“Most sharks researchers do not think wrong, but in an incomplete way,” he said.
One of dr. Clua’s co-authors, John Linnell of the Norwegian Institute for Natural Research, study human conflicts with predators on land and admit that he is not a shark. “Land predators stalk and sometimes attack people until they are killed,” he said.
Recent history is full of such examples, some almost mythical. Two male lions nicknamed “the ghost” and “the darkness” were blamed for killing dozens of people in southwestern Kenya in 1898. The lions were tracked down and shot by hunters. A decade later, a Bengal tiger known as the “Champawat Tiger” allegedly killed 436 people in Nepal and India. A hunter also killed her.
Craig Packer, founder of the Lion Center at the University of Minnesota, said these stories are true, although they are certainly adorned by colonial writers for readers in Britain. Dr. Packer studied lions that eat humans in Tanzania and compared the phenomenon to an ‘outbreak’ that can be spread by pride or taught by mother to cubs.
“Every now and then one of them finds out we’m having a free lunch,” he said.
Bitprinting will not be as simple as sending hunters into the field to take out a tiger with a taste for human flesh, admits dr. Linnell. But he said that “anything is better than the current non-selective mass murder reaction.” When people react to sharks the way they do, dr. Linnell said it was similar to “going into the woods and shooting the first 1,000 animals you see at random.”
However, people react when shark attacks occur, said dr. Shiffman reminded that such incidents are rare. According to the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida, there were 64 unresolved attacks on humans and 41 attacks last year, meaning that a person ‘somehow begins to interact with a shark’.
Five of the attacks were fatal. More people are killed every year in the US by falling trees.
Although shark attacks are uncommon, they are also shark culls, although a prominent surfer recently called for a call to the Indian Ocean island of Réunion, where bull sharks are. Instead, a number of countries are installing shark nets, similar to fences, outside the surf at popular beaches. Dangerous sharks entangle in the nets, but also harmless, dolphins, sea turtles and other marine life.
In place of these methods, many beach authorities have adopted more humane methods of prevention over extinction. Drones, blimps and tags connect to programs that warn lifeguards and bathers to get away from the beaches when there are sharks. And after two fatal attacks in New England over the past few years, Cape Cod residents have received tournament training.