#shark-mitigation

Gill nets cause unnecessary harm to sharks and other wildlife while failing to reduce local shark presence, since sharks are highly migratory and have no fixed territory. Healthy shark populations are essential for balanced ecosystems.

Shark-bite fatalities rose in 2025–26, clustered at crowded surf beaches and flood-affected estuaries. The driver is growing overlap between people and sharks in space and time — coastal crowding, recovering shark populations, and climate-shifted prey — not increased aggression.

A fence from seabed to surface and shore to shore fully encloses a swim area, keeping sharks out without trapping or killing wildlife. Inside the enclosure protection is near-absolute, but it suits sheltered beaches only and protects just that zone, not the open surf.

Bottom-set gillnets off bathing beaches entangle and kill large sharks to thin local numbers. Long-established, but they are a culling device, not a barrier: sharks pass around them, bycatch of turtles, dolphins and rays is high, and bite-reduction evidence is weak.

After a four-month trial at Coogee Beach (December 2013–April 2014), the City of Cockburn installed an Eco Shark Barrier made of rigid plastic mesh panels that exclude sharks while letting small marine life pass, avoidi…

Hong Kong introduced seabed-to-surface shark prevention barriers in the early-to-mid 1990s after a cluster of fatal attacks between 1991 and 1995. Unlike gillnets, the barriers fully enclose the swimming area from seabe…

Australia's oldest beach shark program, operating continuously since 1937. For the 2025–26 season, bottom-set gillnets were deployed at 51 beaches across 8 local government areas between Newcastle and Wollongong (1 Sept…