AND shArp poiNtsBig mouthsTwo perspectives on cage diving and shark attacks

18 .THE BIG ISSUE. 2 SEPTEMBER 11 - 22 SEPTEMBER 11

Shark attacks have increased radically over the past two decades. No arguing that. But the reason for the spike is up for debate. Anton Louw and Clayton Truscott take opposite sides of the table

By Clayton trusCott

There isn’t an ocean user in the country who hasn’t taken note of how the shark attack stats and headlines have changed in the last three decades. Global warming, the sardine run, El

Nino — say what you like, but none of this clearly explains why the men in grey suits are paying us more attention. But cage diving, and more specifically the chumming associated with the practice, is widely held by many to be the root cause behind “training” great white sharks to associate humans with food, just like Pavlov’s dog.

In his famous experiment, Ivan Pavlov

used a bell to call dogs to their food. After a few repetitions, the dogs began to salivate in response to the bell, making a direct connec-tion between the bell and food. Pavlov’s dog couldn’t eat the bell, it’s made of metal after all, but the sound of it did make his mouth water and reminded him how much he enjoyed his lunch. The experiment proved that with a bit of conditioning, it’s possible to trigger some-thing as instinctive as a salivating mouth and growling stomach with a completely neutral stimulus — the bell.

When applied to cage diving, the think-ing goes that the sights and sounds of human activity becomes the bell. The greater implica-tion, it’s believed, is that we’re featuring on the lunchtime menu for Charachadon Charcharias more and more.

A website by a South African surfer is now putting its weight behind this theory, and is looking to rally support to “clean-up” the multi-million rand cage-diving industry. The site, www.stopsharkcagediving.com, takes up the Pavlovian argument that cage-diving operators who chum the waters to attract sharks are making an undeniable association

between us and food. The website creator, who goes by the

pseudonym Justanothersurfer (he isn’t an anonymous coward, but isn’t too keen on getting into a fist fight with cage divers), uses statistics and common shark trends as a basis for this argument, asking the public to consider the following:

•Between 1905 and 1990 there were 31 attacks in Cape waters and one fatality.

•From 1991 to 2010 there have been 93 attacks and 15 deaths.

The two things that have significantly changed in the past 15 to 20 years are the num-ber of ocean users and the commercialisation of shark tour operators.

Justanothersurfer further compares chumming the water to driving through the Kruger Park with a bloody hunk of kudu meat dragging behind your car. Every time the lion pounces, you drive a bit further away, so that you

Pavlov’s shark

can take pictures. Eventually the taunting and teasing would cause the lions to snap, behave erratically, and even go after a tour vehicle — or any human being in sight. Put bluntly, you cannot play with wild animals and not expect to get bitten after a while.

“The negative impact of feeding wild ani-mals — or luring them with the smell of food — to within a few metres of humans is common sense when referring to baboons and lions in the wild. Yet coaxing and teasing the king of the ocean with food until it snaps (literally) is seen as a great way to make money,” says Justanothersurfer.

“Great whites are smarter than we think, and they are getting pissed off at the taunt-

ing by the cage-diving operators. As a result, every now and again they are target-ing wave riders or spear fishermen.”

Although rules state cage-diving operators are not allowed to intention-ally feed the sharks, researchers and even operators themselves admit that less scru-pulous outfits don’t always heed these regulations. Even responsible operators unintentionally lose bait to sharks on

You cannot play with wild animals and not

expect to get bitten after a while

SPECIAL REPORTSHARKS

‘ ‘Don't touch the wild animals: An unidentified shark cage diving operator in Gansbaai 'plays' with a great white

2 SEPTEMBER 11 - 22 SEPTEMBER 11.THE BIG ISSUE. 19

By Anton Louw

A common response to the rise in shark attacks has been to blame the growth in the cage-diving industry, especially if you live around the Western Cape. Cage-diving operators

use chum to attract sharks to boats, where they can be viewed by tourists willing to pay big bucks for the privilege. The argument goes that this results in a classic case of Pavlovian conditioning, where sharks are being “taught” to associate human activity with food.

The early 90s are often described as the watershed point. It was when cage diving got going in South Africa, just after great whites were declared a protected species along our shores. From then on, we started to have a lot more attacks. Or so the stats say. But, hang on, what do the stats say?

No clear cut statsThe problem with using statistics to prove a

point is that if you want solid numbers, you need to have set criteria for what can be in-cluded. The Global Shark Attack File (GSAF) includes incidents ranging from swimmers, to victims of air and sea disasters, to shark anglers having the tables turned on them by their catches. The more thorough International Shark Attack File (ISAF) only focuses on “un-provoked” attacks. In other words, it excludes shark fishing, sea disasters, and so on. It also excludes spear fishing — but more on this later.

Then you also have to ask: what counts as an attack, and what doesn’t? A surfer bumped off their board? What about having their surfski nipped? Can we include a bite out of a hobie cat, or what about a ski boat? Does a dad defending his son count as one or two? What

about a washed up foot? You get the point. Discrepancies aside, the stats do give a good

indication of patterns and trends in activity over the years. In the Western Cape, attacks increased through the decades leading up to 1981 and since then have sort of levelled off with around 25 attacks per decade. What is interesting is that in the 80s, the bulk of attacks were on spear fishermen in False Bay and a few in the Southern Cape. So if you go by ISAF’s

stats, you get a boost in the 90s. Nationally, there’s no clear trend towards

the Western Cape, or colder (read great white favourable) areas where most chumming is prevalent. If you isolate confirmed great white attacks, there seems to be a curious trend away from them towards other sharks. Other things must also be considered, like when is an attack “confirmed” to be a great white? I imagine in the post-Jaws/pre-docu-mentary channel era, white sharks received a few false accusations. The recent string of at-tacks in Port St. Johns where Zambezi sharks, or possibly even tiger sharks, are to blame is a tragic indication that great whites are not necessarily the dominant culprits along our coastline.

