Egyptian authorities and beach resorts could be doing more to educate the public on sharks, two seafaring veterans told The National less than two weeks after a fatal attack.
Captured in a chilling viral video on June 8, a Russian man was killed by a shark off Egypt's Red Sea coast. The incident continues to haunt the Arab nation of 105 million.
So great has the effect of the incident been on the national mood that photos posted online at the weekend of a fisherman with a baby shortfin mako shark caught near Alexandria sowed panic among beachgoers and prompted an angry response from authorities.
The Alexandria Institute for Oceanology insisted in a statement that the mako shark was caught three kilometres off the coast opposite the city's El Max district.
The presence of sharks there, it continued, is hardly a surprise at this time of year, when they move to areas close to the coast during mating season.
“There is no justification for sowing panic and confusion by posting and sharing information and photos that convey false news,” it said in a statement on the sharks, which can grow to be 4 metres in length.
“Mako sharks pose no threat.”
Shark attacks are rare in the waters off Egypt's Mediterranean coast.
Thanks to the disturbing video, the June 8 attack in the Red Sea received much more publicity than when sharks killed two foreign tourists in one day in the same area a year ago.
It dominated popular talk shows for days and generated a tidal wave of content on social media in Egypt, with many online publications earnestly posting instructions on how to deal with attacking sharks or how to avoid them.
Some of these instructions – such as punching the attacking shark in the eye, hitting it with a selfie stick or never pretending to be dead – have predictably sparked satirical posts in response, some of which have argued, rather convincingly, that the tips were hardly practical when most panic and rush out of the water if as much as a floating nylon bag touches their legs.
Ridiculing the shark mania sweeping the nation, pranksters posted similar tips and attributed it to the local government of Qalubiyah, a drab and landlocked province to the north of Cairo.
Humour aside, many Red Sea hotels have installed nets around their swimming areas since the attack to keep sharks at bay and instructed lifeguards to explain to patrons what they should and should not do when in the water.
Significantly, there has been no marked drop in the number of visitors going into the water or taking beach holidays in the area.
But sharks can pose a real threat in the Red Sea, where a spate of attacks in recent years drew attention to their presence not far from the millions who have been holidaying there since the global tourism industry discovered the area some 30-plus years ago as an ideal destination for scuba diving, snorkelling and, more recently, kite surfing.
However, according to two Egyptians with years of oceangoing expertise, authorities have done little, maybe even nothing, to study the behaviour of sharks in the area to better understand why they come into shallow waters or to educate beachgoers on what to watch out for when in the water.
Hours after the June 8 attack, which happened off the resort city of Hurghada, officials said they would immediately place satellite tags on sharks in the area to monitor their behaviour.
The two Egyptians – veteran scuba diving instructor Hatem Sanyeldin and international angler Omar Khalifa – said the tracking devices have been sitting at the Ministry of Environment warehouses for more than a year.
“There's a simple but very useful fact local authorities can share with holidaymakers but do not: Red Sea sharks invariably swim in shallow waters during the summer months,” Mr Sanyeldin, 61, who has been diving and instructing since the 1980s, told The National.
The 24-year-old Russian man was swimming in a bay about 20 metres off the beach at a depth of up to 5 metres in the late morning when he was attacked by a tiger shark.
The bay, explained Mr Sanyeldin, sees a great deal of leisure boat traffic during daylight hours, keeping sharks out until nightfall when they go into the bay to feed.
“It could have only made the decision to enter the bay in the morning to find food,” said Mr Sanyeldin, who has about 25,000 diving hours and is widely seen as the Red Sea's best technical diving instructor.
Authorities have said the tiger shark was a female looking for a safe place to give birth.
It was caught by local fishermen accompanied by experts hours later while swimming near the spot where it attacked. An autopsy showed its stomach was empty save for some of the man's remains.
“The video of the attack conforms with the technique used by tiger sharks when they attack turtles. That so little of the man was inside its stomach when it was caught shows that it did not like the taste of humans,” said Mr Sanyeldin.
Mr Khalifa, the angler, said there could have been a wide range of motives why the shark attacked the man. These, he insisted, do not include overfishing in the Red Sea.
“It could have been many things that we are not aware of, including climate change,” said Mr Khalifa, 39, who is an International Game Fish Association world record holder and regularly participates in international competitions.
He said a fishing ban in the area recently introduced by authorities meant that large colonies of spangled emperor fish were swimming freely.
“Sharks normally swim with them and feed on the injured among them. They must have taken the attacking shark along with others into the shallow waters where the attack took place,” he told The National.
“People should not swim these days in that area. There are many out there this time of year.”
