SPEAKER_00 0:42

You're listening to Word on the Reef. Diving into marine science and Great Barrier Reef and Beyond Science. Tanya Murphy and Brett Good Barrier. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Word on the Reef. I'm your host, diver and marine conservationist Tanya Murphy. And joining me, as always, is Kent Aquarium's marine educator and fish whisperer, Brett Goodband.

SPEAKER_04 1:10

Good morning. Good morning, everyone. We've got a great episode today.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

Before we dive in, though, just a quick reef news update. And unfortunately, it is concerning news. The Great Barrier Reef is at very high risk of extreme and widespread bleaching next summer, linked to this year's El Nino weather phenomenon. Professor Morgan Pratchett, our marine conservation ecologist at James Cook University, whom we had on our show back in March, told the International Coral Reef Symposium in Auckland, New Zealand last week that the extreme El Nino posed a significant concern. Quote, it's a very high likelihood that we'll see very high severity and large-scale mass bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, Professor Pratchett said. It's very concerning, but it is a few months away, so all we can do is hope that there's a change in those predictions. And also, right now the reef needs action from us, not despair. We know the reef is resilient and we have technology to do things like restoration projects. But addressing climate change is the only real long-term solution. So for everyone who hears this, if you haven't already, please consider joining or supporting a climate action group. And let's keep the pressure on our Environment Minister Murray Watt to reject the multiple climate-wrecking fossil fuel proposals that are currently on his desk right now. But now on to today's topic. Today we're talking about one of the ocean's deadliest killers. It's responsible for the deaths of thousands of marine animals along Australia's east coast, including turtles, whales, dolphins, rays, and dugongs. No, I'm not talking about sharks. I'm talking about shark nets and baited drum lines, deployed by the Queensland and New South Wales governments. Hundreds of these devices are installed along Australia's east coast, including within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and at Cairns. Governments say they're there to protect popular swimming beaches from seven shark species considered dangerous to humans. But it's not just those sharks that become entangled. Since 2001, Queensland's shark control program has caught 413 whales and dolphins, 907 turtles, 1,766 rays, and more than 13,000 sharks, including harmless and threatened species of shark. The picture is just as concerning in New South Wales. Over the past 90 years, the state's shark nets and drum lines have killed more than 15,000 non-target marine animals. So how effective are these programs at protecting swimmers? Is shark culling supported by the evidence? And what alternatives are available that can keep both people and marine life safe? Here to help answer some of these questions is shark scientist Dr. Leonardo Guida, shark campaign manager with the Australian Marine Conservation Society. Good morning, Dr. Guida, and welcome to Word on the Reef.

SPEAKER_04 4:19

Good morning. Thanks for having me on, Sadio and Brett. Yeah, good morning. Thanks for coming, buddy.

SPEAKER_00 4:22

It's great to have you on the show. To start with, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your origins and how you first became interested in sharks and rays?

SPEAKER_02 4:31

My earliest memories are when I was a kid, and I used to, you know, dad used to have National Geographic magazines with that famous yellow cover. Now I remember just trawling through them as a kid, just looking at animals like most kids do. And I just always gravitated towards a great white chart. And even though I probably shouldn't have watched it at such a young age, I saw the film Jaws, scared me to bits. At the same time, that fear was deeply fascinating. And I wanted to know why I felt that way and what was this animal and what did it do. Anyway, I've always had a love of science, and so I was fortunate enough to go through university and marry the two where I was able to do my PhD looking at the effects of commercial fishing on shark and ray populations in Australia. Specifically how stressed out they get when they get caught, what that means for their survival, their behaviour, and also their reproduction. And I did that at Monash University down in Victoria, and then come 2018 I was extremely fortunate to get a job at essentially exactly what I studied. And that was with AMCS and the Australian Marine Conservation Society up in Brisbane. So I moved up to Brisbane in 2018 to lead the shark conservation work. And yes, I'm familiar with with Queensland, familiar with what goes on there. Uh and then in 2023 moved down to Sydney to be with my now partner and one-year-old son. And as we've probably all heard of this year, there are a state of shark bites here in New South Wales. So I seem to be in and amongst it wherever I go. But yeah, I do what I can to improve public education information and advocate for what robust science says or recommends we should do with respect to conserving the ocean, utilising our resources sustainably, so with respect to commercial fishing, and live alongside a healthy ocean into the future for future generations as well.

SPEAKER_00 6:28

A lot of people don't have a lot of sympathy for sharks. In fact, many people are terrified of them. So why are sharks important and why do we need to protect them?

SPEAKER_02 6:37

Yeah. So look, first thing, that fear is completely normal. That fear is an evolutionary response we have. It's what's kept us alive, it's what's allowed humans to exist on this planet for the better part of a few hundred thousand years, and simply humans aren't built to be in the ocean. So it's not surprising that a lot of people not just scared of sharks, but sometimes the ocean in general. My brothers refuse to go in water deeper than their knees. So that fear is is normal. It should be respected. But where it gets to the point where it leads us to make bad decisions, bad policies, is when we let that fear override a sense of rational judgment and and what the evidence has before us.

SPEAKER_04 7:20

Yeah, that's that's exactly right. And and that's how I structure my shark shows at work is the first question I ask people is please put your hand up if you're afraid of sharks. And then I say the same thing. That's okay. It's it's okay to fear them, but we also need to understand how important their role is and how important they are to the planet and learn how to navigate living with them so that we can protect them. And people respect that.

SPEAKER_00 7:44

Yeah. So why why are sharks important?

SPEAKER_02 7:46

The simplest answer to that question is the food web. They keep it in balance and in check. And if we remove too many sharks from that food web because they form that keystone role that's so important for everything else, those food webs can potentially become unstable and worse still possibly even collapse. But sharks do more than just eat things in a food web, they can influence the behavior of animals around them. And it's what ecologists have have coined the landscape of fear. And by that, particularly in like coral reef ecosystems, you get smaller fish that when a shark comes nearby, they then hide away into their coral retreats or they reduce their foraging activity, and by reducing foraging activity, it puts less pressure on other organisms and invertebrates. And we've done some studies out in WA around shark bays, tiger sharks eat sea turtles and jugons on their toes, as it were. So if a sea turtle or a jugong is happily munching away, the moment there's an indication that there's a tiger shark in the area, those animals will then stop eating, and their priority is to avoid being eaten themselves, and so they'll move off and move around. And what that does is it prevents overgrazing of seagrass in any one spot. So you get these mosaics of seagrass, healthy seagrass communities, and the sharks are also indirectly protecting the little guys because those seagrass communities are really important nurseries, not just for invertebrates, but for small fish as well. And then to throw it one step further, seagrass is an absolute powerhouse of a carbon store. From memory, it it draws down carbon at forty times the rate of tropical rainforests, and it can store carbon for hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of years. And so in that respect there, we can also look at sharks as climate champions. So they don't just go around and eat things, they can influence the behavior of other animals around them, and as a consequence, that can then shape quite literally it's a very physical ecosystem there as well.

