Rob Harcourt

Well, they were

They've implemented a shark culling program to try and protect swimmers.

And, again, the abundance of sharks locally didn't change because when you kill a number of sharks in one area, then new ones come in and fill up the area because the food is still there.

So you're not actually going to change the presence of sharks.

You're just going to kill a whole bunch of animals, which will then be filled in by animals coming from elsewhere.

Yeah.

Well, this is the other thing that, and this sort of the complexity of food webs is something that really make people sort of step back a little bit and realize that things are much more complicated.

Because if you take out

large predators, you'd think, okay, well then there'll be less of them.

But what we find in a lot of food web modelling, and it's been enacted in real terms when fisheries have overfished, is that you often end up with an increase in the predators because you change

Well, we are in the – so the culling is a 19th century approach and we know now because we know a lot more about marine food webs that it's probably not going to work.

But we do have phenomenal ways of actually seeing what's going on.

And I don't know if it's well known in Ireland, but one of the things about the Coogee attack is that the poor woman was swimming at a beach which is right underneath the flight path for Sydney International Airport.

And so there's a ban on drones flying over that area.

So we've been putting drones over most patrol beaches for years.

The last five to 10 years, they've been very, very effective at spotting sharks.

So they've now lifted that ban, I should say, in response to that bite at Coogee.

And they'll probably put in place, you know, patrolling by surf lifesaving because they can see sharks coming into the bay.

We have beautiful clear waters for the most part of Sydney.

And so you can detect the animals from a fair way away.