Surfers at high riskNo matter how you look at it though, since the early 90s surfers have become the high-est risk group. Within this there are further trends — the mid to late-90s had a spate of attacks and incidents along the Garden Route. KwaZulu-Natal had a great white attack at a netted beach. Towards the end of this period, False Bay became the centre of attention again. At the same time, there was a series of attacks

occasion, making it ques-tionable that no positive

association is being made.The website is, however, very clear

about not being against shark tours and, most importantly, shark research. Its goal rather is to generate enough support to legally “challenge the cage-diving industry to clean up their act, stop chumming the waters, and stop putting ocean users at risk”.

www.stopsharkcagediving.com aims to do this by getting 50 000 Facebook friends, and then requesting each person to donate R10. All the proceeds will go towards hiring a legal team to challenge the industry protocol.

“It’s a common-sense argument, really,” reckons Justanothersurfer. “They [sharks] are obviously attracted to the food that is poured into the water. Even if there’s a small chance that chumming is leading to attacks or contributing in some small way, it should be stopped.”

against the current

If you want to close down cage diving because of chumming, you should close down your harbour...and you should stop spear fishing as well

— Alison Kock‘ ‘

20 .THE BIG ISSUE. 2 SEPTEMBER 11 - 22 SEPTEMBER 11

on the Atlantic side of the Peninsula, which was virtually unheard of prior to then. This got tongues wagging and the most obvious reason was the new attraction in town: cage diving.

But those who’ve been surfing since the early 90s know a lot else has changed. Apart from less day-glo on surfboards, there are a lot more guys — and girls — in the water.

This is obviously not unique to South Africa. Yet, on the whole, we actually lag be-hind the general upward trend in attacks glob-ally. George Burgess, director of ISAF, attributes this upward global trend to the higher numbers of ocean users. Surfers are generally also more at risk than bathers because they hang around at the backline where the waves form, which is where research has shown sharks tend to be in Cape Town. But if there are specific causes for spates, then they need to be investigated further.

Tagging studiesAlison Kock, marine scientist at the Save our Seas Founda-tion points out, “When you are sharing the water with a large, curious predator that is common here, encounters

are inevitable. On a good day in winter at Seal Island we see 30 attacks on seals and 20 indi-viduals around us, and there are surfers eight kilometres away. The tagging studies that we’ve done in Cape Town show the sharks within two kilometres of the beach all summer long. They interact a lot; people just don’t know that they’re there most of the time.”

Kock continues, “I would expect to see more attacks and a different trend if there was a causative relationship caused by conditioning.”

An unexpected trend, however, has been the decline in “contact time” when chum-ming. In a study done at Seal Island in 2007 and published in the Marine Ecology Progress Series, tagged sharks reportedly lost interest in the chum after initial contact and pushed off to hunt seals. On return trips, although they were in the immediate area, they ignored the research vessel and chumming tour operators completely. Chumming is also nothing new.

According to Kock, “This isn’t the first time that white sharks have been associated with

people and food. Fishing boats are essentially doing the same thing. And if you want to close down cage diving because of chumming, you should close down your harbours that are re-leasing a chum slick kilometres long, and you should stop spear fishing as well.”

As with attack numbers, shark popula-tion numbers are also murky, although recent research may be leading us to more accurate figures. Regardless, it certainly doesn’t look like there’s been an explosion of numbers drawn by chumming, or for any other reason. In fact, numbers look lower than healthy.

As Lesley Rochat of the AfriOceans Con-servation Alliance puts it, “Shark incidents must be put into perspective. Sharks are some-

thing which most people cannot see and do not understand. Media has

branded them nature’s outcast and an animal that we ought to fear and loathe.”

How often is a shark seen and it doesn’t result in an at-tack? And how often is the shark not seen at all yet still doesn’t at-tack? While very few of us are victims of shark attacks, we’re

all victims of popular culture. Call it Jaws Syndrome, but we tend to look for and uphold evidence that supports our point of view.

Tempting argumentThe biologists canvassed for this debate don’t believe white sharks in South Africa are being conditioned to be more aggressive towards humans, based on their extensive research and experience. They are also quick to point out that it is very hard, if not impossible, to design an experiment to test this empirically, and warn against using anecdotes.

The most obvious anecdote is this: cage diving has increased over the past few years, shark attacks have increased over the past few years, therefore cage diving leads to more shark attacks. Tempting as that argument is, without hard proof it’s no more valid than Pastafarianism founder Bobby Henderson’s classic argument that while there has been a de-crease in the number of pirates, there has been an increase in global warming over the same

period. Therefore, global warming is caused by a lack of pirates.

Rather, there are a myriad of possibilities for the rise in shark incidents — the seal colony round the corner that has mushroomed, a change in currents, a collapse in nearby fisher-ies — many of which are highly complex and in intensive stages of research. Or it could simply be that there are many more of us in the water, and more “eyes” on the sharks than ever before. © Zig Zag / www.zigzag.co.za

There are a myriad of possibilities for the rise in shark incidents...or it couldsimply be that there are many more of us in the water, and more 'eyes' on

the sharks than ever before

SPECIAL REPORTSHARKS

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