-
Study suggests shark diving tours are safe
Study suggests shark diving tours are safe
Study suggests shark diving tours are safe
The Associated PressHONOLULU — A new study suggests that shark diving tours off Oahu have not resulted in more danger to humans.
The University of Hawaii report, published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Conservation, also suggests that the two shark tours operating along Oahu’s North Shore are not causing harm to the coastal habitat.
Though shark cage tours have become a popular visitor attraction in Hawaii, some critics want to shut them down. Some Native Hawaiians consider sharks to be ancestral gods and view feeding them for entertainment to be disrespectful of their culture.
Surfers and environmentalists fear the tours will teach sharks to associate people with food – leading to an increase in attacks – while disrupting the ocean’s ecological balance. Tour operators routinely throw chum overboard to attract sharks to the cages.
Federal fisheries regulators, meanwhile, are investigating the tours on the grounds that they are illegally feeding sharks.
The study’s authors tested boat captains on identifying sharks that congregate around the cages that hold tourists who pay to see the animals up close.
They also reviewed tour boat logbooks over a four-year period, ending in 2008, to learn what type of sharks were showing up at the dive locations.
The most prevalent shark species were Galapagos, which accounted for almost three-fourths of those sighted. Almost all others seen at the dive sites were sandbar sharks.
An analysis of the logbooks determined that varying numbers of the two species at cage diving sites matched seasonal fluctuations. The authors also concluded that while the Galapagos species appears to be growing in number and the sandbar species declining, the tours were causing no change in the overall shark population.
They determined that humans are not threatened by shark cage tours in Hawaii because Galapagos and sandbar sharks rarely bite people.
“Our study indicates that current Hawaii shark diving operations … pose little risk to public safety,” the study stated.
Other potentially dangerous species, such as tiger, hammerhead or white sharks “occasionally visit Hawaii shark cage diving sites, but there is no evidence that the rate of shark attacks along the adjacent coast has increased significantly since the advent of shark cage diving operations in 2001,” the study added.
The authors also said the tours do not increase the potential of shark attacks near the shoreline because the boats operate three miles from the coastline and because the chumming they do to attract sharks to cages mimics the decades-old operations of crab fishing vessels in the same area that discard bait from their traps.
The authors were Carl G. Meyer, Jonathan J. Dale Yannis P. Papastamatiou and Kim N. Holland of the University of Hawaii, and Nicholas M. Whitney of the Center for Shark Research in Sarasota, Florida.
Bron:Study suggests shark diving tours are safe – Florida AP – MiamiHerald.com
-
1 Reactie
-
Re: Study suggests shark diving tours are safe
Tja de studie geeft natuurlijk wel een beetje een vervormd beeld van de situatie. De tourboat eigenaar word ondervraagd en hun logboeken worden bekeken. (waarschijnlijk worden “ongevallen” of zeer agressieve haaien niet snel gerapporteerd in deze boeken, alhoewel dit natuurlijk wel zou moeten)
Over de cage dives in in ZuidAfrika ook veel te doen geweest. Tegenstanders die zeggen dat de operators de haaien lokken en dat er hierdoor meer haaien langs de kust gezien worden. Volgens mij zijn hier ook studies over geweest die aantoonde dat er eigenlijk bijna elke keer andere haaien gezien worden. En de haaien zich niet aangetrokken voelen door de boten. (of boten associeerden met eten)
Blijft een gevoelig onderwerp. Gaat natuurlijk de inkomsten van een hele branche. En de vraag van de toeristen.
(en ja ik heb zelf ook een keer in een kooi gezeten tussen de witte haaien en ik heb er ook zeker van genoten :zip:)
