Shark Encounters

I asked Florida sportsman magazine publisher Blair Wickstrom if he was seeing more shark encounters along the coast of Florida. There's shark predation, is growing along our coastal waters and that's essentially the people that are losing fish. Not so much to my mind. He doesn't really get into where you've got a lot of shark predation going on, but some people think it's higher and it's a larger number than some people think and not as much as like, say, the snapper fishing, where people are releasing undersized snapper only to see him bitten in half 10 feet from the boat or bringing in half a snapper that was bitten in half by a shark. And so there are a lot more shark encounters than in the past, and I think it's just you've got a situation where a lot of the other reef fish and a lot of the other fish that the shark were feeding on are being stressed. Those numbers are reduced. And so you are seeing more sharks in the coastal waters. And I think that's bringing in more encounters. And then you've got a growing number of dive industry boats that are encouraging those encounters by actually coming in sharks. And so you're actually training these sharks to come in into the area where boats are, when you have the second boat show up on that reef that doesn't have a goal of bringing in sharks for tourism dollars, they're having unwanted shark encounters. And so I think there's some of that going on as well.