FIVE fatal shark attacks in 10 months have led the Western Australian fisheries minister, Norman Moore, to question whether great white sharks still merit protected status.
Great white sharks have been listed as "vulnerable" since 1996, and have been protected in all Australian waters since 1999. But the recent spate of attacks has occurred at a frequency unlike anywhere else in the world, Moore said in a statement this week.
All fatalities from shark attacks are tragic, but there is "absolutely no scientific evidence" to suggest the recent uptick is linked to a rise in the shark population, says Ryan Kempster at Flinders University in South Australia. "Sharks mature slowly, taking up to 25 years until they are sexually mature, so any kind of abundance increase is going to be slow," he says.
In response to the attacks, the Western Australian government has funded four research projects that Kempster thinks should tell us more about the enigmatic fish.
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