Dr Elliott's Very Polite PREDATORS

New Zealand shark scientist Dr Riley Elliott is happiest when diving below the waves observing sharks, or lobbying for better understanding about the ocean's most maligned occupants

- Diane Godley

News helicopters flew low over Drs Riley Elliott and Ocean Ramsey in an effort to film the crazy rescue the pair were attempting in the waters just south of Perth, Western Australia. It was April 2014 and the two marine biologists were frantically swimming alongside a dying shark in an effort to revive it.

What made the dramatic rescue even more unusual was the fact that it was taking place during a shark cull.

There had been seven lethal great white shark attacks over the previous three years off Western Australian beaches. The public wanted something done and permission had been given for a three-month sharkcull trial targeting sharks longer than three metres.

The larger animals were to be hooked using massive hooks on baited drumlines then killed, while smaller sharks were to be released ‘alive’. According to The Guardian at the time, drumlines captured 172 sharks, 50 were larger than three metres and shot. None were great whites. Some 20 sharks were found dead on the baited hooks—14 of them under three metres—before crews could reach them, while another 90 were released ‘alive’.

Drs Elliott and Ramsey had found one of the released sharks suffocating on the ocean floor. The 2.4 metre tiger shark was also bleeding from hook wounds. The pair of conservationists swam the shark to the surface, one either side of it, and continued to swim with it for an hour and a half trying to revive the animal.

Both marine biologists knew that the released sharks didn’t stand much of a chance of survival after sitting on a hook for up to 12 hours. Exhausted and traumatized, once released the animals simply sank to the bottom of the ocean floor. “We realized the negligence of this, as well as the entire shark cull, and wanted to do something to stop it,” says Dr Elliott.