SPEAKER_00 9:46

Yeah, there was this famous example of the role of apex predators that went around on social media a few years ago, which was about removing wolves from Yellowstone National Park, I think, and it had a complete flow-on effect to absolutely everything else in the park, so they had to bring the wolves back.

SPEAKER_02 10:01

The the general concept is rewilding, and it's the idea that you know if you reintroduce these keystone animals into ecosystems, one thing leads to another, which leads to another, which leads to another, and you're kind of restoring what was. It works in theory, but in practice it can be quite challenging. The goal is to not get to that point in the first place. And so we're very fortunate in Australia that we've got the resources. Politically speaking, we're relatively stable compared to a lot of countries in the world. We've got as I said, we've got the resources, we've got the intellectual talent, the capacity, the technology to ensure that our oceans are healthy into the future. So yeah, hopefully we don't get to that point.

SPEAKER_00 10:41

Yeah, I mean, whether it's sharks or lions on the African savannah, these are animals, predators that have been there for hundreds of thousands of years, maybe millions of years, so we can't simply just go and uh wipe off anything off the planet without it having a flow-on effect.

SPEAKER_04 10:56

It's a bit naive to think that we can just stick our beak in and go, hey, you guys need to do this. They're like, hang on, champ, we've been around a lot longer than you. We know what we're doing.

SPEAKER_02 11:03

Yeah, but when it comes to sharks, they're older than the first tree that ever sprouted on Earth.

SPEAKER_04 11:08

And the range of Saturn and us?

SPEAKER_02 11:11

Yeah, they've they've been around about 450 million years.

SPEAKER_04 11:14

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 11:14

They've survived all five of the Earth's mass extinction events.

SPEAKER_04 11:18

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 11:18

But what's really alarming is that there's a very genuine fear that they might not survive us. And the past hundred or so years of industrialized fishing globally, you know, they've uh they face an extinction rate of thirty-odd percent of their species. And in Australia, whilst we're relatively good in terms of shark populations and species compared to the rest of the world, the bar's pretty low. And even in our own waters, roughly one in eight shark and race species are threatened with extinction to varying degrees.

SPEAKER_04 11:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:49

And when you kind of realize that we still can legally fish some endangered shark species from our waters and then sell them on for consumption, that's when you go, hold on, we've got some serious problems in our backyard, and we really need to look at what we're doing.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

There are 331 species of sharks and rays, they're relatives in Australia, and nearly half of them are endemic, which means they're found nowhere else. So, what are some of your favourite shark species and what's remarkable about them? Because I think a lot of people who aren't ocean going just sort of think of the word shark and they just see a terrifying great white shark. But they're so diverse, aren't they, Dr. Guida?

SPEAKER_02 12:38

Yeah, yeah, incredibly diverse in terms of size. They can range from as small as around about 60 to 80 centimetre lantern sharks that live in the deep, dark depths of the coral sea, right up to a whale shark, the world's largest fish, which you can get up to from memory, possibly up to 18 metres. Pretty huge. Yep, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:59

Both of those are examples of sharks that are completely harmless. The whale shark is the largest one and it only eats plankton. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 13:06

Yeah, so and that's just in size. And then you can look at diversity in terms of where they live. You've obviously got your coastal species, your open ocean species, like the oceanic white tips. And then you've got deep sea species, as I mentioned, like the lantern shark or even a green-eyed spur dog, which lives at you know a little over 1200 metres below the waves.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

I love that name, the green-eyed spur dog.

SPEAKER_04 13:28

Yeah, I know that's awesome. If you're going to come back as a shark, you'd pick that one, wouldn't you?

SPEAKER_02 13:32

Absolutely, yeah. So that's in depth. And then again, the diversity is crazy in terms of their biology. They generally mature quite late in life on average. And as I said, it's quite diverse, but on average, 10 years they reach maturity, two to three year reproductive cycle, giving birth to four to six young. But that again, that's the average. The the extremes, you can have gummy sharks, as I mentioned earlier, which are quite productive and they'll breed every year and pup about 30 pups and they'll mature at about six years old. Um, females that is. And then you've got the other end of the spectrum where you've got dusky sharks that are about eighteen to twenty-odd years old by the time they mature.

SPEAKER_00 14:13

Wow, they're really slow to repeat.

SPEAKER_02 14:15

Yeah, they've got pregnancies for nearly two years, then they take a year off just to recover. There's only a handful of pups born. And as I said, there's everything else in between. So when we look at that and then we look at the impacts on sharks, primarily fishing impacts, you can see how it's quite easy to essentially take them quicker than they can replace themselves.

SPEAKER_00 14:35

Sharks can grow really old as well. I don't know w whether we have those species in Australia, but I remember reading about Greenland sharks that can live for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.

SPEAKER_02 14:44

Yeah, they're estimated about four hundred years old. Wow. Um, so that predates colonization of Australia by what 50, 200 years.

SPEAKER_04 14:55

Jeez, imagine if he could talk, eh? Imagine the things that that 400-year-old shark could tell us.

unknown 15:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:00

Yeah, and their metabolism's so slow.

SPEAKER_04 15:03

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 15:03

Which is also also why they live so long and because they live in such cold water.

SPEAKER_03 15:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:06

That I think from memory, basically, in terms of energy requirements, it's something literally like an apple a day. Because their metabolism is so slow.

SPEAKER_00 15:15

So that's another one that's not very dangerous then, because they don't need to eat very much because they don't move very fast.

SPEAKER_04 15:20

Yes. We haven't actually got to any yet that are a problem to humans, and so they think.

SPEAKER_02 15:25

So yeah, so there's there's quite a lot. And in terms of my favourites, I mean, as I touched on earlier, you know, as a kid is a great white chart.

