Government advice on shark threat: swim at your own risk

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 24, 2002 | by Sean Paige

Two federally funded events concerning shark attacks (one held May 21 at Washington's National Press Club, another scheduled for mid-June in Tampa, Fla.) suggest that Americans have good reason to be wary as another summer beach season gets under way. But they may have less to fear from shark encounters (which, although statistically rare, have been steadily increasing in the last decade) than from federal and state regulators determined to pursue shark-protection programs that could be contributing to that upward trend.

Sharks aren't the only potentially dangerous animals enjoying the protection of federal regulators seemingly blind to the public-safety ramifications of their actions. People in the Rocky Mountain region, where wild-animal encounters aren't the rarity they are elsewhere, are similarly wary of federal grizzly bear and wolf reintroduction programs and wonder aloud about whether protections for certain endangered animals don't also endanger people.

That indifference to public safety was clear at a National Press Club event (bill to the taxpayers: $23,000) at which carefully selected presenters not only dismissed last year's "summer of the shark" as nothing more than a "media feeding frenzy," but tried to paper over any possibility that government regulations had anything to do with it.

Participants dishonestly argued that there was nothing abnormal about last summer (2001) because, statistically speaking, it was little different than the year before (2000). That the year before last was a record year for attacks, with totals much higher than anything experienced before the federal government and state of Florida put shark protections into place in the early 1990s, wasn't mentioned by the government officials or shark advocates involved. And that was only one of many selective and self-serving statistics served up for public consumption at the event and presented as fact by the gullible media.

In fact, last summer was an extraordinary year in the annals of U.S. shark attacks. The 55 attacks in 2001 broke the record of 54 set only a year earlier. The number of Florida attacks (37) was only one short of the previous record, also set in 2000. Back-to-back record years in any phenomenon as unpredictable as shark attacks is itself noteworthy. Last year's three known U.S. fatalities were more than were recorded in all of the 1990s. One noted expert, Jack Musick, called the back-to-back deaths off the beaches of Virginia and North Carolina "unprecedented." And the schooling of sharks off Florida's west coast had other experts scratching their heads and groping for explanations.

So why would the federal government be putting out such spin and interjecting itself into the debate about whether attacks are or are not on the rise? What agencies such as the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) have to fear from public anxieties about shark attacks is that they'll prompt hard questions about whether governments haven't been regulating recklessly. The agency embarked in 1993 on an effort to increase allegedly depleted populations of large coastal sharks by sharply reducing the catch quotas of commercial shark fishers in the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. As the shark-catch quotas were cut and more sharks left in the water each year, attacks along the Eastern Seaboard and in Florida more than doubled, on an annual average, since the mid-1990s.

Saving supposedly endangered sharks and responding to pressure from wildlife-advocacy groups was the government's main concern; what might occur along the beaches when those shark populations rebounded (assuming they were seriously depleted in the first place) never seems to have crossed anyone's mind.

Regulators seemed similarly oblivious to possible consequences when the state of Florida in 1992 banned commercial shark fishing and sharply curtailed recreational shark fishing in state waters (extending 3 miles into the Atlantic and 9 miles into the Gulf of Mexico).

That action effectively established shark sanctuaries in waters closest to shore where human-shark encounters are most likely to occur. In 1995 the state also instituted a gill-net ban that has increased the quantity of bait fish in near-shore waters. Protected sharks chasing exploding bait-fish populations--neither of which are being culled out by commercial and recreational fisherman, as they were in the past--may be contributing to the considerable increase in attacks in Florida waters during the 1990s.

If government is going to engage in predator-protection initiatives, it has a responsibility to inform Americans about the public safety implications of its actions and take reasonable steps to minimize the tragedies that may result. But putting it so squarely to the people could raise controversy and erode support for such actions, so the government chooses, in the case of sharks, to deny that we have a shark problem or that its regulatory actions might be contributing to it. To say we should take action to shield people from shark attack is to admit that we have a problem. And admitting we have a problem points a finger back in the direction of government, its pet scientists (all of which are living off government research grants) and wildlife-advocacy groups prodding the government on.