When great white shark corpses started turning up with their livers missing, it took a while to piece together the story – and now South Africa’s cage-diving operators are living in fear that their golden days are numbered. RICHARD PEIRCE has this exclusive story
Cage-diving with great whites occurs in South Africa around Dyer Island (Walker Bay), in False Bay, and in Mossel Bay. Of the three, Dyer Island, offshore from the town of Gansbaai, is by far the most popular with local and overseas tourists. This is the self-styled “Great White Shark Capital of the World”, with eight operators all doing up to three trips a day. They service thousands of tourists a year, and directly and indirectly provide hundreds of local jobs.
As well as the operators, restaurants, guest-houses, hotels, souvenir shops and others all derive benefit from great white shark eco-tourism.
Cage-diving around Dyer Island started in the late 1990s and has become a multimillion-dollar industry. The sharks were a money tree, and the good times were never going to end – until the sharks vanished!
Then the horrible reality sunk home that the leaves had all fallen off the money tree and been blown away.
In early 2016 the sharks disappeared for three weeks, and various theories were put forward to explain their absence.
In 2013 a pod of killer whales (orcas) had been seen in the area for the first time, with further sightings in 2015 and 2016. First a pod of six were seen, and then a pair of males with distinctive collapsed fins. The fin of one animal fell to the right and the other to the left – they were nicknamed Port and Starboard.
On 7 February, 2017, Port and Starboard were again spotted near Dyer Island, and the next day a dead 2.7m shark washed up on a nearby beach. The body was intact, but there were scratch-marks around its head.
This story is from the November 2017 edition of Diver.
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This story is from the November 2017 edition of Diver.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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