SPEAKER_04 15:31

Yeah, that's my boss.

SPEAKER_02 15:33

But as I've had more and more experience working in this area, southern fiddler rays are very, very dear to my heart. They're a an endemic species, southern parts of Australia. And during my research, I looked after several pregnant fiddler rays in tanks and watched them give birth and release their young. So it's got a very, very special part of me. Um, the Southern Fiddler rays. And then there's other cool ones like the white fin swell shark, which I've only ever seen it in a specimen jar, tragically. And this is a species that best estimates is is critically endangered. Again, endemic, lives at about 500 metres below the waves. And like its other swell shark cousins that live in more coastal waters, it'll swallow water to make itself inflate and look bigger than any potential threat.

SPEAKER_04 16:22

Yeah, it's pretty swelling.

SPEAKER_02 16:24

But yeah, the more common versions of that species, again, down here where where I grew up in Victoria, like a draft board shark. Quite gnarly looking sharks, they only get to about a meter or so long, and yeah, they'll swallow water up, and I've literally pull them up on deck and then they'll just spit all this water out. So it's pretty funny. They're pretty hardy, they they can handle a beating. So when they do get caught, they can handle air exposure for like 30, 40 minutes. And this is all done through work in simulation as well in tanks and aquaria. And yeah, they've got a really good post-relief survival act just because they're such hardy animals.

SPEAKER_04 16:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:57

But again, the other end of the spectrum, you've got hammerheads, which the joke is, you know, they see your hook and die because they're just so sensitive to the stress.

SPEAKER_04 17:06

Yeah, they're strung out.

SPEAKER_00 17:07

And um it doesn't take much.

SPEAKER_04 17:09

No.

SPEAKER_00 17:09

I I just googled a picture of the swell shark and there's a picture of one that's all swelled up. And yeah, I guess it's kind of like a puff of fish. They swell themselves up to look bigger and deter predators as well. But I'm never I never knew that a shark could do that as well. That's remarkable.

SPEAKER_02 17:25

Yeah, they're pretty cool. And you've obviously got the famous Epheled shark out there on the reef. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 17:30

I've got Epi's. Yeah, four Epi's at work. They're so cool. But my soft spot, my favourite is obviously Great Whites, because that's what I've grew up with.

SPEAKER_00 17:39

Oh, you don't have any of those at the Kansas.

SPEAKER_04 17:40

We don't have any of those. Thank God no aquariums have them.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

No one's successfully. No, they're just activity.

SPEAKER_04 17:46

They're no. But my my soft spot is definitely our two leopard sharks, Rosie and Clio, who are in the process of laying more eggs at the moment. It's like a stegles factory.

SPEAKER_00 17:54

So for any listener who isn't familiar, an epaulette shark is a small, sort of long, thin shark which just has spots. It's brown with spots. They look like puppy dogs.

SPEAKER_04 18:03

They're just utterly harmless.

SPEAKER_00 18:06

I think they eat crustaceans or something. They're really adorable.

SPEAKER_04 18:08

And they walk across the top of the reef at low tide helping themselves. They walk like a dog and they can survive nearly an hour walking around the top, as long as there's a bit of water there. But it's the idea of those two big black dots, I reckon that's to terrify seagulls, because they look down and look at those dots and go, man, that thing's huge. Yeah. I'm not going near that. Meanwhile, the epaulette sharks just wandering around doing his own thing.

SPEAKER_00 18:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 18:30

Which is actually why they're called epaulette sharks, isn't it? Because they're like the epaulettes on a captain's uh Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's so cool.

SPEAKER_00 18:38

Oh, and leopard sharks. I love my leopard sharks. They're adorable as well. I mean, the name, for anyone who's not familiar, might make them sound like an apex predator, but to humans they're harmless, aren't they? They've got a sort of a mouth that seems to face down. What do they eat, the leopard sharks?

SPEAKER_01 18:54

They're just small fish and crustaceans.

SPEAKER_04 18:56

Yeah, we feed them squid and fish and prawns and all sorts of stuff.

SPEAKER_00 18:58

But they don't feed them, you don't feed them guests at the aquarium?

SPEAKER_04 19:01

No. No, we don't want to feed them, though.

SPEAKER_00 19:03

You don't have many people putting their hands up? No. Who wants to join in a first person perspective of the fish feed?

SPEAKER_04 19:09

No, my sharks. It just go ooh. Yuck. Ooh. Get them away from me.

SPEAKER_00 19:14

Too many microplastics in those humans.

SPEAKER_04 19:16

But we've had we've had a couple of parthenogenesis babies from our leopard sharks in there, too. No sperm required.

SPEAKER_00 19:22

For any listeners who don't know what parthenogenesis means say what it means, Brett?

SPEAKER_04 19:26

Yeah, so they can have the ability to have a offspring without sperm present. So reptiles and insects do it. But the issue with that is that all parthenogenesis babies and sharks are all female. So they do need diversity. They need to be able to find sperm out there and find males and have a bit of both. But makes sense. Yeah, if they don't miss them. All the holes in the Swiss cheese line up and bang, you've got a female version of the species. That's not a clone though. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_00 19:56

Yeah, leopard sharks are just so adorable. They, as the name suggests, for anyone who's not familiar, they're looking brown with spots and their fins are round. Instead of having sharp pointy fins, they have round fins, which just enhances the colour.

SPEAKER_04 20:10

Haven't they been voted as being the cutest shark on the planet? They're so beautiful.

SPEAKER_00 20:14

You see videos online of aquarium divers giving them a belly rub and cuddles against you.

SPEAKER_04 20:19

They need cuddles during feeding, otherwise they get upset.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

Very affectionate. So so I love to describe to people sharks as just being like dogs. I mean, if you think about all the different breeds of dogs, you've got your tiny little harmless lat dogs, and then then obviously it ranges up to the bigger, great more scary dogs. And you know, sharks are the same, you can't taint them all as being dangerous because they range from the the small, cuddly ones to the large, dangerous ones.

SPEAKER_04 20:48

There is a dog shark.

SPEAKER_00 20:49

Yeah, and there's a spur dog. There is a yeah. Sorry, Leo.

SPEAKER_04 20:54

We've um we go off, we do this, we go off on a tangent.

SPEAKER_00 20:58

So many movies and media reports depict sharks as mindless killing machines. How much does this perception reflect reality and how much of a threat do sharks really pose to humans?

