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

River Sharks In Massachusetts?

Sharks are an accepted hazard of Massachusetts coastal life. Living or vacationing at the beach is awesome, but you could get stuck in 10 miles of bumper-to-bumper tourist traffic, you could get flooded by a hurricane and you could get eaten by a shark.

There are degrees of probability attached to each event- a Cape Codder is more likely to sit on Route 25 for an hour than to get the Jonah/whale treatment from a local leviathan- but the risk is there, and you have to balance risks and benefits before making a decision to go to such a place. It's why people tend to not vacation in Chernobyl.

People who live away from Cape Cod can scoff at some of those coastal risks. You have almost no chance of an ocean wave breaking on your house if you live in Bridgewater, other than Ye-Have-Offended-A-Wrathful-God types of events. Beach erosion doesn't come up much in Mansfield town meetings. Cape traffic doesn't really touch Halifax... although I'd bet it does if you overanalyze a bit.

One thing you should pretty much be able to count on is that you should stand very little chance of being attacked by a shark in, say, Rockland... at least once you eliminate fantasy stuff like the Chevy Chase-style land sharks or a Sharknado moving inland.

Jones River, Kingston MA

Sharks, for the most part, require salt water to live. They are designed for salty living, they have difficulty balancing without salt and will die very quickly if they are removed from salt water.

Not everyone knows that- the first time that I beat on a hotel door with my fist involved someone from Nebraska who didnt know that coastal people don't use salt water in their pipes and therefore fish caught in Cape Cod Bay can't be kept alive by filling the bathtub with tap water- but it is taken for granted by a percentage of the general population that is steady in the upper 90s.

People who study sharks, both professionally and as a hobby, know that there are several types of river sharks (mostly in Australia and India), and that Bull Sharks can go up rivers with ease. Bull Sharks are perfectly comfortable in fresh water, and that's sort of where we're headed today.

Mattapoisett River, Mattapoisett MA

Massachusetts has had three fatal shark attacks (off Boston, Scituate and Mattapoisett) since the White Bread showed up in 1620. Native Americans no doubt had attacks as well, but those attacks went down in a manner that Google never recorded. None of the Massachusetts attacks went down in a river, and two of them were quite some distance from shore.

Other than a Great White Shark getting stuck in coastal lagoon a few years ago, inland sharks are almost unheard of in Massachusetts. It does happen, though.

What is believed to be a Basking Shark was spotted miles up the Taunton River in Dighton, a noticeably non-coastal town.  A rumor exists of a Bull Shark going after a fisherman's catch in the Connecticut River, up by Holyoke.  I also saw the Housatonic River mentioned in the same discussion. A shark, probably a Great White, was spotted in the mouth of the Merrimack River once. Mouth-of-river vs. up-the-river is a distinction that we'll get to in a moment.

Bluefish River, Duxbury MA

The sharking in Dighton was painted as a Basking Shark by Dr. Gregory Skomal, and his word is better than mine. Basking Sharks are harmless to humans, unless they fall on them. The Great White Shark at the river mouth is perfectly natural and absolutely dangerous. The Bull Shark in Holyoke is the scariest story of the three.

Each of the fatal shark attacks in Massachusetts history almost certainly involved Great White Sharks, but we also have Bull Sharks. Bull Sharks are no joke. Bull Sharks can get up to a dozen feet long, weigh up to 700 pounds and have a reputation as an ornery, aggressive shark- an ex wife with gills. They are highly territorial, and Wikipedia describes them as having "virtually no tolerance for provocation." I don't know how to explain the math, but they have the highest bite force of any shark. Bull Sharks are very bad things to be swimming near.

Bull Sharks have been spotted in the Mississippi River as far north as Illinois, and up the Ohio River as far as, well, Ohio. They have been spotted in Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana, which is brackish. They have been in the same Potomac River that George Washington once threw a dollar over. Iran has a dozen fatal river shark attacks.

