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That was the character Quint in the utterly compelling masterpiece novel of the same name written by Robert Lautner, which reimagines the life of the grizzled sea captain played by Robert Shaw in the 1975 movie JAWS.
In the prequel book, Quint, who had survived the shark-ridden sinking of the USS Indianapolis in World War II, sets up a new business in Amity. Suffice to say, business goes well, until, well, it doesn’t. In the intervening years, sharks have been increasingly big business.
In 1987, Discovery's founder John Hendricks was trying to find a way to get attention for the fledgling channel, and landed on sharks partly because of the enduring cultural pull of Jaws. By 2021, the week had generated 2.9 billion impressions and roughly $13.1 million in national TV ad revenue.
Tracy Morgan's "30 Rock" character once famously declared, "Live every week like it's Shark Week.” However, that’s what surfers have been doing all their lives. In Australia, though, that lived experience has been more prevalent and more traumatic in recent years. The percentage of people involved in shark attacks in Australia since 2000 who were surfers was 43%, showing the over-indexing of surfers. The state of NSW has had seven attacks and three fatalities in the last 12 months. 12 people have died on its beaches in the last decade.
Related: 10-Foot Great White Shark Stalks Unsuspecting Swimmers (Video)
After the last attack, where a woman swimming between the flags at Coogee Beach was critically injured and later had her arm amputated, the NSW Premier Chris Minns unveiled an extra $A24 million investment including harnessing artificial intelligence and emerging technology, and a major scale-up of drone coverage across beaches in Sydney and along the NSW coast. The extra cash brought the government's total investment in the Shark Mitigation Program to more than $80 million over the next two years. Minns called it, ”the largest expansion of aerial shark surveillance in the world.”
No other government is spending anywhere near this much money. As a comparison, California’s only shark safety program, part of the Cal State Long Beach Shark Lab, was launched in 2018 with a $3.75-million state grant. That money has now run out. Florida does not have a centralized, statewide budget for physical shark mitigation, and instead relies on localized beach safety operations and legislative measures.
So where will all the money go in NSW? Around 70 beaches will benefit from drone monitoring 365 days of the year, including at least one beach in every coastal local government area. Sydney’s coverage will expand, and two SharkSmart listening stations are being added in Sydney Harbour to alert swimmers to tagged sharks nearby. The program will prioritise beaches with high numbers of swimmers, surfers and paddlers, including in Sydney and the North Coast, where shark incidents have become more frequent.
Related: World’s Sharkiest Surf Zones Ranked by Deadly Shark Encounters
The next obvious question is: will it work? There’s been plenty of positive reaction. Surf Life Saving NSW welcomed the news, saying the program had already identified and prevented over 2,000 shark interactions this year alone, across more than 100,000 flights. Surfing NSW welcomed the funding as "a win for surfer safety all along our coast.” Humane World for Animals Australia said it was fantastic news for ocean-goers and said earlier patrols would meaningfully cut risk.
The expanded drone program, it seems, has few detractors. Yet criticism, often from the same bodies, came on the unresolved shark-net issue, while others feel it's only through population control, or culling, that risk can really be reduced. Minns ruled out targeting great whites, as they remain a protected species, but left open the possibility for bull sharks, saying "if our waterways and estuaries are being overrun with bull sharks and they are way above the numbers that we traditionally see, we've got to put swimmer safety first."
The big issue is that any evidence of shark population is incredibly thin on the ground. The surf journalist Nick Carroll has spent the better part of the last decade trying to get hard, scientific answers on those numbers, and has made little headway.
“There’s a lot of people leaning on the results, and what happens when a government department carries that kind of investment?” He recently wrote in Surfing World. “You guessed it. It gets ring-fenced.” The only information he received was that over the last 10 years, the program had tagged 295 bulls, 819 tigers, and 1568 whites and that the government still believes white sharks are vulnerable due to low breeding numbers. No one has any real idea of any of the species populations, or made available any scientific conclusions that could inform policy.
“Keep spending our money,” Carroll concluded, but added a sarcastic caveat. “But come back to us in five years and tell us again about how the white shark population’s stuck in neutral.” With the drone program expanding, we may see a whole lot more. And hope that beachgoers will see a whole lot less.
