Evans Head

You'll see them detected on the tag shark listing stations either side.

And if you keep an eye out, yeah, over the next couple of weeks, and it is the 3rd of September now, so by the time this comes out, yeah, have a look back through the SharkSmart app and when the detection's actually started because, yeah, you will see those bigger animals that are moving down out of Queensland actually get detected up at Kingscliff and then at Byron Bay, Lenox Head, Ballina, Evans Head, Yamba, Coffs Harbour, Port Macquarie.

They're really predictable in where they travel and the same animal will get detected along the coast.

So it just shows that they're not travelling down the east coast in that deeper water.

We can pinpoint even back to 2015-16 when this program started.

We've seen an increase in bites up on the north coast of New South Wales around Ballina and Evans Head through Byron and that.

We had a changing conditions where there was lots of bait fish around, there was cooler waters for a three or four year period there where there was just white sharks constantly there.

And the same can happen along the coast.

We'll track animals up down the coastline too where an animal detected or multiple animals detected or caught in the same region down the coast or up the coast.

Two months later, they might be caught or detected on the same day or several days apart.

So there's some relationship there where, and I use this term loosely, that groups of animals over hundreds and hundreds of kilometres might move up the coastline at any given time in in the same group but that might be mostly driven by what the environmental conditions are uh that the cold waterfront where the bait fish are and where they're foraging but we will definitely see also from from year to year um within days an animal might be detected on the the tag shark listing station at coughs harbour and and and two and a year later that it's there at the same time or a day later or it might be re recaptured um at Ed Evans Head where it was previously called at Ballina days apart and then years apart as well.

So they're definitely a creature of habit in terms of knowing where they want to be but they're certainly on the move the whole time and they spend very little time in the same area but that's mostly a relic of the environmental conditions constantly changing so they're moving up and down the coastline looking for those food sources.