SPEAKER_01 21:10

Yeah, it's it's a great question.

SPEAKER_02 21:12

And a lot of people, I'm sure, would be familiar with with the Jaws effect that being that since the film Jaws, you know, people all of a sudden went, Oh my god, there's this animal out there that wants to hunt us down and tell us all. And then, yeah, the media, I mean, there's that phrase, you know, if it bleeds, it bleeds. But I think the tide is turning, albeit incrementally. But I think probably in the last maybe I'd like to say at least five to ten years. Yep, I think the reporting on sharks has been a lot more considered. You obviously still get the sensationalist stories and everything like that, the sensationalist language, but people are becoming more and more considered about how they talk about sharks.

SPEAKER_04 21:49

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 21:50

And the kind of stories that are told. So the good thing about social media is that people are starting to see more and more images and footages of sharks just doing their thing and not really bothering anyone and just looking awesome in these amazing coastal sceneries or at sea.

SPEAKER_04 22:07

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 22:07

And people are now seeing the other side of the coin, whereas traditionally, if ever you saw a shark, be in a picture or a film, it was always that classic wife jaws wide open. Yeah. And that was the only thing that would come to mind when you thought.

SPEAKER_04 22:20

Well, I can add a little bit of weight very quickly to that because I get to see it from a customer point of view. Now I've been doing those shark shows at the aquarium now for nine years. Nearly three million people have been through that place. And I've seen from a customer point of view, I've seen a seismic shift from when I first First used to do the shark shows to people just either getting up, walking out, or shaking their head in the show, go, they're all monsters, to now having a hundred and ten people still seated at the end listening to the conservation part. And most of them are saying, Thank you for giving us the real story. Education leads to conservation. And people just want to know the real story. So just to add a bit of positivity to what you said, and from a customer point of view, it's it's changed.

SPEAKER_00 23:02

Yeah. When I've been working on the tourism dive and snorkel boats on the Great Barry Reef for many years, you always ask the room who wants to see a shark while we're at their snorkeling today, and it's divided. Some people are like, yes, yes, which is good to see. And and some people are like, no. And I'm like, well, if you don't want to see one, you're in luck because we barely ever see them, unfortunately, since they're so endangered. But if you do see them, what we're going to see on the the shallows of the Great Barrier Reef coral snorkeling area are your small reef sharks, which are smaller than us, they're smaller than a human, they're afraid of us. And when they see us, they're just going to swim off. So you're going to need to take a photo real fast, otherwise you'll blink and you'll miss it. So and for me, having worked and dived on the Great Barrier Reef since 2011, not once have I had a scary shark come up to me. It's usually been me chasing the sharks.

SPEAKER_04 23:53

Yeah, but that's the other way around. The sharks have the meeting going, here comes Tanya again.

SPEAKER_00 23:57

Yeah, but Brett, you've had a tiger shark swim past you, and it wasn't the slightest bit of interest in eating.

SPEAKER_04 24:02

Yeah, no, so I was very privileged back in the day. So I used to work on a dive boat called Taco that used to go up to North Horn, Northern Coral Sea. And uh back then I was doing all the filming of the shark feeds and all that sort of stuff. So but my interaction with sharks started when I was little because I grew up on the south coast of WA, so we used to dive with great whites all the time and surf with them. So I just fell in love with them. But yeah, yeah, I had a massive tiger shark come into the feed one day, and she was about four metres. She was huge, the biggest tiger shark I've ever seen. And she came up from the bottom and she looked at all the other sharks feeding. There's a couple of hammerheads, oceanic silver tips, a lot all going crazy. And she just came up and she gave them all the death stare and she just looked straight at me and swam past and disappeared. And I had that moment of how cool is this after I got my breath back.

SPEAKER_00 24:46

But yeah, it's just you know Jaws had the fiction that the shark is actually vindictive, it's gonna chase you down to get revenge upon you. But the reality is they prefer sushi. Sharks prefer sushi. That's right. But you know, every time that there's been an attack, it's it's usually because there was sushi involved.

SPEAKER_02 25:04

Yeah, there's a tricky one to kind of communicate to people. It is. As I said, but particularly recently, particularly in New South Wales, where you had a spade of bites in the space of ten days and surfers and whatnot. And I've I've recently spoken to people who are either directly or indirectly affected by those bites, and and the common question they ask is like, why? Why did it happen? How did it happen? And and yeah, you're right, like most times it's a case of the shark's doesn't quite know exactly what it is or you think you're a seal or a turtle.

SPEAKER_00 25:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:37

Yeah, you've unfortunately kind of gotten in the way of perhaps it's actual prey. The shark itself might have felt defensive, again, because you're in the way, so to speak. Yeah, often there's no rhyme or reason as such, and it unless you can actually pop inside the mind of a shark, which let's be honest, none of us can, I suppose we'll never truly know. But from what the scientific research about behaviour and you know how they perceive shapes and vision in the water and smell and everything like that, there are instances of as Tanya hinted at, you know, mistaken identity because of your silhouette.

SPEAKER_00 26:11

And if people are fishing or gutting fish nearby, then that's obviously increases their confusion because they smell the fish blood. Yeah. And if you're spearfishing, then I think everyone who goes spearfishing understands the risk that they're taking.

SPEAKER_02 26:25

100%. I think a spearfisher that doesn't acknowledge the risk of a shark is probably someone that's never spearfished before.

SPEAKER_04 26:32

And should take up golf instead.

SPEAKER_02 26:34

Possibly, yeah. So yeah, it's it's unfortunate and tragic to say the least, but uh more often than not, particularly with white sharks as well, like very, very curious animals, very intelligent animals. They don't have hands, they've got a mouthful of razor blades, and you know, a an exploratory bite, unfortunately and tragically, can sometimes be fatal. Um and whether it's a fatal bite or not can be a matter of just real tragic bad luck and a couple of millimeters or a millimeter to the left or to the right of banana.

SPEAKER_00 27:03

Yeah, that's right. So another thing is I saw a list of which animals are the most deadly to humans. And um humans are one of them. We uh killing each other at much higher rate than sharks are.

SPEAKER_04 27:15

Mosquitoes 1.9 million people last year, I think the Mozzy took out.

SPEAKER_00 27:19

Apparently, you're more likely to die from a coconut falling on your head or a vending machine falling on your head.

SPEAKER_04 27:24

Vending machines and garden snails too made it on the list last year. I don't know how that works.

