The bull shark prefers shallow water, so encounters with humans can be frequent. Photo: Shutterstock
According to experts, a shark monitoring program administrated by the government of New South Wales (NSW), Australia has one critical flaw: Bull sharks slip through the cracks.
The Shark Management Alert in Real Time (SMART) system is a catch-and-release-based method to keep track of sharks near Australia’s eastern beaches. It boils down to drum lines that catch sharks and alert nearby wildlife officials, who then attach tracking beacons to the animals and release them.
Those tags, positioned on the fins, can then transmit warnings to beachgoers or lifeguards if the shark swims near a busy beach.
The SMART system went live on a long swath of East Australian coastline in March 2022, thanks to over $85 million in government funding. The program just finished its first calendar year, and it’s funded through 2026. SMART drumlines are now in place at 19 locations along New South Wales’ 1,300+ mile coastline.
A January paper published in the journal Fisheries Research documented findings from SMART during a period before it became a government program: December 2019 to May 2021. Their research, local to two beach towns in the northeast corner of the state, showed strikingly low bull shark catch. While 67% of the system’s total catch was split between white and tiger sharks, bull sharks accounted for just 3%.
Only eight bull sharks hit the monitored drumlines during the 18 months, compared to 137 great white sharks and 65 tiger sharks.
That contradicted regional observations. Documented sightings of large shivers of bull sharks and bite incidents were on record, including two fatal attacks in the past 15 years.
No bull sharks?
Of all sharks, bull sharks are among the most concerning to swimmers and surfers. Because they prefer shallow water, encounters are plentiful.
So if New South Wales’ government’s program is concerned with preventing shark attacks, how effective can it be if it’s letting bulls go largely undetected? The answer could be that it still works pretty well.
SMART lines are obviously in their infancy, so data from one season only explains so much. But Australia did report just nine unprovoked shark bite incidents in 2022 — a significant dropoff from its five-year average of 15 and well below the U.S.’ 41 confirmed cases.
Nevertheless, the Fisheries Research paper’s authors think the SMART system lacks bull sharks for one key reason. The article observed that “[h]igher catch rates and increased activity associated with foraging of bull sharks have been reported during low-light periods (at night, dawn and dusk), yet the SMART drumlines are deployed during daylight hours.”
According to Australia’s ABC News, that’s accurate. The SMART lines deploy between sunrise and 8 a.m., and crews retrieve them “at least two hours before sunset,” it said, summarizing the paper.
Whether SMART needs to catch more bull sharks to keep beachgoers safe or not, the species isn’t the only variety of sharks benefiting from the officials’ methods. Harm reduction is the methodology behind SMART — the fewer unprovoked attacks, the fewer sharks suffer lethal consequences at the hands of the authorities.
But because the baited hooks hang at a certain depth under the surface, the study authors found, critically-endangered grey nurse sharks are generally safe from bycatch. The 3.2-meter depth also reduces false alarms, the study said.
“The standard traces effectively caught target shark species whilst reducing catches of grey nurse sharks and false alarm events, highlighting that the trace length currently used for NSW SMART drumline deployments is optimal,” the paper concluded.
Nothing like a win-win on a Friday.
Learn how to minimize chances of an adverse shark encounter as well as essential information about shark behavior, shark personalities, shark language, what to do if a shark bites you, and more during 20-plus video lessons in Ocean Ramsey’s Guide to Sharks and Safety.
