FIVE fatal shark attacks in 10 months have led the Western Australian fisheries minister, , to question whether great white sharks still merit protected status.
Great white sharks have been , 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, 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 the University of Western Australia in Perth. “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.
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In response to the attacks, the that Kempster thinks should tell us more about the enigmatic fish.
When this article was first posted, it incorrectly stated that Ryan Kempster was at Flinders University
