pool wave & yer a dead man...Sirens Blaring Alien Invasion.
No! Not Sharks that killed the beast.
Twas the unjust Surf Merch law that's killing off endangered truebluebashers...surfjustsurf
Get on board or else! ONEOFUS.
Johknee wrote:udo wrote:Words from a Legend Qld Surfer / Shaper
We as Australian surfers should demand a 1 kilometer wide strip of ocean around our country to be made shark free. Anything over 10 ft power head to the noggin and off to the cat food factory. It might take 10 years but they will learn that there mates that ventured into the shallows never return. Farrk they own 2/3 of the world's surface as it is. We may even feed them a few tree hugger now and then if they behave themselves and fall into line..Think i saw this. Bourton?
Yep
Not sure if this has expired posted but I just came across it on insta
freeride76 wrote:Science (should) proceed via falsifiable theories and hypotheses. If reality contradicts your theory or hypothesis you discard or modify it.
Europeans thought swans were white.
The first black swan observed - just a single black swan- meant that theory was now falsified and had to be discarded.
Despite millions of observations of white swans- a single black swan, falsified the assertion that swans were white.Thats how science should work. Empirical data which contradicts your theory requires the theory to be discarded or modified.
Theories which have poor predictive power also should be modified or discarded.
A four fold increase in attacks since 2000, focussed on Northern NSW, also requires explanation which is not served by existing theories.
I might be about to tell you how to suck eggs here FR, so I'm sorry if this is old news, not helpful and condescending. I've cut your comment up to reduce the length of this.
I'm genuinely looking forward to reading any article you write on this but (there's always a but), that is not the most current description of how science. Karl Popper introduced the concept of falsification of hypotheses and while that's in general a very good principle, and underpins a lot of modern research, it is a pretty blunt instrument that isn't so useful in ecology (and fisheries biology).
Ecological science is now much more broadly focused on estimating probabilities rather than discarding an idea outright.* It's far more useful way of approaching environmental science in general given the uncertainties in data collection and the uncertainties around the ecological processes we are trying to quantify.
It's what I was referring to when I wrote a comment in this thread about shark diets, on this page: https://www.swellnet.com/comment/1047750
I don't think humans are a part of a shark's diet. To follow the swan analogy would mean that a shark eating a single human disproves that. The comment I wrote on that page showed that white sharks in Australia feed on humans as low as 0.01% of the time. So yes, they are known to eat humans but the infrequency of that shows we are very unlikely to be a part of their (preferred) diet.
That's not to dismiss the seriousness of them as predators of us. It's just to say that the approach to scientific reasoning in modern ecology tends not follow that old school approach to falsification that you described, but rather probabilistic reasoning.
I obviously don't know what articles you're reading but it may be that the different approach to science from what you described makes findings appear like advocacy, when it's just a newer approach to ecological science that has been developed to assist decision making. Also, even models with poor predictive capability can sometimes be useful in identifying an underlying ecological process amongst many others.
I absolutely agree that this is a worthy investigation. And I have thought for a long time that it requires a different approach that doesn't rely necessarily rely on shark population estimates. That is a useful question to resolve but I think developing a statistical method based on aggressive and non-aggressive encounters to estimate the probabilities of each kind of encounters would be really helpful and interesting (where aggressive includes fatal and non-fatal attacks, and non-aggressive includes sightings in the lineup/nearshore zone). It could essentially wrap a bit more rigour around the bitemetrix ideas. We all know about the aggressive encounters so a big challenge would be documenting non-aggressive encounters. I think there would be ways to do that, going back over the past 20 years but it would require a bit of work to dig through available data from groups like surf lifesavers, surfers notes (i.e. when we all make a notes about swell and your own surfs, do you include any encounters with sharks?), and other sources I likely don't know about. But that way we could develop a dataset and statistical model that tells a more useful story.
And to answer the question someone asked .... where are the shark scientists to answer these questions? Just waiting for funding to do it. Salaries need to be paid and it's hard to get research funding for something that affects so few people, even if that effect is fatal.
Surfing Australia could contribute $100,000 and support an ARC linkage grant of $300,000 that would pay a couple of postdocs and a PhD student to answer these kinds of questions. I don't know if that's a lot of money to the SA budget or not but it's that kind of money that's needed to start answering research questions that would be of direct interest to surfers. It would be fantastic for that to happen but who knows if it ever could.
* This could be either estimating the probability of a hypothesis (or model) given the observed data, or the more traditional estimate of the probability of the observed data given a specific hypothesis/model. A philosophical statistical difference that few care about but in complex models, each parameter is essentially a unique hypothesis.
benskii wrote:I absolutely agree that this is a worthy investigation. And I have thought for a long time that it requires a different approach that doesn't rely necessarily rely on shark population estimates. That is a useful question to resolve but I think developing a statistical method based on aggressive and non-aggressive encounters to estimate the probabilities of each kind of encounters would be really helpful and interesting (where aggressive includes fatal and non-fatal attacks, and non-aggressive includes sightings in the lineup/nearshore zone).
Why not have both? A dataset of non-aggressive/aggressive encounters as well as a good picture of how the overall population of the predator is growing. If you have the latter, you can infer likelihood of both of the former.
udo wrote:Words from a Legend Qld Surfer / Shaper
We as Australian surfers should demand a 1 kilometer wide strip of ocean around our country to be made shark free. Anything over 10 ft power head to the noggin and off to the cat food factory. It might take 10 years but they will learn that there mates that ventured into the shallows never return. Farrk they own 2/3 of the world's surface as it is. We may even feed them a few tree hugger now and then if they behave themselves and fall into line..
