New paper on the economic value of sicklefin lemon sharks in Moorea

Business partner or simple catch? The economic value of the sicklefin lemon shark in French Polynesia by Clua, E, N. Buray, P. Legendre, J. Mourier & S. Planes (2011).

Most arguments invoked so far by the scientific community in favour of shark conservation rely on the ecological importance of sharks, and have little impact on management policies. During a 57-month study, we were able to individually recognise 39 sicklefin lemon sharks that support a shark-feeding ecotourism activity in Moorea Island, French Polynesia.

We calculated the direct global revenue generated by the provisioning site, based on the expenses of local and international divers. The total yearly revenue was around USD5.4 million and the 13 sharks most often observed at the site had an average contribution each of around USD316 699. Any one of these sharks represents a potential contribution of USD2.64 million during its life span.

We argue that publicising economic values per individual will be more effective than general declarations about their ecological importance for convincing policy makers and fishers that a live shark is more valuable than a dead shark for the local economy. Studies monitoring the potential negative ecological effects of long-term feeding of sharks should, however, be conducted to ensure these are also considered. Besides declarations about the non-consumptive direct-use value of sharks, as promoted by ecotourism, the calculation of their other economic values should also benefit shark conservation.

Complete paper here.

White Sharks and AC/DC? Best Practices Garbage

A recent article has popped up in the mainstream media about some industry folks in Australia who claim that blasting AC/DC underwater attracts white sharks, oh, and the white sharks "love it."

Naturally we have to call bull-shit on this one.

Folks, as long as we have been in the shark game, going on for over a decade now, we have seen every kind of shark attraction device known to man - and a few that defy description.

Blasting AC/DC underwater is not new, it is not innovative, and dare we say it is a complete and utter disservice to the animals that we make a living with.

It's the kind of best practices garbage that you just do not see with terrestrial animal tourism.

Where are the megawatt speakers blasting the sound track from Zanadu in the Gombe National Forest? We're pretty sure that someone without a PhD, and who's vested interest in the wild animals that inhabit this park could come up with some half-assed observation about chimpanzees "rocking out" to techno funk from the 1970's.

The fact is, folks like us make a living "with" wild animals, not "from" wild animals and that's a distinction that many within the shark industry have forgotten, or have conveniently decided to ignore as they chase sharks around the world.

Worse yet some within our community are now throwing up a thin excuse for bad behavior with sharks as calling it "conservation", which is the next iteration of the AC/DC and white shark argument.

Last week we saw a video featuring a woman, dressed as a mermaid, free diving in 500 feet of water with white sharks at Isla Guadalupe, no cages, no dive safety team, all under the mystical caption of "conservation".

What's starts with basic disrespect for wildlife, leads to all manner of lunacy with sharks under many guises.

The final observation?

White sharks have been around for the past 300 million years in perfect balance with nature and none of that nature included mermaids, simians riding on fins, or AC/DC.

Are we fortunate enough to spend time in the presence of white sharks, or do we have to completely and abjectly modify the shark encounter to suit our tastes as top water interlopers, surviving in their environment in what amounts to crudely designed life support gear?

Shark-Human Interactions – Aggression?

If you want to fully understand our continued support for Beqa Adventure Divers in Fiji it has a lot to do with Da Shark and his in depth look at the fundamentals of our industry covering topics that get almost zero coverage elsewhere.

This week was a fine example.

Da Shark on Human-Shark Interaction:

One of the most frequent questions our customers ask is whether our Sharks are aggressive.

Our standard answer is to tell them that in our experience, they are not aggressive as in wanting to bite us but rather, that they may sometimes be assertive, meaning that some will try and barge in to get some food and that in doing so, they may display a degree of posturing.

Granted our definition may be threading a very fine line – but words are powerful and we want to steer the conservation away from the usual stereotypes and towards a more neutral mindset.

Complete Post.

Image by Christy Fisher

Can tourism save sharks or can sharks save tourism?

From the Dive Hub Blog this morning some smart industry analysis:

A recent study on the economic potential of shark tourism in Spain has found that this type of tourism supports hundreds of jobs and generates more than €17 million to the Canary Islands economy each year.

The study was carried out by researchers at the University of La Laguna and the New Economics Foundation. It suggests that there is potential for developing ecotourism around the species of sharks and rays found throughout Spanish waters but highlights the urgent need to protect these species. The findings suggest that the wonderful marine wildlife that exists close to the UK’s coastal communities could provide great benefits for local tourism and increased protection of the marine environment. The UK has 21 types of sharks and 16 of skates and rays in its waters, including the Basking Shark which is the world’s second largest fish and already supports wildlife tourism activity in the UK.

