Ep 10 | Michael Hoarau | Reunion Island: Bull Sharks, Bans & Lethal Measures | Crossing the Tideline
Crossing the TidelineShow Notes
Between 2011 and 2019, Reunion Island experienced 30 shark attacks, 11 of them fatal. Bull sharks were responsible for 90% of them, on a small French island of 900,000 people in the Indian Ocean, in the most popular tourist and surfing areas on the west coast. For a place that small, it was unfathomable to live through.
Michael Hoarau runs operations for the Shark Safety Unit on Reunion Island and has spent years deep in the data, the fieldwork and the politics of trying to reduce shark encounters in the aftermath of those years. Reunion is regularly referenced internationally as a benchmark for shark risk management.
With Bull shark activity surging along the east coast of Australia this year, particularly in Sydney, it felt like the right time to have this conversation.
Michael walks us through what those years actually felt like on the island, the community divisions that opened up and why nobody could ever agree on what caused the spike in the first place. He explains what the French government put in place, including a permanent ban on surfing and swimming outside the lagoon, the world's first large scale exclusion net trials, and a shark control program using smart drum lines that has now run for 12 years.
The numbers are striking. In 2016 alone, 52 bull sharks were caught on the drum lines in targeted areas. That same effort now yields an average of four or five bull sharks a year. There has not been a single shark attack on Reunion Island since May 2019.
The back half of the conversation goes deep on the balance between lethal and non lethal measures, what the shark control program has actually taught them about bull shark behaviour and why Michael says the answer is never one thing.
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