Will A Shark Culling Work? Do We Need It?

"Civilization ends at the waterline... after that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top."

Barnstable County Commissioner Ron Beaty has put a "shark hazard mitigation strategy" on the table after a series of shark interactions on the Outer Cape. These how-d-you-do's between sharks and humans ran the gamut from "A Fisherman Saw One" to "One Ate A Seal 20 Yards Off Of A Busy Beach" to "One Attacked A Surfboard With A Surfer Still On It."

Beaty has proposed lining the more popular Cape beaches with baited drum lines. These lines will have a big ol' shark-catching hook in them, the shark will either drown or have to be gun-shot and the desired end result will be the death of the offending shark.

This plan is soaked in controversy, and will require Ally Raisman levels of Moral Gymnastics.

Cape Cod, as we often mention here, has her pros and cons. As is often the case in life, the good comes with the bad at times. You can adopt an entirely beachnik lifestyle if you wish, but you're going to lose years of your life stuck in traffic. You will have the best view of the sunrise in Massachusetts, but you may also end up in the tummy of a Volvo-sized apex predator.

Can't win 'em all, right?

Wychmere

Becoming the lunch of some greater being is a bad thing to be thinking about, and doing so will definitely dampen your enjoyment of Cape Cod's many fine beaches. The best defense is to go with the numbers. Chew on this, if you will...

-Sharks have killed three people in Massachusetts since the Other Man arrived in 1620. The last one was in the 1930s.

- None of these attacks were on Cape Cod. Only one (Mattapoisett) happened near the shore, and the Scituate and Swampscott/Boston fatalities happened rather far offshore. You are more likely to have your boat attacked and be devoured than you are to suffer a Samuel L. style direct snatching from the shallow water.

- Cape Cod has only had 3 attacks in her recent history, and one of them was weak enough that the victim was originally thought to have tangled with a bluefish or a particularly capable lobster. Another of these attacks harmed only a surfboard.

- Cape Cod's population goes up to 400,000 every summer, and 200,000 of that number are people who came for the direct purpose of swimming. Surfcasting is our national sport, if a Cape can have a national sport. We've had great periods of time where "fisherman" was the main job in town. We've never had anyone get sharked to death on Cape Cod, and nothing I read speaks of indigenous, Wampanoag/Algonquian shark attacks.

- If you count non-lethal attacks in Massachusetts, you get about a dozen. Some of these attacks were spurious, such as "a hammerhead bumped into my boat while I was reeling in a tuna."

- You are 132 times more likely to drown at a beach than to be killed by a shark. You are 75 times more likely to be killed by lightning. You are 290 times more likely to be killed by a boat. You are 45 times more likely to be killed by a riptide. You are 1.6 times more likely to be swallowed up by a sand sinkhole- which, to be fair, may be a worse way to go.

- If you're female, you're more likely to be killed by a Kennedy crashing a vehicle into a Martha's Vineyard body of water. No women have been killed by a shark in Massachusetts' recorded history. Two, to my knowledge, were in a kayak a shark sampled a few years back in Manomet.

- Depending on the year studied, you are more likely to be bitten by a lab rat, a blue jay, a ferret, a gerbil, a parrot, a skunk, a raccoon... Shoot, you are 100 times more likely to be bitten by a human than a shark.

- Most sharks, Great Whites included, feed on a single item, Our sharks like seals, which is why the arrival of the sharks closely followed the arrival of the seals. Humans, even chubby ones, aren't fatty enough (in other words, we're too crunchy) for a shark's tastes. We are most likely also not salty enough to be shark food. An attack on a human is almost always a shark mistaking the human for a seal or a squid.

- We'd need 394 fatal shark attacks this summer to average one a year since the Mayflower arrived.

Duxbury Beach

So, it isn't like this is a pressing issue or anything. Why the shark cull, then?

Cape Cod is a beach, a big long one with water on both sides of it. Beach life draws in the tourists. Cape Cod depends on those tourists for her economic well-being. If sharks start gobbling swimmers, no one will come here.

It's basically the arguments posed by Quint and Mayor Vaughn in Jaws. We're a summer town. We need summer dollars, or we'll be on the welfare all winter. If someone says "Barracuda," no one will care. If we turn up on CNN or YouTube in the form of a shark attack video, we may as well be Iowa for all the beach tourism we'll get afterwards.

Farewell and adieu, to you fair Spanish ladies...

Don't get me wrong. It's very sad and tragic when someone dies in a car wreck or if they get the Die Slow or whatever... but a slip-n-fall in the tub isn't going to scare away 200,000 tourists every summer, and a shark attack will.

Chatham Harbor

Will the Beaty plan work?

There's a lot to hate about it. For starters, it is incomplete. It won't kill every shark. You only need one shark to slip by, and we get all that Amity Island negativity. So, right off the bat, the plan blows like the mighty North wind.