The research found that sharks and rays offer economic benefits through diving tourism and that approximately one-third of Canary Islands diving activity is linked to these species.

“Studies such as ours reveal that sharks offer economic benefits beyond food; left alive, many species can provide a source of long-term income and employment through diving tourism,” said Aniol Esteban, Head of Environmental Economics for the New Economics Foundation. “When all tourist expenditures are taken into account, we estimate that €17.7 million (£14.5 million) of the €97.2 million that divers bring to the Canary Islands can be specifically attributed to the presence of sharks and rays.’ These are significant amounts of money.

There are several other examples of shark dive tourism creating economic benefits, as well as conservation and marine habitat proetction. The Shark Reef marine reserve in Fiji is an example of this, as is the whaleshark watching industry at Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia. Many divers will visit specific areas just to catch a glimpse of a particular shark. From hammerheads and great whites to basking sharks and threshers, sharks have a powerful pull for dive tourism.

Complete Post.

Shark Feeding Zeitgeist Monday

We will be posting Wolfgangs industry observations about Tiger feeding today. In a case of Monday Sharky Zeitgeist Why Sharks Matter covered the same issue from a different angle.

Commercial shark diving and research. It is hard data that helps our industry counter the hysterical anti-shark diving sentiment that often finds its way into the media mainstream:

Guy Harvey's Island Grill - Helping Out

Scotty Gray from Florida's Blue Iguana Charters had a problem only we could solve this month.

His buddy at Guy Harvey's Island Grill in Key West needed "something unusual" for this years Island Grill Halloween Fantasy Fest.

That "something unusual" was a Mark V shark cage, the kind that Shark Diver and Shark Divers keeps in storage all over Florida for film and television crews and for our use in the Bahamas and Cuba.

When we asked Scotty what they were planning for the cage he got a little vague, "well, you know, part of the big party this weekend I guess."

The big party featured Guy Harvey himself and an series of well known dive folks, locals, and we're told a few conservation folks as well. After all this is Guy Harvey's place.

The images from last nights party came back, and this one is the only one fit for print, taken very early in the evening. When folks in Key West celebrate Halloween, they celebrate Halloween.

Nothing gets held back and apparently our Mark V shark cage, designed for hard encounters with white sharks, tigers, and giant squids...was a hit with the ladies.

Glad we could help out. After all if you have shark cages, use them.

Swimming with the sharks for science

These are the kind of stories shark diving folks like to read. Found on the Big Island Weekly Blog this week - kudos to Nick Whitney and team:

A whitetip reef shark research project has some Big Island photographers literally swimming with sharks in the name of science.

Nick Whitney, a postdoctoral scientist now with the Center for Shark Research Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla., started a Hawaii whitetip photo identification project in 2002 as part of his Ph.D. research at University of Hawaii at Manoa. The findings of the project, which required the help of several underwater photographers around the state, will be published in a scientific journal within a year and will be available on the Web site, http://www.whitetip.org.

"I was planning to do a telemetry (tracking) project on whitetip reef sharks to study their movements, but found that while it was easy to dive with them and take pictures of them, it was very difficult to catch them in places that were good areas for tracking," Whitney said. "I was also looking for a way to involve the community in my research, and since these animals are easy to photograph and have unique markings on their sides, photo-identification seemed like a great way to do that."

Whitney been involved with studies on tiger sharks, sandbar and Galapagos sharks in Hawaii. He said that while he's interested in all these species, whitetips are the most intriguing because there has been little research done on them. As an added bonus, they can frequently be seen while diving in shallow water and don't immediately swim away like other species.

Whitney was able to identify at least 178 individual white tips throughout the state. Most were only sighted once, but over 50 were sighted multiple times.

"A few individuals, usually adult females, have been seen repeatedly -- seven to 10, up to 13 times for one individual from 2001 to 2008. That was an adult female at the dive site called "Suckemup" near the Honokohau/ Pine Trees area on the Big Island," Whitney said.

The project revealed that whitetip reef sharks move around more than anyone expected.

"We found movements of as much as five to six miles to be more common than we expected, and one animal moved over 16 miles along the coast," Whitney said. "We also had two animals cross a relatively deep, 450-foot, channel between Molokini crater and Maui, which certainly isn't the same as an inter-island crossing, but our genetics study indicates that the inter-island channels are not significant barriers to gene flow. It turns out to be true that some sharks will return to the same area for years, but they're not always there and will often be absent for months at a time before returning."

