Learning to live with sharks

Sharks kill around six humans per year, on average; humans kill more than 40 million sharks per year (or possibly even up to 100 million, according to some estimates). It shouldn't be all that difficult to work out which of the two is a dangerous threat and which is a victim. Yet the killing continues. Perhaps the most irrational of the various reasons for which people kill sharks is the quest to protect surfers and swimmers from the exceedingly rare attacks. In December, the government of Western Australia embarked on a mass cull of sharks off its coasts in response to a series of attacks that had led to seven deaths in three years. Politicians read this as alarming, even though the annual statistics from the html) show that the overall number of shark attacks in Australia for 2013 actually stayed below the long-term average. According to the ISAF report, short-term fluctuations in numbers are common, and statistically meaningful conclusions can only be inferred on longer timescales, e.g. decades. Globally, the ISAF has recorded 63 fatal attacks for the years 2004 to 2013, with the yearly total varying between one and 13. The strategy pursued by Western Australia until its next review in June is to capture sharks with baited lines, assess their size, and cull all that are larger than three metres in length. A similar cull is also underway in the French territory of La Réunion, where five fatal attacks have been recorded in the last three years. Experts have vehemently criticised the culls as a fallback to a bygone era of shark paranoia. More than 100 scientists have written to Western Australia's state government to call for the cull to be stopped. Marine biologist Helen Scales, who took part in a BBC documentary on sharks, told reporters: " Culls do not work, anyway. They responded similarly in Hawaii in the Seventies and more than 4,000 sharks were culled but it did not have any effect on the level of shark attacks. " A recent survey conducted among the visitors of Sydney Aquarium and released by the Sea Life Conservation Fund found that 87% of respondents were opposed to killing sharks for safety reasons. Thus, the cultural trauma caused by Steven Spielberg's blockbuster Jaws, released nearly 40 years ago, seems to be fading at last. Christopher Neff, who conducted the survey, told reporters: " The [government] assumption is …