Tuesday, January 10, 2006
How to avoid being eaten

Many of Queensland’s popular beaches are either netted or ‘drum-lined’, to prevent sharks from coming into close contact with recreational swimmers.

However, there are no such measures at Amity Point on North Stradbroke Island (near Brisbane), where last weekend a young woman was mauled and killed by a pack of bull sharks.

Like most catastrophes of this kind, the woman decided to swim at a time, place and in a manner where a number of contributory factors converge.

• She was swimming with her dog;
• The [Moreton Bay] water was very murky from run-off, following recent heavy rain;
• It is the early mating season for bull sharks, which commonly swim into estuarine waters or their vicinity and become [more] aggressive;
• She was swimming early in the morning;
• She was swimming in a busy fishing area.

Her death was not a result of these reasons, but rather her chances of being attacked were heightened by these factors. However, until the recent coverage in the papers, I – who would like to think knows a little bit about dangerous marine life – had little idea that swimming with a dog was more dangerous, or that January is the time of year that bull sharks get frisky.

Protecting swimmers from sharks will always be a balancing act between creating barriers, which kill many hundreds of there magnificent [-ly dangerous] creatures each year and providing ample information warning of factors which increase the chances of attack.

Queensland should not simply net more beaches and kill more sharks. The ocean is their environment and we must respect that. But then conversely, people are not inherently equipped with the knowledge to avoid attack.

As government will be expected to ‘do something’, money would be better spent on publicity promoting safe swimming, even if it reduces the opportunities for recreation. Infrastructure is not answer to every public issue.

That said, this is the first life lost to sharks in Queensland for over 40 years, suggesting that so far, the aforementioned balancing act is set about right.

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