Great white sharks and bull sharks feeding on a washed-up whale carcass have forced the closure of a string of beaches south of Sydney, Australian wildlife and surf rescue authorities said on Sunday.
The 8m, 25 tonne sperm whale carcass was reportedly spotted on Saturday lying on wave-swept rocks at Era beach in the coastal Royal National Park, leading to immediate beach closures.
“There’s some great white sharks and there’s also some bull sharks being sighted there,” said Brendon Neilly, area manager for the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service.
Photo: Reuters
“While they can be fairly dramatic and confronting events for people, they are eminently natural events, and so the whale carcass is being moved back into the food chain by the sharks,” he said.
“So I wouldn’t be swimming there, but it’s a pretty interesting process,” he added.
Wildlife officials were working on strategies to dispose of the whale carcass, but probably not before today, Neilly said.
Surf Life Saving NSW issued an alert advising that all beaches within the Royal National Park, including Era, Garie, Burning Palms and Wattamolla, were closed due to “increased shark activity.”
“We can’t prevent people from going in the water, but knowing just how many sharks are there and the reports of larger white and bull sharks in the water — they’re not the fish you want to be swimming in the same water with,” Surf Live Saving NSW chief executive Stephen Pearce told Australian Broadcasting Corp.
There have been nearly 1,300 shark incidents around Australia since 1791, of which more than 260 resulted in death, according to a database of the predators’ encounters with humans.
The most recent fatality was a 12-year-old boy who died after being attacked by a shark in Sydney Harbour in January.
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