On the Big Island, Cynthia Hankins, Dee Wescott, Vicky Newman, Bryce Groark and Porter Watson contributed photos for Whitney's project. Divers on other islands also contributed significantly. The Honokohau area was one of the spots where many of the Big Island images came from, Whitney said.

"We only got a few photos from other sites which were often a long way from Honokohau, which meant we had a very low probability of detecting any movements," Whitney said. "Fortunately we had a few very dedicated photographers working the Honokohau area and were able to find out that at least two females seem to repeatedly use this area as a place to gestate, and possibly give birth. Also most sharks give birth every other year, and that seems to be the case for whitetips as well, but our photos from Honokohau show that at least one female was able to get pregnant two years in a row. She was photographed very late-term in both years."

Hankins, a Kona resident, has photographed the Kona Coast from as far south as Paradise Pinnacle (Near Paradise Park) and as far North as Malae Point in North Kohala.

While Hankins says she can recognize some of the whitetips she photographs, the tracking and information gathering is best left to Whitney. She first learned of Whitney's research when a friend who knew of her shark fascination introduced her to the project. Whitney taught her about reef sharks and she provided him with sighting data and images to aid in his research, she said. Hankins has been forwarding him photos for the past four years, and encouraging other Big Island divers to do so as well.

Hankins said when she's taking photos for the project, it's important to get certain angles, so that Whitney can identify the different whitetips. Taking photos for scientific purposes requires a different approach than normal underwater photography.

"I recognize a few individuals by sight and have seen them repeatedly, frequently at the same couple of sites," she said. "I've also been adding tiger shark photos to a new page on Nick's sighting Web site. The tigers aren't seen as frequently as the whitetips, but I have seen the same animals on several occasions."

Hankins said she's seen and photographed pretty much everything one would expect to find in Hawaii waters -- and then some.

"I've seen most everything in the fish and creatures ID books for the Hawaiian waters. One day I found a new species of nudibranch (sea slug) which is sitting in a lab in California waiting to be described," Hankins said. "I've seen a juvenile humpback whale being attacked by 25 tiger sharks. I've watched octopus mating; Manta rays breaching; turtle trying to mate; eels attacking each other; and so many more amazing things."

When it comes to swimming with sharks, Hankins has her own rules of engagement.

"The whitetip reef sharks are pretty harmless if you don't provoke or disturb them. They are usually resting in the mornings, which is when I dive most often and we find them sleeping in the shadowy areas under arches, ledges or in lava tubes," Hankins said. "If you approach slowly you can get quite close. It's always exciting to see an animal as big as yourself with the ability to inflict damage. You always want to approach with a respect for their space and try not to disturb them or corner them."

Some of her other subjects, however, are not as friendly.

"The tiger sharks on the other hand are very scary. They are twice to three times the size of the whitetips and have a stealthy and menacing look," Hankins said. "I try to remind myself that they are not interested in eating me, they are just curious. None the less, the adrenaline always rushes and my heart pounds. Rarely will they linger for very long so the shots need to be quick."

To view and purchase underwater images from Hankins, visit http://www.cynthiahankins.com.

Whitney cautioned that taking photos of sharks can be dangerous, if not done correctly.

"Any large, wild animal -- and many small ones -- has the potential to be dangerous in one way or another, but whitetips are very docile and I would even say 'tolerant' of human activity to a large extent. Over the course of trying to tag them and collect tissue samples for our genetics study I've done many things that should've gotten me bitten and didn't," Whitney said. "They're not teddy bears though. Grab one and hold on long enough and it will grab you back."

Although Whitney's completed his studies at UH-Manoa and now works in Florida, he wants to keep the whitetip reef shark project going. The long-term data complied is very valuable, he said.

"I hope to keep collecting photos and information and publish additional studies on whitetip reef sharks of Hawaii in the future," Whitney said.

People can submit photos at http://www.whitetip.org or can e-mail them to whitetip@hawaii.edu.

L.A Times Covers "Free Gaffed Mako" Controversy

L.A Times Pete Thomas is an outdoor writer who knows controversy when he sees it. He also knows conservation sense when he sees it as well. This week he covered the ongoing fall out of a video now on You Tube of what appears to be an illegal take of a breeding aged Mako shark off the coast of Florida this week.

His continuing coverage of the oceans at the Outposts Blog is a must read for ocean folks worldwide.