Port Lincoln Australia tuna farm operator Hagen Stehr is calling for the State Government to ban research that aggravates white pointer sharks following the publication of spectacular white pointer photographs yesterday.
Stehr said the photographs, published in The Advertiser, were a concern for the tuna industry and the sharks would have been "teased" to achieve the aggressive photographs.
"Our divers are family men - how do you think his wife feels when he goes to work at 6am and she picks up the paper and sees that, knowing her husband is going to be diving half way to Dangerous Reef in a tuna farm cage that day? Someone needs to take a stand with this - it is absolutely appalling," he said.
But Kay Fox, wife of shark researcher Rodney Fox who is still at sea, said the sharks were not "teased" by the people on the boat to get such photographs, but were instead enticed toward the boat, using tuna oil or whole tuna, to take them away from the seal breeding colonies at Dangerous Reef and Neptune Island.
Fox alleged the tuna farmers themselves attracted sharks to their cages by feeding "hundreds of tons" of pilchards each day to tuna in their cages.
"If that's not teasing them then I don't know what is," she said. "There have always been sharks in Boston Bay and this is a result from what the tuna fishermen have been doing forever," she said. Fox alleged great white sharks frequented tuna farms on a regular basis. She said the charter trips offered by her husband to Dangerous Reef and the Neptune Islands were all apart of the research being conducted by her husband and son.
But, Stehr said the research was irresponsible and questioned whether the government was funding research that resulted in the published photographs. "They are spectacular pictures but the research should never allow the sharks to be stirred up - they should stop this kind of research," Stehr said. "We are harvesting at the moment and we don't need to have this type of research so close to our operations."
South Australian Research and Development Institute scientist in Port Lincoln Kate Rodda said the pictures published did not symbolize the "true nature of the beast".
Fox said a great white shark was fitted with a satellite-tag last month, which cost about $14,000. "We are conducting research all the time on these trips and I think the tuna farmers should put some money into more research rather than continuing to whinge about it," Fox said. She also said in no way were the sharks teased toward the boat because the field trips undertaken by those on board the Falie traveled to where the sharks lived. "We can only attract them between 100 meters and 300 meters - they just don't come from anywhere," she said.
Fox said the company held about "a dozen" charter trips to Dangerous Reef and Neptune Island each year.