An adventure tourism business that offers cage diving tours of great white sharks in the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary has a big problem, if you ask owner Jane Reifert. She says her tours, and the unique education they offer about a misunderstood and demonized animal, could soon come to an end because of unfair rules about how they can attract sharks.
The business, Incredible Adventures, has offered tours in the Farallones for almost a decade. But the business is now both filing an appeal and facing an opponent’s appeal of the permit it holds with the sanctuary.
For years, the business has been asking for the right to use scent bait to bump up the number of its shark sightings, but the sanctuary has only allowed it to use plastic decoys, saying they are less likely to disturb the sharks than scent bait—essentially a container filled with fish or even pig parts. The issue took on a new urgency, Ms. Reifert says, after lackluster numbers of clear white shark sightings in recent seasons prompted her to cancel last fall’s tours altogether.
Meanwhile, local environmentalist Gordon Bennett is appealing the sanctuary’s permits for two cage diving shark tour operators in an attempt to make a point about the importance of the public’s right to appeal sanctuary permits in general.
Decoys and scents
Incredible Adventures started operating in the sanctuary in 2005. The business runs in the fall, when great whites are around, and ferries about a couple hundred people per season on about 15 to 20 days. The tour, which takes around 10 to 12 hours, starts in San Francisco,
where people watch a presentation on great white sharks before hopping on the boat. Naturalists are on board to talk about the sharks and other ocean life. Once the boat arrives in sanctuary waters, a few people at a time slip on wet suits and climb into a cage, which is lowered into the water, where they wait to get a glimpse of a great white.
Ms. Reifert argues that seeing animals is important to conservation: “It’s sort of like: you see the cow, so you don’t want to kill the cow. When you see sharks and see how magnificent they are, you become more invested in their protection.”
Despite the adventure tourism label given to such operators, Greg Barron, the business’ west coast director of operations, says its mission is education. “It’s important that we’re out there because we need to debunk [the myth that great white sharks are dangerous],” he said. He said magnitudes more people die from dog bites and bee stings, for instance. (Since the 1920s, about 13 deaths have been attributed to great white sharks, according to the state department of fish and wildlife.)
The business runs tours around the world, but the one in the Farallones is the only one in the United States. Great whites are elusive creatures and cannot survive in captivity, but they are known to congregate in the area, perhaps to feed on elephant seals and mate.
“It’s the only place in the continental U.S. that people can see great whites, because it’s the only accessible aggregation point where great whites can be found. It’s not that they aren’t elsewhere, but the other places are remote or difficult to get to, or they are spread over miles,” Mr. Barron said.
In 2006, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began a process for instituting new rules for the cage diving operators as part of a new management plan for the sanctuary. The rules “prohibit attracting any white shark within the Sanctuary,” according to a federal notice from 2006. To break those rules—whether by the use of a seal-shaped decoy or scent—both researchers and businesses like Incredible Adventures need a permit.
After the rules were finalized in March 2009, Incredible Adventures requested permits for both types, but they were only permitted to use the seal-shaped decoys. In August of that year, the sanctuary’s superintendent, Maria Brown, issued a memo stating that the sanctuary would allow scientists with research permits to use both decoys and scent but would prohibit those with educational permits from using scent, because the sanctuary considers it more intrusive.
Scientists use scent bait to lure sharks close enough to biopsy or tag them. The trade-off to what the sanctuary says is a greater disruption is the benefit yielded by research. “Research allows us to better manage and protect the sharks. Education helps garner support for protecting white sharks, but it doesn’t lead to additional management strategies to protect white sharks,” Ms. Brown told the Light.
Ms. Reifert disagrees. “We kind of go hand in hand. We help educate people about the latest research about sharks. I consider education to be equal to research,” she said.
Incredible Adventures has used decoys in the same way every year it has operated, but Mr. Barron said the success rate has gone down. That is born out by sanctuary data; in 2010, educational operators saw sharks on over 50 percent of trips. In 2013, sharks were seen on just 29 percent of trips. That year, researchers saw sharks on 71 percent of trips. And Incredible Adventures disputes even these low rates of sightings for educational operators, believing the true numbers are even lower.
Mr. Barron isn’t sure why his group is seeing fewer sharks. Great whites are not considered threatened or endangered; in fact, in a recommendation to the California Fish and Game Commission last year to turn down a request to list the animal, the state’s Fish and Wildlife Department said data appeared to be showing a population increase. (There is no agreed upon population, though a 2014 study by Florida researchers estimated the population in the eastern Pacific Ocean at around 2,400.)
