Shark Spotters researcher Alison Kock uses a foam seal to attract and tag Great White sharks off Seal Island in False Bay, Cape Town, as part of her 12-year long project to smash stereotypes surrounding these predators, on 24 February 2016. Since 2004, Kock has built a database of over 400 sharks. Her research has shown that the sharks in False Bay are mostly teenagers. “I realized we just had no clue. There was no research. We didn’t know anything about sharks. We didn’t know how many there were. We didn’t know what parts of the population were there, we didn’t know whether they used other parts of the bay. Nothing,” says Kock. A clear photo of a dorsal fin and an image taken underwater using a GoPro are needed before the shark can be darted with a GPS tag. In 2015, a record high of 98 people were bitten by sharks and six were killed. In the same year, there were 12 people who died taking selfies. Still, the knock-on effect of a shark attack can be lethal to business. Shark Spotters found that for up to three months, there are fewer people in the water. Kock fears humans are eating sharks to extinction. Seafood fraud is a massive problem. In 2012, a South African study found that 9% of samples from wholesalers and 31% from retailers were labelled incorrectly as a different species. Currently there is no regulation in South Africa that prevents shark from being sold under different names either. It enables fishers to catch and sell beyond the legal limits by selling shark under thousands of different labels like ‘flake’, ‘whitefish’, ‘ocean fillet’, ‘gummy’ or ‘lemon fish'.
A member of the Economic Freedom Fighters argues with South African Police after a crowd was dispersed by stun grenades outside Parliament in the buildup of South African President Jacob Zuma’s State of the Nation Address, on February 11.