SPEAKER_00 27:29

Oh no. Yeah, there's a few out there, but I've got a few more bones to pick about the media in our local paper a few years ago. There's a local girl who I'm acquainted with that was very unlucky to get bitten on the ankle by a shark.

SPEAKER_04 27:43

Oh yes, I had her at work.

SPEAKER_00 27:44

Yeah, she obviously it it wasn't a very big shark because she made a recovery. She didn't lose her foot, it just sort of bit her ankle. But the local newspaper, not having been there to take a photo of the actual shark, they put a stock photo of a giant great white shark right next to the article.

SPEAKER_04 28:01

She she came in with her foot all strapped up in a wheelchair and she listened to my shark show. We had a really good chat afterwards.

SPEAKER_00 28:07

Well, she's famous for shouting, I still love sharks to the meeting as she was wheeled out of the medical evacuation helicopter. Yeah, okay. We'll have to get her on the show at some point. Um I think Netflix, like, you still have shows on there, like dramas, about sharks that are horror films. But you've also got a lot of documentaries about the free divers that free dive with tiger sharks and the um All the Sharks, which is promoting the excitement of diving with sharks. Um, I've got a race ahead because we've done what we usually do. We eight half-hour tiny. Turn off on a tangent. Um But I want to talk about threats to sharks. So let's reverse the question. We've we've talked a lot about how much of a threat sharks are to humans, but how much of a threat are humans to sharks, Leo?

SPEAKER_02 28:52

We're their single biggest threat. Yep. As I touched on earlier, you know, they survived the world's five mass extinction events, but they may very well not survive us. And just to recap in case anyone had missed it earlier, the world's been fishing industrially since the early 1900s. So in a little over a hundred years, we've managed to put 37% of their species at risk of extinction. With the IUCN Red List, that's from what I can recall the highest form of any marine life at risk of extinction. And more recently, they've found that oceanic species have declined by 70% in the past 50 years globally. When we look at Australia and and how we fish, we've got, as I touched on earlier, but roughly around about one in eight of our species are threatened with extinction. And the primary driver is commercial fishing in Australia and also globally. But there are also emerging threats coming through as we learn more. Recreational fishing to an extent, but again, it's by and large commercial fishing. Other impacts we have, and these are particularly for ray species and most famously sawfish, is where you have, particularly across northern Australia, the damming of rivers, the extraction of water from key watersheds. Freshwater sawfish, for example, are endangered. They'll live out on the coastal walls out at sea, but they come into the freshwater reaches of rivers and pup. And sawfish puffs will live in the rivers and billabongs until they're about five or six years old and they'll start making their way back out to sea when they're bigger adults. So if you're altering river flows and you're harvesting water and you're damming up rivers, you're choking off a lot of those really, really important habitats and migratory pathways for these animals to live their normal life. And that's another really big threat, particularly the sawfish. And then overlaying it all, you've got climate change. It's influencing where and when sharks move and for how long they move in certain areas. And that is going to affect perhaps whether they interact with the commercial fishery or not, but then also their biology, which we don't quite fully understand how climate change is affecting their biology with temperature changes in the water. But what we are seeing is their movement pattern changing and what that might mean for their habitat availability or their traditional hunting grounds. And then, of course, you've also got other fish species that will move and change their migraine patterns because of climate, and then there's that flow-on effect through the food web in terms of where's food available, when and how much.

SPEAKER_00 31:21

You mentioned commercial fishing, and as a campaigner, you've done various campaigns to help protect sharks from fishing in Queensland. Can you tell us the commercial fishing threats that existed for sharks in Queensland and the protections that have been introduced across the past decade?

SPEAKER_02 31:40

So, zooming right out, the early 2000s is when Australia as a whole reached peak shark fishing. And since then, across Australia, in all jurisdictions, fishing rules and management have incrementally changed such that we're now better now in terms of how we fish than what we were then. We're by far from perfect and there's still a long way to go. But we have come a long way, and largely to the thanks of conservationists, community support, scientists, and fishers who recognize that they're having an impact and that things need to change so that they have a healthy industry moving forward into the years ahead. When we look at Queensland specifically and more recently, we know that the commercial gill nets have largely been removed from the Great Barrier Reef and are due to be officially phased out by June next year from memory. Yep. Gillnets were a primary driver of overfishing just because of the nature of how they fish.

SPEAKER_00 32:30

And that's that's bycatch because gill nets weren't aiming to catch sharks, or were they?

SPEAKER_02 32:35

No, no, they weren't. There's definitely gillnet shark fishery. There's obviously the bycatch issue with threatened species, and I won't go into that so much, but I'll speak more about sharks. So with gillnets, for people who aren't familiar, they're a fishing net. And they're called a gill net because basically what happens is a fish swims through it, it gets caught in the gills, and as a consequence it can't move, and then they haul the nets up and there's a catch. Now, gillnets are used from the point of view that, oh, we can select for the size of fish. So when we look at sharks, the idea is that if a shark's too small, it'll pass through the nets. If a shark's big, so it's a mature adult, it'll bounce off the net because the mesh is too small. But if a shark is the perfect size, as per the fishing rules, it'll get caught. The theory being that you can kind of fish sharks at a level with that a size where you're not impacting the smaller ones growing up and you're not necessarily catching the larger ones that have to breed. However, there was overfishing going on, and this was largely because Queensland Fisheries since 2012 didn't have any independent monitoring. So basically you had to take logbooks for what they were written as, and essentially any threatened species that were caught whether sharks or otherwise was grossly underestimated. And so the veracity of that data was you could question to say the least. And obviously, any decisions you make and any models you come up with are only as good as the data you've got. So, yeah, we're talking very about skeletammerheads. Now, hammerheads, scalp hammerheads are endangered Australian waters, critically endangered globally, and because of the nature of their head, doesn't matter what size they are, they're going to get caught in the net just because of the head shape. And hammerheads don't last long at all in terms of their stress response. They die really quick. And so the nature of gill nets, you know, they could be up to a kilometer long in the Great Bayer Reef these nets, which is insane. The overfishing was happening, and when you have a look at the Great Bayer Reef report going back maybe five years or so, you know, it was clearly identifying that overfishing was a problem, overfishing of predators in an ecosystem was a problem, and as we touched on earlier, there was a risk that it would have broader ecosystem impacts in terms of food webs. And so realizing that the Queensland government is part of their overall strategy to make their fisheries more sustainable, we've now seen that gillments have been removed, phased out. And I'm involved in the Gulf Carpenter fishery as well. Similar thing, gillnets still operate there, but some great decisions have been made where we've got some net freeze on down in the Gulf as well to protect certain species, including sawfish. So, generally speaking, I would say over the past five years or so, Queensland's made some significant strides forward. But again, challenges still persist, and it'll be a case of working through those challenges to ensure that Queensland has healthy oceans and that we manage our fisheries also so that the broader ecosystem can be resilient when we consider the impact that climate change is having as well.

