Shark dives may be banned by feds

Lured by hunks of bloody fish, the sharks come excitingly close.

Great hammerheads, tiger sharks, silky sharks and other members of the most feared family of fish dart around the divers — clients of dive boat operators who specialize in this extreme side of the scuba business.

The dive companies in Florida, California, the Gulf of Mexico and a few other spots feed sharks as the only reliable way to bring them close to their clients. But a bill sponsored by Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., could put them out of business by banning shark feeding in federal waters as an unsafe practice, comparable to feeding bears or alligators.

“When people feed sharks, it can change their behavior and cause them to start associating people with food,” said Ryan Brown, spokesman for Nelson. “This puts divers at risk, especially those who aren’t diving in a protective cage. Florida law prohibits shark feeding in state waters, but the practice is currently unregulated in federal waters further from shore.”

Shark dive operators say they perform a vital ecological service, showing the reality of a misunderstood species that has suffered terribly from modern industrial fishing. Shark populations worldwide have sustained sharp declines, due largely to the demand in Asia for shark-fin soup, an expensive delicacy. “There’s all this hype, all this negative media out there about sharks,” said Bryce Rohrer, owner of Florida Shark Diving of Jupiter. “They’re dangerous, they’re killers, which, of course they are, but not towards people.

“The only way people come to know these animals is these ‘Jaws’ movies and ‘Sharknado’ movies. When they’re in the water looking at this animal calmly swimming around, this amazing creature, you can see the transformation. When people come off my boat, they understand sharks, they’ve seen sharks, they see what they really are. They walk off my boat as proponents for sharks.” Are shark dives dangerous? Rohrer said none of his customers have ever been bitten. But George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History, said they can endanger divers.

“There have been dozens of bites associated with shark dives,” he said. “Most of them, of course, don’t make headlines because the operators don’t want it out that you’ve got a chance of being bit. In the old days, some of the operators gleefully showed off some of their scars to impress the divers on the boat, but now they try to hush that up as much as possible.”

An Austrian lawyer received a fatal bite to the leg on a shark dive in the Bahamas in 2008, on a boat called the Shearwater operating out of West Palm Beach. That boat lost another client in the Bahamas in 2014, when a Texas chiropractor and nature photographer disappeared on a shark dive.

Whether feeding sharks affects their behavior is less clear. Burgess said it does. “It’s like Pavlov’s dog,” he said. “When a boat arrives at a site where there’s been feeding, you see the sharks there, attracted by the sound of the boat. It’s like when I get home and my dogs are at the door wagging their tails.”

But a 2012 study of tiger sharks by scientists at the University of Miami found that shark feeding had no impact on their movements. And the study suggested that by showing sharks in a positive, non-aggressive light, shark feeding may bolster shark conservation.

The shark-feeding ban is part of a larger bill supported by the sportfishing industry that would also prevent the National Park Service from implementing restrictions on fishing at Biscayne National Park, where fish populations have suffered sharp declines.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which banned shark feeding in state waters in 2001, supports the bill, although the commission has received mixed views on the ban, spokeswoman Amanda Nalley said.

But if the bill passes, Rohrer said, “it would effectively shut down shark tours and eco shark diving in the entire country.