Western Australia’s fisheries minister ordered the shark responsible for a fatal attack caught and killed, while ruling out a widespread cull. The order followed Australia’s fifth fatal shark attack of 2026, which occurred in Perth the previous month. One official response targets an individual animal. Meanwhile, researcher Juliana Gleaves is studying how people’s fears and perceptions affect support for shark conservation.
Fear, risk and the people in the water
Surfer Duncan Chamberlain says regular ocean users tend to understand shark risk differently. The 74-year-old has surfed for 54 years and enters the Southern Ocean from his hometown beach at Middleton, south of Adelaide, three or four times a week. When he encounters a shark, he follows a 20-minute rule: “You go in [to shore] for 20 minutes and you presume they're cruising along the coast, so they've moved on by then, so you go back out,” he said. “If you look at the statistics, you're in far more danger driving to the beach on the roads.”
Gleaves’s initial research found surfers were more likely to worry about sunburn than sharks. Mal Biscoe, who has surfed for more than 30 years and runs his own surf school, agreed that he assesses risk naturally. He saw no comparison between the risk of a shark encounter and the rewards of surfing, including physical and mental health benefits.
Biscoe estimated he’d had about eight shark encounters over the years, with sharks swimming beneath or around him or appearing in the distance. During the closest encounter, a harmless wobbegong climbed onto his friend’s back while they were surfing. “We had a laugh about it and then we're like, 'I wonder what scared it out of the water?' But I've never had an incident where I feel threatened,” he said.
Some students mention sharks during Biscoe’s surf lessons. He tells them they’re more likely to step on a ray or be injured by their own board than by a shark. Biscoe wasn’t sure whether surfers care more about shark conservation than other species, but said he believed they were generally environmentally aware. “I think surfers and people that live along the ocean are more concerned just about the natural environment itself, whether it be sharks or dolphins, whales or rays or just fish life,” he said.
The official response and the conservation question
The fisheries minister ruled out a widespread cull, saying it wouldn’t be appropriate, but issued the “catch and kill” order for the shark responsible. In 2025, Australia had five fatal attacks and 23 shark bite incidents in total. Those figures sit beside the targeted killing chosen as the official response to the Perth attack.
Gleaves is examining fear, perceptions and attitudes toward sharks as part of research in conservation psychology. Her initial research found that people with better knowledge of sharks felt less fear and were more likely to support efforts to save them. The article says there are 500 shark species and that their overall numbers have fallen 70 per cent since the 1970s. It also reports that shark numbers have plummeted globally by more than 70 per cent since the 1975 release of Jaws.
Gleaves’s study will examine how movies and media reporting shape views of sharks. A later stage will use virtual reality to test whether an immersive experience in which people can “swim” with sharks behaving neutrally encourages more positive views and greater concern for shark conservation. Gleaves said Jaws sparked her fascination with sharks, though she conceded the film wasn’t great for sharks’ public relations. The shark hunter Quint was played by Robert Shaw.
What the available reporting can’t establish
The article also referred to swarms of moths in southeast Australia that could indicate recovery of an endangered species. But the moth report’s URL returned no article content through either fetch attempt, so no moth details could be confirmed. The available account offers no confirmed community response or mutual-aid effort around the shark policy; its reported responses are individual risk judgments, research, and the minister’s order.