SPEAKER_00 35:35

For anyone who's not aware, because I think if you ask the majority of Queenslanders, do you eat shark? Most people will be like, no.

SPEAKER_04 35:41

No, or what is shark.

SPEAKER_00 35:43

But a lot of people wouldn't realise that maybe they have eaten shark by mistake, because when you go to the fish and chip shop, a lot of the time when you have fish and chips, it could have been shark meat, right? Because you just buy fish and chips. This doesn't tell you what fish it is.

SPEAKER_01 35:56

Yeah. Some some shops just go fish and chips, $15. And it's just literally fish and chips and go, oh, whatever the fish is, I'll eat it.

SPEAKER_04 36:03

And that's also a bit of an issue too, because if people go into a fish and chip shop and they ask for fish, it's not actually listed as to what type of shark it is.

SPEAKER_02 36:10

No, no, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. And we did a survey a few years ago, a national survey, and from what I can recall, I think it was one in three people don't realise that flakes even shark meat.

SPEAKER_04 36:20

Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_02 36:20

And then yeah, as you said, flakes a generic term. It should only refer to two species of shark, and that being the gummy shark, which is more often found in the southern parts and the cooler waters of Australia, or the rib shark.

SPEAKER_00 36:33

And I understand that you or other researchers had done DNA tests on fish and chips from different restaurants and found endangered, critically endangered scalloped hammerhead in fish and chip shops, and it wasn't labelled as such because it shouldn't be there in the first place.

SPEAKER_02 36:45

Yeah, yeah, the the mislabelers across Australia was done by Macquarie Uni. The mislabeling off the top of my head, I think about 90 odd percent of samples were mislabeled by species or general name, like flake.

SPEAKER_03 36:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:56

Gummy shark. So it was either called Flake and it wasn't gummy shark, or it was a species that it actually wasn't.

SPEAKER_03 37:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:02

And then amongst all that, yeah, green ice burdock, funnily enough, was one of them. That was found out in a fish shop in Victoria. And that's an endangered species.

SPEAKER_04 37:10

So what penalties?

SPEAKER_02 37:11

Technically allowed to catch green iced burdock, but somehow it ended up in a fish shop.

SPEAKER_04 37:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:15

And then yeah, you had staltanahead in the mix and a few other species as well.

SPEAKER_00 37:20

So uh I guess that's why you had a campaign called Give Flake a Break. Yes.

SPEAKER_04 37:25

Uh I use that in my show every day. Yeah. Give Flake a break.

SPEAKER_02 37:28

Yeah, no, thanks. Yeah, because it's just to give it a break because you don't know what species you're eating, and it could very well be an endangered species. But when we look at gummy sharks, in and of themselves, the way they're managed just for that species, the impact's not too bad.

SPEAKER_00 37:42

Yeah, because they're they're fast replacing, they breed fast.

SPEAKER_02 37:45

However, however, when you start going, well, how are gummy shark caught? Well, they're caught with gill nets. What else does that gill med catch? That catches school shark for Victoria. School shark are an endangered species. School shark are currently being overfished. School shark are down to around about 12 to 15% of their original numbers. So gummy shark isn't sustainable when we start looking at broadly, what does it mean for the environment? But basically, if you want to catch gummy shark with a gill net, it's coming at the expense of another species. So you wouldn't call that sustainable.

SPEAKER_00 38:30

So you talked about how we now have extra protections for our sharks in Australia, but now there's some anxiety in the community about whether a rebound in shark numbers might pose an increased safety risk to swimmers. How much truth is there to that? And what's the real facts about shark numbers, especially on the east coast of Australia?

SPEAKER_02 38:52

So it's true that shark bites in Australia are on the increase and have been on the increase. But this is most probably due to the fact that we've got an increasing population living on our coastlines and enjoying our beaches. So around about 90% of Australians live within an hour of the beach. And as we see the climate warming in particular, summer's getting hotter, winter's getting milder, more and more people are going to use the beach more and more often. And we're also seeing an increase in popularity in water sports. I'm sure you've seen an increase in popularity or interest in diving, but there's definitely been an increase in interest in surfing and activities like surfing. So in short, more and more people are spending more and more time and longer times in the water, which is going to, at least mathematically anyway, increase what is already a relatively low risk of shark interaction. When we look at shark numbers themselves, as I flagged earlier in our interview, sharks breed really, really slowly. And so if you have a look at Western Australia, for example, they had a look at a rough population assessment in their northwestern border. And that's where there was some intense commercial shark fishing going on that only stopped in the early 2000s. And in the 15 years since it stopped, so when they had a look at these shark species and then the catch trends and numbers in 2020, what they found was with the exception of one species of shark, the sandbar shark, other species like duskies, hammerheads, milk sharks, silky sharks, at best their numbers had stabilised. And again, this is because they take several years to reach maturity. Again, two to three years reach reproductive about, and they'll only give birth to a relatively few number of parts.

SPEAKER_00 40:36

Okay, so the fact that fishing of sharks has reduced in the last five years in Queensland isn't going to result in a sudden explosion of shark melts.

SPEAKER_02 40:45

Yeah, yeah. So when we look at that gill net and the removal of gilnets from Queensland's east coast, which accounted for about 90% of the fishing effort, and again, it was a shark fishery in parts and definitely did catch a lot of sharks. Yeah, in a couple of years, it's biologically impossible for numbers to quote unquote boom. Another example is in northern Australia, right up until I think it was about the 1970s and even the 1980s, there was heavy overfishing from Taiwanese gill boats, gill net boats that were allowed into Australia to fish for sharks. The fishing was so intense that ultimately that that fishing stopped. And what they were predominantly fishing for were black-tipped species. Now, black-tipped reef sharks are kind of one of the more productive species, and it's taken you know around about 30, 40 years within that time frame, black-tipped sharks or black-tipped species, those reef sharks, they're back at their estimated around 90% of their original numbers. So even then, for a relatively productive shark, it can take decades to get back to really good levels. So yeah, when we look at the gillnet band in Queensland, a couple of years is is nowhere near enough to see significant recoveries. And even then for a lot of the species, you know, some of them are coming off relatively low baselines. So we have to keep that in mind as well, if in fact they hopefully do recover.

