Saturday, March 10, 2012

Commercial Shark Diving vs Hysteria

Hello? Yeah, I have a baited shark...
Since 2008 this blog and others have documented a tide of media and agenda based hysteria leveled against the commercial shark diving industry.

What usually begins as a small agenda group seeking to end regional commercial shark diving, quickly morphs into something that left unchecked can end badly for commercial shark diving interests.

And it's all based on the premise that baited sharks become regional killers. It's 1970's based hysteria, and with no research data to counter that ugly argument, our industry has been left hanging in the wind.

All that changed this week, thanks to Dr Neil Hammerschlag and crew who have produced the first and hopefully not only research study to look at baited sharks in the Bahamas.

We featured their outreach video this week, Hat Tip Dorsal Fin Blog, and will let Da Shark take it from there. His blog basically covered this study and it's impacts from Hawaii to Fiji in great depth and it's fine reading:

Fantastic new paper by Neil!