Great White Shark warned by text message

More then 70 great white sharks have been tagged by scientists in Western Australia in a first ever trial of it’s kind which sends beach lifesavers a text message when the tagged shark swims close to the Perth shoreline.

Wildlife officials and scientists will also receive the text or email warning when any of the tagged sharks move to within 500m of metropolitan beaches.

The text messages are designed to be sent to designated phones within 2 minutes of detecting a tagged shark via 18 acoustic seabed receivers positioned in different areas of the shoreline.

Since the receivers were installed in May, Department of Fisheries’ senior research scientist Dr Rory McAuley said sharks had been picked up in Perth waters on four occasion, PerthNow reports.

“The ue of the technology that delivers real-time notifications of tag detections hasn’t been used in an operational sense anywhere else in the world,” Dr McAuley told the website.

The study is aimed at unlocking the secrets of shark migration patterns and how they relate to attacks on humans.

Shark are an ever-present threat in the waters off Perth. Nine years ago, a man was killed by a white pointer in waist-deep water off Cottesloe Beach.
Since then, there have been a dozen shark attacks in Western Australia, two of them fatal.