Series of shark attacks have Red Sea resort area on alert

As many as four gruesome but non-fatal shark attacks this week at a Red Sea resort destination popular among scuba divers have led to a beach closure, a shark hunt, and a claim by a conservation agency official that the attacks occurred because overfishing has made natural food scarce.

Reports vary as to whether there were four or three victims. All were Russian tourists attacked Monday and Tuesday by what is believed by some to be a single oceanic whitetip shark. The victims were airlifted to a Cairo hospital and at least one remains in critical condition.

The location is Egypt's Sharm el-Sheikh stretch of coastline, popular because of its beautiful coral and colorful reef fish. One attack was on a couple, with the shark inflicting serious injuries to the man's legs and biting the woman's back and legs, according to the Russian news agency RIA Novosti.

The Associated Press reported that the shark also bit one of the woman's hands off, and that she suffered a heart attack during the ordeal. In the other macabre incidents, as many as two divers reportedly lost limbs to shark bites.

Since the rare attacks occurred close to shore, a long portion of coastline has been closed to water activities as a hunt has begun for the shark, but there is no way of knowing whether a single shark was responsible.

Mohammed Salem, director of South Sinai Conservation, cited uncontrolled fishing as the reason for the attacks. "That is why the sharks are forced to approach the shore in search of food," he told RIA Novosti.

However, it's unclear whether any of the scuba diving outfits were baiting reef sharks for tourists, and possibly lured in one or more pelagic oceanic whitetips.

Salem said shark attacks are rare, occurring at a rate of one every year or two. According to the Global Shark Attack File, the last person to have been killed by a shark in Egypt was a snorkeler, in the same general area, in 2004.

-- Generic image of whitetip reef shark is courtesy of Wikipedia

Comments

[drudown]

I find it refreshing that a conservationist is proferring a very plausible explanation for why a pelagic shark not normally known to forage in shallow waters opportunistically preyed upon a known, tertiary prey item (human beings), i.e., a depletion of natural fish stocks in its natural habitat. Given that Oceanic Whitetips have a well documented history of devouring people after maritime disasters, it seems this (ahem) "one" shark may be more than the elusive "rogue" shark of myth and lore, but a possible harbinger of adaptive survival strategies in changing marine ecosystems around the globe.

Conspicuously, the factual record here tends to disprove the commonly proffered, exculpatory gibberish that nearly all shark attacks involve "investigatory" bites. To the contrary, most legitimate shark attacks are simple acts of predation by a generalist feeder.