When Hunter Becomes Prey
Diver|November 2017

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

Richard Peirce
When Hunter Becomes Prey
IN THE 1975 FILM JAWS, the presence of a great white shark threatened the prosperity of a fictional seaside town called Amity. In real life in 2016 and 2017 the absence of great white sharks threatened jobs and businesses in the South African town of Gansbaai.

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.

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