Utter lunacy. Anyone who thinks like that should not call themselves a surfer.
As a surfer, surely we understand the ocean and all of its machinations, we are closer to the ocean than most other people in society, we should know more about weather, climate and all organisms that call the sea their home.
Risk and reward exist in the same physical state.
Surely we don’t think we can control oceanic life, to differ, would be placing human beings in some kind of elitist realm of existence , we may need a gentle reminder that we are just animals ourselves, destroying all that’s in front of us.
That’s the most preposterous statement I’ve read on Swellnet ever, gotta be taking the piss. AW
Cheers Benskii- took all that onboard.
AlfredWallace wrote:udo wrote:Words from a Legend Qld Surfer / Shaper
We as Australian surfers should demand a 1 kilometer wide strip of ocean around our country to be made shark free. Anything over 10 ft power head to the noggin and off to the cat food factory. It might take 10 years but they will learn that there mates that ventured into the shallows never return. Farrk they own 2/3 of the world's surface as it is. We may even feed them a few tree hugger now and then if they behave themselves and fall into line..Utter lunacy. Anyone who thinks like that should not call themselves a surfer.
As a surfer, surely we understand the ocean and all of its machinations, we are closer to the ocean than most other people in society, we should know more about weather, climate and all organisms that call the sea their home.
Risk and reward exist in the same physical state.Surely we don’t think we can control oceanic life, to differ, would be placing human beings in some kind of elitist realm of existence , we may need a gentle reminder that we are just animals ourselves, destroying all that’s in front of us.
That’s the most preposterous statement I’ve read on Swellnet ever, gotta be taking the piss. AW
fwiw the worst board i ever had was one of Murray's.
velocityjohnno wrote:Why not have both? A dataset of non-aggressive/aggressive encounters as well as a good picture of how the overall population of the predator is growing. If you have the latter, you can infer likelihood of both of the former.
Yep, it's definitely worth having both and a long term shark population estimate would definitely improve the performance of the model I'm thinking about. But we already have some sense of those numbers, or at least some attempts at estimating them.
What we don't have any/much research on, as far as I know, is something that can be used to estimate other processes that influence the probability of attacks.
Here on swellnet we often discuss the conditions when attacks occur (time of day, water clarity, season, primary prey population numbers etc) but to develop a good model that might shed some light on processes that might influence the probability of attacks we also need to include the conditions when sharks are encountered but don't attack. That's what I was meaning but yeah an important component of that model would be the shark population.
Great posts Benski.
benskii][quote=freeride76 wrote:but I think developing a statistical method based on aggressive and non-aggressive encounters to estimate the probabilities of each kind of encounters would be really helpful and interesting (where aggressive includes fatal and non-fatal attacks, and non-aggressive includes sightings in the lineup/nearshore zone).
Shouldn't the non-aggressive also include pings from the tagged sharks - just because they are not sighted, which I suspect is a fairly high number, doesn't mean they're not there in a non-aggressive way?
Thinking about it a bit more I'm not sure it's a distinction with a meaningful difference - because we have no explanatory mechanism for why non-aggressive behaviour becomes aggressive.
We could come up with a bunch of correlations that have zero causation.
A few interesting stories on shark attacks and near misses on the Shark Shield report so I thought I would start this thread. Don't want to trivialize the subject as people have had their lives taken or changed forever by what can happen. I thought it might serve as an educational purpose by hearing others experiences so we may all learn from them and hopefully avoid it happening to us.
One of them was a mate of mine named Hazey.
He had been surfing at Castles, a notoriously sharky wave in the bay at Cactus.
Several hundred metres offshore the wave breaks before reforming into Inside Castles making a long left with several sections. The wave has been the scene of several attacks and near misses over the years including the local known as "Sharkbait" who had been attacked more than once.
Gerry Lopez is another who came very close to being attacked out there and vowed to never surf Cactus again after his near miss.
Well Hazey was surfing out the back with another bloke named Steve when out of the blue he was launched into the air still on his board by a huge force from below.
A shark had rammed him with a direct hit straight up into the air! In a moment it was gone but soon returned to the stunned Hazey and started biting him and his board. Hazey instinctively put his arms out to protect himself but both his arms ended up in its mouth. As the jaws closed down his arms could have easily been severed, but several teeth on the sharks lower jaw had become dislodged and imbedded in the board leaving his upper arms with massive injuries, but the vital inner arms where major arteries run were not majorly damaged. This probably saved his life.
By this time Steve had reacted and in a rush of adrenalin and pure ballsy courage he threw himself onto the sharks back and started gouging at the sharks eyeballs, eventually feeling one pop and the shark departed.
Steve got the two surfboards together and got himself and Hazey on and started the long paddle to shore.
Then they were both thrown into the air as the shark rammed them a third time before disappearing again. They continued to make their way closer to shore and the shark nudged them again. Steve told me he thought he really must of pissed it off when he popped its eye.
Finally they we're just a metre from shore when the shark made its fifth and final appearance. It beelined towards them and the shore while they stood in waist deep water with their boards. The sharks mouth was just rapidly opening and closing like one of those wind up sets of false teeth. The boys separated and put their hands on either side of it's body and held it on a 90 degree angle to the beach as they made the final steps to the safety of the sand.
Hazey was rushed to Ceduna hospital and then flown to Adelaide for micro surgery on his shredded arms.
Steve ended up receiving a bravery award and they both sold their story to 60 minutes and made $50,000 each out of it!
It was quite a story!