Still, the sanctuary is worried about potential impacts from scent bait. In its 2012 denial of Incredible Adventures’ scent permit application, it wrote that sharks spend a lot of time looking for food, expending a lot of energy. Anything used to lure a shark under false pretenses—whether scent bait or a decoy—has the potential to make sharks waste time and energy looking for food that doesn’t actually exist, when they could be seeking an actual meal.
According to the denial, anecdotal information from a shark researcher at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and data from its own records suggest that sharks might be habituating to the decoys, though the limited data is not conclusive.
Still, Ms. Brown wrote in her 2012 decision that “Decoys represent a viable method to attract white sharks and to improve the chances of viewing them for educational benefits while minimizing the potential for effects to the sharks and other sanctuary resources.” Scent, on the other hand, is “unwarranted to achieve the purposes of educational activities because it could increase disturbances to white shark natural behaviors.”
Incredible Adventures disputes the ideas that scent disrupts the sharks and that decoys are successful. Ms. Reifert said many sightings generated by decoys are farther than one boat-length—which she said she was told in 2009 was the criteria for an official sighting. And the visibility in the water is poor, so that tourists can’t see much unless the shark is within a couple dozen feet.
The 2012 permit denial said that once decoys are removed from the water, the effect on sharks is instantaneously gone; scents, however, can linger for up to 12 hours, according to a 1996 study. But Ms. Reifert says the study used bait constantly, whereas her business wants to use it for a few hours at a time, 15 to 20 days a year.
Ms. Reifert also points to another study, by Karl Laroche, a researcher from Montreal who conducted research in South Africa in 2007. He told the Light that even sharks that came near the scented boat eventually “ended up losing interest in us, our attractant and our decoys” and that it didn’t seem to affect “natural predatory behavior.” (He added the caveat that the Farallones are a different system, but that the research suggested scent might not pose a huge concern.)
Another researcher, Peter Klimley, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who has studied sharks for years, said that in the short term, using scent changes the animals’ behavior; that’s why researchers use it, after all.
In the long term, Mr. Klimley doesn’t believe the limited use of scent would alter migration patterns or have other large-scale effects. He went on to say that he supports eco-tourism and believes there is benefit in people seeing sharks up close, but that people have to decide just how valuable it is. “There’s a cost-benefit analysis that the public has to make,” he said.
For its part, the sanctuary has written in denials to Incredible Adventures that the effects of using scent are “inconclusive” and that resource protection is based on a “precautionary principle.”
Incredible Adventures is, for the third year, in the process of appealing the denial of its scent bait permit.
Public appeal
At the same time, Inverness resident Gordon Bennett has filed an appeal of permits for both cage operators, disputing their right to use anything to attract sharks. (The other operator, Great White Adventures, did not return to a request for comment.)
Mr. Bennett was motivated to file the appeal by a proposed plan to eliminate the public’s right to appeal permits in sanctuaries overseen by N.O.A.A.
In 2014, when the Gulf of the Farallones announced plans to expand—over doubling in size to encompass 3,295 square miles—Mr. Bennett began looking into the process. That included digging through notices in the federal register, a daily journal where the federal government posts new and proposed rules. Mr. Bennett found a notice that N.O.A.A. planned to eliminate the public’s right to appeal permits it issues in six areas it oversees, including the marine sanctuary at the Farallones. Only applicants and permittees could appeal an administrative decision.
In the register, the administration said because other sanctuaries that provide permits prohibit public appeals—and because it was “unaware” of anyone ever filing an appeal—it wanted to make its policies consistent across various administrative areas.
But Mr. Bennett believes there are no appeals because of the sanctuary’s casual approach to announcing permit approvals. So he looked for permits to appeal, and found two for cage diving shark tours: Incredible Adventures and Great White Adventures.
The point was to bring attention to the importance of a public right. “I wanted to use the issue to hopefully change procedures in the sanctuary, so [the] public would have knowledge of these permits in time to register an objection if they want,” he told the Light.
For Mr. Bennett, the problem he suspected was underscored by what happened next. In mid-December, less than a month after the permit approval was discussed at a marine sanctuary council meeting, he filed his appeal of both permits, arguing that the use of decoys altered the sharks’ natural behavior. But the permit for Great White Adventures had been approved back in August, and the shark season at the Farallones was already over by November’s end.