Shark Experts Try To Calm Our Fear And Loathing

The Age

Wednesday November 8, 2000

PENNY FANNIN, SCIENCE REPORTER

The shark attack that killed Perth man Ken Crew this week did not indicate that great white sharks were turning to humans as a source of food, a scientist said yesterday.

Barry Bruce, a white shark researcher at CSIRO, said Monday's fatal attack - like those off the South Australian coast in September - more likely occurred because people had been swimming in the same stretch of water as the sharks' natural prey.

Although there had been three fatal shark attacks within two months, there had been only one fatal white shark attack a year for the past 10 years, he said. In all three of this year's fatal attacks, seals and fish - the natural prey of sharks - had been seen nearby, Mr Bruce said.

Mr Bruce said that when a shark was in hunting mode, even if its target was a seal, it might attack a human if it encountered one.

``White sharks are not adapted to cue in on people. Sharks do not have a cognitive process that says `a person, I'll eat that'," Mr Bruce said.

He said the notion of a rogue shark with a taste for human flesh was fanciful and such ideas had been perpetuated by Hollywood since the 1950s.

Suggestions that the shark be killed did not make it any less likely that there would be attacks in future, Mr Bruce said.

White sharks are protected under state and federal threatened species laws. Yesterday the Humane Society International opposed killing the shark. Rebecca Brand, the society's wildlife campaign researcher, said such action set a dangerous precedent.