I lived and studied in northeastern Australia for 6 months last year, and I can assure you that the biodiversityin Australian waters is second-to-none.

I can also tell you for sure that there is a wide network of “protections” for Australian tourists and swimmers, from nets to baited hooks, that kill dozens and maybe hundreds of big sharks every year.

Here’s the full Discovery Channel preview:

MYSTERIES OF THE SHARK COAST
Premieres Thursday, July 31, at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
Australia’s northeastern coast is a hotbed for shark activity. Its tropical seas are home to more species of sharks than anywhere else in the world. But there’s trouble in the sharks’ stronghold Down Under – even here the sharks are disappearing. What’s happening to them?

I can understand putting a net outside your popular beach, but hangng hooks of meat to buoys just attracts sharks for the purpose of killing them. This is senseless extermination and terrible for the aquatic ecosystem, something that I hope the show will cover.

Additionally, the Australian tuna industry, one of the cleanest and safest in the world, is not shark-safe - the tuna industry kills thousands and thousands of sharks every year as “by-catch,” meaning that they weren’t the intended catch and are simply killed or butchered for their fins.

The real star of this program will be Richard Fitzpatrick, a shark scientist whose career I followed with some interest while in Australia because of his unique tagging method: Fitzpatrick has developed such as sense about tiger shark behavior that he’s comfortable swimming with them and tagging the massive sharks by hand. He’s also famous for tagging smaller sharks by lassoing their tails with ropes. That should make for a very cool show.

This has the potential to be the most interesting and most important Shark Week program in years - I hope you’ll check it out.

- Jeff

This will be the last Shark Week show review; however, you can expect more shark content from Science Says in the next week or two. If you’d like to receive updates on those articles, please click HERE or on the SUBSCRIBE button at the top of the page.

Technorati Tags: sharks, richard fitzpatrick, discovery channel, shark week, australia, the shark coast

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