Massachusetts is the far northern range of the Bull Shark. They bear their young in fresh water, where other sharks can't enter. They prefer warm, shallow, murky water. Massachusetts has that, at least in the summer.

If your town has a river that holds 3-5 feet of water and connects to the ocean, you could easily have a Bull Shark. If you go in the water and a hungry ol' Bull Shark is in the water... Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies...

South River, Scituate MA

This is a scary scenario, and perhaps now is the time to introduce Numbers into the discussion. No one has ever been bitten by a Bull Shark in a Massachusetts river in recorded history. My tireless (OK, 2 page) Google searching yielded one or two non-verified river sightings of a Bull Shark in Massachusetts.

A shark attack itself is rare in Massachusetts. If you exclude fishermen, you have 3 fatal attacks and a half dozen or so non-lethal interactions over 400 years. Rhode Island, Connecticut and New York have one shark fatality each, with NY's attack being old enough that it happened to a Dutch guy (who perished when "the Devil appeared in the form of a fish" as he swam across the East River), perhaps a victim of a Bull Shark.

Keep in mind that 20-50 people win the Megabucks lottery annually, and the exponential stuff year to year sort of dwarves shark attacks very quickly. You are thousands of times more likely to win the Lottery, get hit by lightning, bed a Spice Girl, hit a hole-in-one or have a fight with Mike Tyson. More people have been removed from Donald Trump's inner circle since May than have been killed by sharks in Massachusetts in 400 years.

As bad as the odds are on being attacked by  a shark in Massachusetts, the odds against a river shark attack are even worse. None have ever happened here, putting it in the same statistical company as Yeti who have hosted the Late Show, tidal waves in Nebraska, asteroid impacts during the State Of The Union address and frogs who prefer Asian prostitutes.

What I believe is Maraspin Creek, Barnstable MA

That said, there is nothing to stop a Bull Shark from swimming into a Massachusetts river and picking off a bather. It would be a perfectly natural thing.

The Jersey Shore shark attacks of 1916 which inspired the movie Jaws were perhaps partially the work of a Bull Shark, who struck two of the victims in a tidal river well inland. Five Americans were killed by Bull Sharks since 2001.

As far as "deep up a river" goes, the Bull Shark is the sole threat. There are some other concerns, however.

I'm going to leave the "if a Basking Shark can get 20 miles up the Taunton River, could a Great White Shark do so as well?" questions to Dr. Skomal, who is more schooled in these matters than I am. I think that salt-water sharks can enter estuaries during very high tides where the esturay gets extra salinity, but I also started in writing as a sports-betting columnist. I'll leave the answer as between "No" and "a GWS would actually be more likely to chase fish up a river than a plankton-eating Basking Shark."

Cut River, Green Harbor

The Jones River in Kingston, along with Duxbury Bay and Plymouth Bay, are nursing grounds for young Sand Tiger Sharks. Sand Tiger Sharks can reach 10 feet long, and have a mouthful of teeth that you don't want closing on you. 

I'm pretty sure that, once they start getting mature-sized, they swim off to other feeding grounds. They are considered to be docile, and have never bitten a non-fisherman in Massachusetts waters. 

They are noted bait-stealers, and have bitten scored several bites on fishermen and bathers in other states.

Still, they love river mouths, and there was and perhaps still is a STS research facility on the Jones River which catches and releases sharks in the Jones River area.

If you dangle your legs off the boat and a STS bites your foot, it will probably be of little comfort to you that this sort of attack is beyond rare in Massachusetts waters. Please note that this is a far-flung scenario which has yet to occur in the Bay State.

Acushnet River, Fairhaven and New Bedford MA

Massachusetts has several rivers that touch the ocean, and even if a shark can't swim up the river, they love to hang out at the mouth of the river and pick off fish entering the ocean. This could be problematic for people swimming or kayaking in river mouths.

Again, no river deaths of humans have been attributed to sharks in Massachusetts, and I can't even find records of an attack going down in a Massachusetts river.

You stand almost no chance of encountering a shark in a Massachusetts river... but don't say that we didn't warn you if it does happen.