AFTER THREE UNCONFIRMED sightings of up to 10 primordial predators in Deep Water Bay recently, a city's collective fear of sharks has been resurrected. Sunday junk cruise parties are making excuses not to swim. Cocktail conversation recollects Australian shark hunter Vic Hislop's unintentionally comic attempt at hunting local man-eaters in the mid-1990s. Even surfers are hesitant about tempting fate.
Is it going to be a shark summer?
Hong Kong sharks have an exceedingly high kill rate, wreaking unwitting revenge on a city whose insatiable appetite for shark's fin soup is leading to the species' demise. Since 1991, all six confirmed attacks by sharks on humans were fatal, compared with a global statistical average of 15 per cent, according to the International Shark Attack Files (ISAF). For the decade of the 90s, only Brazil, Australia, South Africa and Reunion Islands, respectively, recorded more deaths, according to the ISAF.
Also Hong Kong sharks are exceptionally prone attacking human victims. Worldwide, Hong Kong rounded out the top 10 in number of attacks by region in the past decade (1990-2000). About 50 people are attacked by sharks annually, says the ISAF, whereas in 1995, three people were killed in a fortnight in the waters off Sai Kung alone.
'For a period, Hong Kong was the most unsafe place on the planet for shark attacks,' says Keith Wilson, a senior fisheries officer with the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conser-vation Department.
But that doesn't seem to be the case any more, according to marine biologist Andrew Cornish. 'Basically, for all intents and purposes, sharks are extinct in Hong Kong,' he says. In the course of 1,000 dives over five years in researching a book he co-authored, Reef Fish Of Hong Kong, Cornish says he's seen only one shark. It was a nurse shark, a small-mouthed, bottom-dwelling, crustacean-eating, bunny rabbit of a predator spotted in Mirs Bay.
Ultimately, biologists' knowledge of some 350 species of shark is a drop in the ocean, and in Hong Kong, even less so. It doesn't make for much of a doctorate thesis if you can't find anything to study, says Cornish.