SPEAKER_00 42:06

A lot of people ask me, well, I feel like I'm seeing more sharks when I go fishing nowadays because they're coming in around my boat when I fish, they're taking the fish off the lines. But there's also been research showing that sharks have learned this behaviour to follow fishing boats. So it doesn't necessarily prove an increase in shark numbers. It proves an increase in their behaviour to follow fishing boats, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 42:32

Yeah. Yeah, look, there may very well be some species of shark, as I touched on earlier, the more productive smaller bodied species like the black chip reef sharks, that may, at least over the past 10, 20 years, may have shown some changes in the numbers and possibly optics. But again, that's not all shark species. And generally speaking, there is a very, very strong body of research that shows, be it in the lab or out in the field, and then even you know, some really groundbreaking WA studies have shown that where you've got wreck fishing hotspots, where it's constant fishing, intense fishing, you've got hot spots of depredation. So that's the sharks coming in to take a bite of fish off. It happens. Let's be honest, it happens, and it's an incredibly frustrating experience. I can appreciate that. Depredation is a real thing. But the way I like to explain it is that if I've got a pizza and I'm walking down, say your local street and I yell out free pizza, free pizza, free pizza, I might get a couple of people coming up to me on the first day going, Well, what's this free pizza thing? Can I have a slice? And I'm like, Yeah, sure, you can have a slice. And if I keep doing that day after day, week after week, words gonna get around. And then eventually I'm gonna be yelling out a free pizza, and I'm gonna have everyone swarm at me and within minutes or seconds, all my pizza's gonna be gone.

SPEAKER_00 43:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:46

I can't then say that because I've got so many people around me wanting free pizza, that the population of Australia has boomed.

SPEAKER_00 43:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:54

What's happened is that people have learned that there's free pizza going on and from around the area, they've all come in and congregated. So on the one hand, you can appreciate a very real sense and a tangible sense that quite literally there are more sharks around me and more often. But zooming out, does that mean that any one given species is boomed in number? Probably not.

SPEAKER_00 44:16

Yeah, that's a really good analogy. And now I'm hungry for pizza, so thank you.

SPEAKER_02 44:21

No worries.

SPEAKER_00 44:22

Now, for 90 years, the Queensland and New South Wales governments have maintained what they call shark control programs aimed at protecting popular swimming beaches. These programs use equipment in the water to catch sharks, including in Inside the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and at beaches near Camps. Dr. Guida, can you explain what sort of equipment they're using to catch sharks and how they work and what impact they have on sharks?

SPEAKER_02 44:47

So New South Wales and Queensland, as you touched on, for 90 years now have operated a shark culling program. In New South Wales, they exclusively use shark nets. So these are 160, 180 odd metres long, four to six metres in height. Sharks obviously hit them, get caught, tangled, and drown. In Queensland, there's a combination of nets, which are predominantly used in the southeast. So your Gold Coast and Sunny Coast areas, but it's also in combination with drum lines. And these are fated hooks that hang in the water with the intention to catch a shark. And then assuming that shark is on the Queensland target list, of which there's seven species, if it's alive, it gets shot dead. There are smart drum lines, these get utilized in New South Wales. The difference between a smart drum line and a conventional drumline is that the smart drum lines are designed such that when a shark bites it, it sends off a signal by a satellite. The fisheries department go out to the shark, tag it, and release it. And that usually happens on average about an hour of getting a signal. In Queensland, they call them catch alert drum lines. And these have been deployed within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park because, as of quite a famous court case back in 2019, I think it was, Queensland was no longer allowed to cull sharks within the Great Barrier Marine Park. And as such, they're putting catch alert drum lines to catch and release the sharks. Yeah, yeah. In that instance, there is a little bit of a loophole in the sense that if a shark is deemed to be basically for animal welfare reasons, they're allowed to euphanize it, which is a bit of a euphemism, they're allowed to kill it. Or if there's a genuine concern for fissure safety, they can kill it. Both instances may genuinely occur, but the tricky thing is that because there's no monitoring on these shark control vessels, it's who knows what actually happens. But nonetheless, sharks are caught and they are released and they are attracted. But uh yeah, for 90 years a culling program has been operating, and based on the evidence at hand, shark culling simply doesn't work when we look at beach safety.

SPEAKER_00 47:03

Yeah, that was going to be my very next question. How effective are these methods of catching sharks? How effective are they at actually keeping swimmers safe?

SPEAKER_02 47:11

Oh, as I said, there's no evidence that a culling program improves safety. You know, a study in 2025 looked at uh netted beaches and unnetted beaches, and shark bite rates didn't differ at either beach. We also know that uh another study showed that an estimated 40% of sharks are caught on the beach side of a net. So these are once they've actually come in, done their thing, and gone, you know what, I'm gonna head back out and bang, they hit a net, as opposed to hitting the net when they're coming in.

SPEAKER_00 47:38

These nets don't completely surround the beach either, otherwise, no, no, no, no, no. As I said, yeah. It's really easy for them to just swim around it.

SPEAKER_02 47:46

Over, under, and around, yeah. And so for those who aren't familiar with, I suppose, picturing a shark net in the ocean, it's kind of like having a fly screen door, but you've only got mesh on there that's as wide as your thumb, and you're hoping to keep all the flies out. I guess it's okay. It's just not going to happen.

SPEAKER_00 48:03

And and with the baited hooks, that would actually attract sharks, you would think.

SPEAKER_02 48:07

Potentially, yeah, potentially, yeah. So you may very well attract sharks that otherwise perhaps wouldn't have stopped by, they might have just kept going. And even with the shark nets, there's numerous images that have been sourced as a result of freedom to information where you can see rays with giant crescent chunks taken out of their wings, which is clearly from a shark. So, again, these shark nets and drum lines can also act as dinnerbells to bring larger sharks in that otherwise may not have even bothered or come past. The way I also like to put it is that Queensland's also using drones. So that these are evidence-based measures that improve safety and it come at no cost to wildlife. So you've got use of drones, as I said, the tagging and tracking of sharks. The use of those technologies also make it incredibly clear how redundant and a waste of taxpayer resources those lethal measures are, because there's no evidence to suggest that they actually improve safety. So it's far better that you have those resources into evidence-based measures that improve safety. And it makes no sense to continue them when you're already using drones and you're tagging and tracking sharks.

