SYDNEY: In a life-and-death struggle, Australian surfer Jake Heron punched the great white shark as it bit his arm and thigh, turning the ocean into a bloody cauldron. Miraculously, Heron, 40, lived to tell the tale.
Very few people survive an attack by a great white, which can grow to 20 feet (six metres), weigh 2.5 tonnes, and with enough power in its jaws to lift a car.
Two weeks earlier, marine biologist Jarrod Stehbens, 23, also fought a great white as it pulled him underwater as he tried to climb into a boat. Sadly, Stehbens lost his fight for life.
These two attacks in the past few weeks, both in waters off South Australia state, have sparked an emotional debate in Australia over whether the great white, the ocean’s fiercest predator, should be culled.
Displaying his savaged surfboard, bitten in half by the shark, Heron is adamant that Australia should end its protection of the great white and start culling.
“They’re top of the food chain and nothing affects it,” Heron told reporters after his attack.
“It’s time they started controlling the numbers. Controlled culling — they kill our national emblem, the kangaroo, they kill elephants in Africa,” he said.
“The numbers have gone up and there’s too many of them,” he said, adding that sharks were swimming closer to shore threatening children swimming off beaches.
But the parents of Stehbens, who fought in vain to free his leg from the shark’s jaws after being attacked while diving for cuttlefish, reject calls to kill the shark.
“He was a marine biologist, he wouldn’t want anything killed,” said his father, David Stehbens. “Jarrod was doing exactly what he wanted to do. He loved the sea...”
“Shark attacks are very prominent in the media when they occur, but they are rare events,” said Barry Bruce, a government marine scientist who has studied great whites since 1987.
Great whites are “hot-spot hunters”, which target oceanic biological activity, like big schools of fish, seal colonies and dead whales. The sharks do not intentionally hunt humans.
“We are not seeing a trend of increasing shark attacks against a trend of increasing population,” said John West, who runs The Australian Shark Attack File.—Reuters
