Katharine The Shark

Recently, sharks and the internet have begun to interact. On the Atlantic coast, shark researchers have been tagging great white sharks, allowing thousands of internet fans to watch their travels across the world’s oceans on the web.  On the other side of the globe, the Australian government has given over 300 sharks swimming off Western Australia their own Twitter feeds, in order to help limit fatal shark attacks.

These are strange times in the intersection between sharks and people on the internet.  A media-savvy shark research group, Ocearch has been tagging great white sharks with GPS trackers and posting the shark’s locations on-line whenever the shark surfaces.  In addition to providing valuable research on the movement of the movements of these pinnacle predators, the tracking has created “shark celebrities.”  The great white shark tagged as Mary Lee by Ocearch now has over 85 thousand followers on Twitter.  Another great white, named Katharine, is not too far behind, with almost 32 thousand Twitter followers.

While thousands are tracking Mary Lee, Katharine and other tagged great white sharks, recent shark attacks on the North Carolina coast serve as a reminder that sharks are indeed dangerous. So far this season there have been eight shark attacks on swimmers on North Carolina beaches, the largest number of attacks in the last 80 years in which records have been kept.  So far, no one has died, although several victims have lost limbs.

The increased number of attacks may to be due to the record number of people visiting North Carolina beaches and due elevated ocean temperatures from an unseasonably hot June that may have prompted fish to migrate north earlier than usual, attracting more sharks.

On the coast of Western Australia, they have an even more severe shark attack problem.  Since 2011, Australia has had more fatal shark attacks than any other country, including six over the past two years — the most recent in November.  The government has taken an innovative approach to problem. They have tagged 338 sharks with acoustic transmitters that trigger a computer alert when a shark comes within a half mile miles of a beach, which tweets out a message on the Surf Life Saving Western Australia Twitter feed.  Whereas the Twitter accounts for Mary Lee and Katherine are fake (the two sharks are not literally tweeting to their thousands of fans) the over 300 Australia sharks are literally tweeting warnings of where they are so that beach goers can avoid them, which is a good thing for both the sharks and the beach goers.

The problem is that all sharks are not tagged and the program may create a false sense of security.  As reported by NPR:  “This kind of innovative thinking is exactly what we need more of when it comes to finding solutions to human-wildlife conflict,” says Alison Kock, research manager of the Shark Spotters program in South Africa. Kock tells NPR that the project is a good idea — but that people should know that not all sharks are tagged.

Her program does the same work, but humans do the spotting and tweeting.

Kock and Kim Holland, a marine biologist who leads shark research at the University of Hawaii, agree that the tweets won’t be enough to protect swimmers.

“It can, in fact, provide a false sense of security — that is, if there is no tweet, then there is no danger — and that simply is not a reasonable interpretation,” Holland says, pointing out that the reverse is also true. “Just because there’s a shark nearby doesn’t mean to say that there’s any danger. In Hawaii, tiger sharks are all around our coastlines all the time, and yet we have very, very few attacks.”

In Western Australia, the local government recently proposed a plan to bait and kill sharks that swim near beaches.

Holland says most shark biologists would agree that’s not a good plan, partly because of what researchers have learned using acoustic transmitters. Scientists tracking white sharks, for example, found that the species can travel great distances, going from Western Australia to South Africa in some cases.

“Because we know that they are so mobile, we’re not sure that killing any of them will have any effect on safety,” Holland says, pointing out that great white sharks don’t set up shop along the same coastlines for long. He says the number of these sharks is on the rise — but there aren’t that many to begin with.

“The other side of the coin is that it’s a horrible thing to see when people get killed, so there’s often public outcry for government agencies to do something.”

Thanks to Alaric Bond for contributing to this post.