SPEAKER_00 49:11

These shark nets, you said there's a seven target species that they actually want to euthanize, but they're catching everything else as well, aren't they? Even the harmless sharks and not to mention the whales and yeah.

SPEAKER_02 49:24

Year on year, you're getting whales getting caught, turtles, dolphins, jugongs. I don't have the exact numbers at hand, but the numbers are quite readily accessible. And yeah, when you think of these animals and what they contribute, not just to the environment, but also just to tourism, it really is a stain that the tourism industry has to wear that whilst they're out there promoting, you know, vibrant wild Queensland environment and snorkeling on the reef and so forth, at the same time, like you have to acknowledge that there's also devices in the water that are killing these very animals that help support a vibrant industry. Let alone, actually, I should also say is let alone cultural practices of First Nations people across Queensland as well. So, again, these nets and these drum lines don't need to be there. They serve no good, they only do damage in every sense, and taxpayer dollars can be better invested in evidence-based measures that do improve safety and come at no cost to wildlife.

SPEAKER_00 50:19

Last year, the Queensland LNP government announced a new updated shark control management plan which included additional funding for extra shark nets and drum lines on top of what they already had in new areas of the Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, Wide Bay, and other areas. But it's come under criticism from the Federal Labour Party spokesman Tom Smith at Senate estimates this week. He said Queensland's shark control program could actually be illegal under the Commonwealth's Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. He literally said that a couple of days ago, so it's quite new. But do you believe the nets and drum lines should all be removed?

SPEAKER_02 50:55

Yes, 100%. As I said earlier, like they serve no purpose. They do not improve safety by any measure. I think the only comfort they provide is to politicians, to seem like they're doing something. Because the general thinking is that the reluctance to remove them is because should they remove a net or a drum line and someone does unfortunately get bitten, the thinking is that politicians are actually more concerned about their opposition using that as ammunition or political ammunition against them as opposed to human safety. So yeah, that only can be in the water and look, it's a strategy that's 90 years old. In no other aspect of our life, be it the schools our kids go to, be it the workplaces we're in, would anyone accept a safety practice or an OHS policy that's nearly a century old? People would be like, shouldn't you update this to modern safety standards? And so why would the beach be any different?

SPEAKER_00 51:55

So uh what are the alternatives for keeping swimmers safe if we take these nets and drum lines out hypothetically? What are the alternatives? You mentioned drones. Is there anything else?

SPEAKER_02 52:05

Yeah, there's drones. Um, the tagging and tracking of sharks enables us to understand better, well, first and foremost, provide real-time alerts as to where particularly large or dangerous sharks might be and at what beaches. But broadly, it enables us to understand better their behavior, where they move, why they move, and when they move into certain areas. And that can relate to things that happen in the environment that could elevate that risk. So in New South Wales this year, there was a spade of shark bites that were presumably bull shark bites. And we had very high or above average levels of rainfall, above average levels of water temperature, and all these conditions are highly conducive to bull shark activity. And the tagging attracting data is showing that when you get high levels of rainfall and storms, bull sharks love hanging out around near coastal estuaries and rivers.

SPEAKER_00 52:51

Oh no, just another way that climate change is coming to get us.

SPEAKER_02 52:56

Yeah, so there's tagging attracting that gives us that information and real-time alerts. Drones, obviously, real-time alerts. There are electronic personal deterrent devices, which, for example, the WA government provides consumers rebates on those devices.

SPEAKER_00 53:11

So, like uh something that you strap on your leg and it emits a signal that deters sharks. Yes, I've heard of them.

SPEAKER_02 53:17

Yeah, exactly. There's eco barriers, which are semi-rigid structures that are fully enclosed a beach or an area from the seafloor to the surface. Again, WA has used these, and then they're quite popular with swimmers. And fundamental to all that is also, you know, really strong community education or public education service. So much like Queensland has got a crockwise program that kids at school learn about, there's no reason why they shouldn't have a shark smart program at schools, just the same. And kids can learn things about, you know, things like observing bait balls or certain seasons of the year when you get, say, mullet runs and white sharks tend to follow those. There are a lot of cues and environmental signals and just general information that could really inform people about the risks that they are then willing to take when they go in the ocean.

SPEAKER_00 54:06

Yeah, so what advice do you have for swimmers to stay safe in the ocean?

SPEAKER_02 54:11

There's quite a few continued, but to keep it simple, there's the classic, you know, avoid swimming at dawn and dusk. Those low light conditions are when sharks typically favor to go on a hunt, so it works in their advantage. Where you can swim between the flags, because at the very least, there's eyes on the water, and should anything happen, you can get prompt medical assistance. But obviously, being eyes on the water, people can also alert you to any dangers that might exist. If you have the luxury of being able to choose what beach to swim at, probably best to swim at a patrol beach or a beach where there's drones. But look, there's quite a lot of beautiful and remote beaches in Queensland that people like because it's quiet and no one's there. Again, ask locals about the local conditions, see if there's you know anything been happening recently. But yeah, ultimately it's it's a case of understanding as best as possible that the risk is very, very low. And just some basic common sense approaches can help improve your safety.

SPEAKER_00 55:07

Yeah, we often have really beautiful crystal clear visibility out here on the Great Barrier Reef. So it's you can see very far in the water. So if you keep your eyes open and everyone, you know, the lookouts, the lifeguards are keeping their eyes open, it just it feels really safe. So um where can people head to take action and help to protect sharks and support your work?

SPEAKER_02 55:28

Yeah, well, if anyone you know wants to learn more about sharks and also more about their conservation and what they can do, you can simply visit marineconservation.org.au, have a look at our sharks page, and yeah, all the information is there.

SPEAKER_00 55:41

Sadly that's all we have time for today. Thanks for all your amazing work and thanks for joining us on Word on the Reef today.

SPEAKER_02 55:46

Thanks for having me on, and Breck.

SPEAKER_00 55:48

And thanks to you all our listeners. We'll be back next week. Best fishes. See you next time.