User:MarkDougherty

This is the user box for Mark Dougherty, Hilo, Hawaii. My interest is the efficacy of shark culling. I lived on Oahu from 1985 to 2012 and surfed the North Shore during this period.

On Feb. 19, 1992, I was surfing near Chun's Reef when bodyboard Bryan Adona disappeared about half a mile away. Witnesses both in the water and on shore report seeing a shark. His body board later washed up with a 16 inch crescent shaped piece missing. Shark tooth serrations were visible. According to the 1993 book Hawaii's Deadly Sharks, the incident was discounted as being a shark attack by researchers studying shark culling in Hawaii, as were four other deaths that had some link to sharks.

In 1994 the researchers published a paper concluding that Hawaii's culls had "do not appear to have measurable effects on the rate of shark attacks in Hawaiian waters."*  Did excluding these five cases impact the statistics to allow the "no measurable effects" conclusion?

For some 20 years the Hawaii paper has been repeatedly cited by some conservationists (worldwide) as proof of the ineffectiveness of shark culling. A closer look at the topic of shark culling is warranted.


 * A Review of Shark Control in Hawaii with Recommendations for Future Research.

Markdd8@gmail.com