Anyone who has shark-fished for sport or profit will tell you that sharks- and fish in general- can be finicky. They may have no interest at all in whatever bait is being offered. As they are sort of up here to eat seals, offering them mackerel would be akin to going to the Chinese restaurant looking for a pizza.

You could bait the hooks with seals, but seals- like Great White Sharks- are a protected species. You already have to deal with the tree huggers to kill Great White Sharks... imagine the reaction when you say "We also have to kill a protected species to bait the hooks to kill another protected species." Remember, they shut beaches down here when a Piping Plover lays eggs in a dune.

Seals, which I again point out are protected, exist in far greater numbers than sharks do here. They eat the same diet as sharks do... minus, of course, seal meat. A seal is more likely to end up hooked than a shark is if you bait the hook with mackerel or haddock or whatever. You might slaughter 500 seals for each Great White Shark you manage to snare. An Australian hook program, which we''ll get to soon enough, reported bycatch of whales, sea turtles and dolphins.

Speaking of seals, they are the favorite meal of the sharks. If you drive the sharks away, you have an unchecked seal population. They rut like sea bunnies, too. Cape Cod fishermen don't mind sharks, but they hate seals. With no sharks, the Cape Cod fisherman will suddenly become the seal's apex predator.

That said... when we had a seal bounty (up until the 1960s on Cape Cod), it drove off all of the seals, and no one even saw a non-Basking shark near the shore in these parts. Sharks weren't very prominent here before the bounty, so remember to balance all the numbers properly.

West Island, Fairhaven

We aren't the first people to consider hooking sharks, and we won't be the first ones to do it if it ever comes to that. Australia, South Africa and Brazil have all taken a crack at it, with South Africa having done so for 50 years.

Western Australia, after a series of attacks on surfers, enacted a shark cull. They used the same baited drumline approach Beaty is proposing. They did so from 2012 through 2016, when a new government discontinued the policy.

Queensland has been using drumlines since 1962, and has had one shark attack death since. They had 27 between 1919 and 1961. South Africa had 3 non-fatal shark attacks at controlled beaches, and

The Aussies anchored a floating barrel to the sea bed, and set a big baited hook in the middle. Fishermen would check the hooks, kill any large (3 meters and above) sharks and try to save any bycatch.

They paid X number of fishermen $610,000 (US) for 107 days of setting hooks and removing the catch. They spent an additional $20 million on mitigation and education measures.

During the first 3 weeks of the program, 65 sharks were caught. 75% of them were under 3 meters, and 20% of those were dead on the hook. The remainder were released with often grievous injury.

Media reaction was intense. The video of the shooting of a Tiger Shark unleashed a storm of protest. Rumors arose later that the drumline had also killed a dolphin, and the fishing boat in question had a large sea creature under a tarp.

Amid large protests, the program was not kept alive for 2017.

Orleans

Brazil has also enacted the drumline strategy. Here's the bycatch, in both numbers and percentage of survival:

Spotted eagle ray - 4 - 100%
Marine catfish - 244 - 75%
Blacknose shark - 26 - 12%
Marine turtles - 4 - 100%
Barred grunt - 3 - 67%
Sting rays - 14 - 93%
Goliath grouper - 13- 100%
Nurse shark - 130 - 99%
Moray eels - 11 - 19%
Snappers - 6 -67%
Devil rays - 6 - 50%
Brazilian sharpnose shark - 1 - 0%

During the same period 38 potentially aggressive sharks were also hooked, including tiger sharks (34) and bull sharks (4). The overall survival rate of potentially aggressive sharks was 70% (relocated and released).

Shark attacks went down by 97% after the drumlines were set, although shark attack numbers vary wildly year-to-year. Many critics cite that people will avoid shark-infested waters once they are made known to the public, and that's what drove the numbers down.

Hyannis Port

Beaty, one should know, appears to be somewhat out of his mind.

He is often mentioned as an example when people discuss voters just checking whatever name is next to the "R" or the "D" on a ballot. He has been referred to as a "lunatic" by another local pol. He has served time in a federal prison for threatening President Bush, which is unusual for a Republican.

There's a real chance that his proposal will be laughed out of court, as the lawyers say.

Will people still be laughing when some child gets Mack The Knifed in the surf, taking our tourist economy with him?

People's reactions tend to be ugly with shark attack deaths, especially if their economy can be destroyed by them. Judging by things like King Phillip's War, Massachusetts has an ethic of Abject Slaughter when confronted by a deadly threat, even if the threat is minimal. We've slaughtered seals before, to the extent of driving them away for decades. Sharks are like seals, in that they can annihilate an area of our economy, and they aren't like seals, in that they can devour human beings.

Cape Cod's mood could turn very sour if a shark attack happened. They would be ripe for a brutal plan like the one offered by Beaty. This column hopes that a less cruel solution can be worked out.

Thumpertown Beach