White Shark Eats Seal in SF Bay; Reminds Us...

In 2009, Dr. Sal Jorgensen and his team helped reveal that white sharks do in fact enter the San Francisco Bay through the use of their acoustic tags and receivers .  

This information also indicated that white sharks didn’t stay in the bay long.  But apparently they stay long enough to feed on pinnipeds from time to time as this rare and amazing video shows (it seems this was filmed on the Alcatraz Island dock during a routine tourist trip to the prison).

So if white sharks are present and interested in eating, how is it that no one has ever been bitten by a white shark while swimming in the bay?  How about the annual Escape from Alcatraz swim?  With that many people in the water every year it seems that the odds of at least one of them being bitten would be high.


Or is the opposite true?  In Western Australia, where the current government is hell bent on hunting white sharks for the sake of “public safety”, an another group swim through waters filled with white sharks, tiger sharks, and dusky sharks, also takes place on an annual basis WITHOUT ANY INCIDENT WITH A SHARK EVER.

Is there truly safety in numbers?  According to Dr. Christopher Neff, that has a large part to do with it.  


But maybe there’s a more basic lesson to learn here.  Perhaps instead of pursuing the death of another animal to make us safer…perhaps instead of pursuing technology in order to make us safer…
maybe we could actually adopt responsible survival behavior to increase our safety level when entering an ecosystem…you know, techniques used by every other living thing on this planet.