On the

busiest day of the year.

And somebody's looking and he's got, it turns out he's got this tattoo of a boxer on his arm.

And everybody's like, oh, I know that arm.

that's Jim Smith's arm.

So they take the arm out of the water and they, uh, and the shark unfortunately dies.

Uh, but unfortunately the person has died as well.

And

Mm.

So bull sharks are not protected, and I, as somebody who studies shark attacks, I can't stand bull sharks.

So if someone's fishing and wants to fish for bull sharks, they, it's just like fishing for anything else.

They can have at it.

But if you're culling, and the idea is that you cull to make the beach safer, then that definitely doesn't work.

So for instance, in Reunion, they caught and killed sixty-eight bull sharks, and there haven't been any...

Since then, there haven't been any shark attacks in the last seven years.

W-why do you think there's been that spike in bull sharks in particular? I know the weekend was great white, but most of those over the last summer were bull sharks.

I know that your field of research is on human attitudes, maybe less on shark attitudes, but what do we know about what motivates these sorts of incidents?

So we know that there are there are three reasons uh that sharks bite people so and i do say this is a social scientist but i do have three degrees and a phd and a master's in this and the first is defensiveness so we're land animal that sharks don't know what we are so when they bite us it's because they don't know what we are not because we're prey so either so it's either defensiveness that they think we could be there to hurt them or to potentially try to eat what they're trying to eat The other is curiosity, and it's a very sensitive dynamic because you see the damage, obviously, that sharks can do to people.

But if you were to look at it across the spectrum of the way sharks sort of curiously explore the ocean...

It doesn't really look that different, but obviously the results are dramatic and horrific when it comes to humans.

So the second is curiosity.

And then the third is, you know, is that we are sort of in the way, not on the menu.

So they're actively, and we saw this a little bit with the bull shark incidents in January and February in Sydney, where the sharks were actively feeding and we entered the water while they were eating bait fish and got bitten.

Oh,

And so what is that?

So- You know, it's important to note that there's really three variables when you have a big storm, and we're always talking about shark activity, human activity, and environmental conditions.

So it's the, the confluence of the three of those.

And I think what we're seeing...

So the bull sharks wouldn't be there if the water temperature wasn't good.

So the bull sharks in Sydney Harbor in the summer are the same as the bull sharks in the Brisbane River in the winter.

So they're seasonal.

So you're describing the conditions in the harbor, but does the same thing happen to the coastline after lots of rain?

Mm-hmm

...

so I'm pleased to, to hear that he agrees with me.

For a long time, the City of Sydney would post signs after a heavy rain to tell people about the bacteria in the harbor and not to swim in the harbor, and they'd put signs up on trees saying, you know, "Don't s- don't swim in the harbor for a few days because of the bacteria." And I think it's not obviously just the bacteria, it's the sharks.

And one of the things that, uh, is a key part of that is making sure that people stay tied to that 72-hour window if it's an estuary, a harbor, or a bay, and a 24- to 48-hour if it's an ocean beach.

Often what we see with the public is that, you know, it's summer in Sydney.

If the next day is a nice day and the sky clears-

Mm-hmm

This scientist we talked to, Dr. Chris Pepin Neff had just the ticket for how we were gonna do this.

Sharks have been demonized and when I do my musical, Flaws the Musical, it's gonna be, you know, like Wicked.

It's gonna be like Wicked.

And the sh- the, you know, the e- the shark is gonna be the star of the musical and the shark starts singing, you know, Defying Gravity and (laughs)-

Do you, um, do you have any songs ready to go?

Oh, I'm working on them.

I've already bought flawsthemusical.com.