Rob Harcourt

And this is where the Tony Abbott, the irony of Tony Abbott saying we've got a column and they're exploding is so misleading because, of course, Tony also famously said climate change is crap.

And one of the big movers is that we have got very much changed ocean and graphic conditions off New South Wales, including Sydney.

And in fact, we did some work on, not so this poor lady was bitten by a white shark, but there's been quite a major redistribution in all of the dangerous sharks because the waters off Sydney are warmer and they're warmer for longer.

So dangerous sharks like bull sharks and you probably remember we had a whole series of bites in last summer as well are coming into our region and staying for longer because the waters are warmer and they can and that also then increases potential competitive interactions with white sharks which also have an overlapping distribution so there's a greater overlap and so

there's potentially more animals present, but there's not been an increase in numbers.

In fact, we know that white shark numbers are relatively stable and bull shark numbers, if anything, may have gone down locally.

Right.

Yeah, that's what you might think at first bite.

Literally, sorry, that's a terrible pun.

But what we find is that these animals, they swim very large distances.

I mean, white sharks that have been tagged off New South Wales have been across to New Zealand and back several times.

They go down to Tasmania, even across to Western Australia.

And we've had white sharks come across to Australia from South Africa in the past.

And where they have tried major culling programs, what they've found is that they kill a lot of sharks but there's no change in the number of people that get bitten.

And so there's been a couple of very famous examples of this, one off Hawaii where tiger sharks are the major problem and they killed nearly 5,000 tiger sharks over the course of a number of years with no change in the number of people being bitten by tiger sharks.

And similarly off Reunion Island, which was,

famous for a series of attacks.

So that's a French protector in the Indian Ocean.

Very, very popular surfing and diving in Ireland, particularly for French tourists.

And where Kelly Slater famously said, we've got to remove all the sharks.