Cape Codders calling for killing after attack
Sharks, seals blamed for fatality
WELLFLEET — Several of the hundreds of people who turned out here last night for a public forum on sharks in the wake of the first fatal attack in Massachusetts in more than 80 years urged officials to kill them or the seals that tend to attract them.
Laurie Voke of Eastham said this month’s death of Arthur Medici, a 26-year-old boogie-boarder from Revere, said shark attacks on seals swimming near people on outer Cape Cod have become “too numerous to count” in recent years, but officials have failed to lift the fishing ban on white sharks or to take steps to control the number of seals.
“Instead, certain government officials have given pet names to white sharks and prioritized the lives and safety of sharks and seals over that of those who swim in the cape water,” Voke, the mother of four lifeguards, told a panel of officials and experts on the animals.
“All of us both individually and as a group bear collective responsibility for the death of Arthur Medici,” she said. “While we knew someone would be killed by a white shark, we just hoped it wasn’t our child, a friend’s child or someone who we knew.”
But David Pierce, director of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, said federal laws prevent the killing of white sharks and seals.
“I can understand the passion for wanting to remove seals and white sharks,” Pierce said. “… (But) it’s likely never going to happen, despite the fact that there’s been a death.”
Town Administrator Dan Hoort said it would take an act of Congress.
“There isn’t any solution but effective deterrence,” Hoort said.
While town officials have posted signs warning people not to swim near seals or at dusk or dawn, sharks’ main feeding times, Willy Planinshek of Yarmouthport suggested that swimmers wear arm and foot bands that emit an LED flash and ultrasound pulse to confuse sharks, who are highly sensitive to both light and sound.
Planinshek also suggested that oceanfront towns station these dual deterrents on current buoy chains, but he conceded the technology for these measures is not widely available.
Ken Lockwood of Wellfleet suggested equipping lifeguards with VHF/UHF radios to warn of shark sightings, a step that Fire Chief Rich Pauley said the town has already taken.
“The challenge is the dunes,” Pauley said. “When you’re trying to transmit a message, it’s very difficult.”
He said he would prefer that each beach have a device called a repeater, which would improve transmission.