Juvenile shark population near Huntington says surfers are loud, numerous and constantly falling

HUNTINGTON BEACH, CALIFORNIA – The juvenile great white shark population resident off the Orange County coast has, through a spokesperson who is a marine biologist and who is doing his best, registered a formal complaint about noise, crowding, and the constant sensation of things falling from above.

The complaint marks the first known instance of an apex predator filing paperwork.

They Were Here First and They Would Like That Noted

The nursery zone off Huntington and Sunset Beach has hosted juvenile white sharks for considerably longer than it has hosted anybody wearing a rash guard purchased at a shopping mall. Numbers in recent years have been robust, and monitoring by state and academic researchers has consistently found that the sharks are present, uninterested, and mostly eating rays.

The sharks’ position, as conveyed by Dr Emerson Kwak of the Coastal Behavioural Ecology Unit, is that they have no objection to surfers in principle and a very strong objection to surfers in volume.

They are not frightened of you, Kwak said. That is the part everybody gets wrong. You are not a meal. You are a neighbour who runs a business out of his garage.

The Three Formal Grievances

The complaint identifies three specific issues.

The first is percussion. A juvenile white shark in eight metres of water experiences an average summer Saturday as roughly four hundred separate impacts per hour, each one a human being hitting the surface from a height. Kwak described the acoustic environment as living underneath a bowling alley run by people who are bad at bowling.

The second is duration. The sharks note that the surfing continues from before dawn until after dark, with a brief lull around eleven that they have learned to treat as their only reliable window.

The third is the paddle-out. The sharks report that when a surfer sees one of them, that surfer produces a sound that is described in the filing as extremely specific and travels an extraordinary distance underwater.

Official Guidance Remains Unchanged and Deeply Sensible

Public safety guidance has not shifted. Shark information for California beaches continues to be published by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and coastal water conditions and advisories are issued through the National Weather Service marine forecasts. Both advise awareness rather than alarm, which is a message that has never once survived contact with a local news helicopter.

Local news coverage of shark sightings continues to follow the established format, in which a drone captures a shark doing nothing whatsoever for eleven seconds, and this footage is broadcast under a banner reading TERROR IN THE WATER while a presenter says the word circling.

The Sharks Have Reviewed the Coverage

Kwak confirmed the sharks have not seen the coverage, being sharks, but that if they had, they would likely object to the word circling.

They are swimming, he said. That is the only thing they can do. A shark cannot stand still. Every shark in the world is technically circling at all times. It is like reporting that a man in a car was ominously driving.

Observations From the Lineup

• Every surfer says they are not worried about sharks. Every surfer also knows exactly how deep the water is beneath them at all times.
• The most dangerous thing at Huntington remains the pier, followed by the car park, followed by a man on a nine foot log who has not looked left since 2004.
• Nobody leaves the water after a sighting. They move approximately eleven metres and then resume, which is the exact distance that makes a person feel they have taken action.
• The phrase it was probably just a dolphin has never once been said by a person who believed it.
• Statistically, the drive to the beach on the 405 is the genuinely frightening part, and nobody has ever posted drone footage of that with dramatic music.

The Resolution

The sharks have proposed a compromise: designated quiet hours between four and six in the morning, during which they request that nobody enter the water.

Surfers have rejected this immediately, on the grounds that four to six in the morning is the only time the waves are any good and the car park is free.

Kwak said negotiations have stalled. Both parties want the same six hundred metres of water at the same time for the same reason, he said. Which is that it is the best water. There is no version of this where anybody is being unreasonable, and that is what makes it unsolvable.

Further reporting on species that cannot agree on shared infrastructure appears at Bohiney Magazine, and readers wanting the British model of territorial dispute, which involves passive aggression and a note left on a windscreen, will find it in the London Prat archive of neighbourly conflict.

The sharks have retained no counsel and are not expected to.

The Drone Operators Have Their Own Ecosystem

An entire secondary economy has formed above the water, consisting of drone operators who arrive at dawn, hover for hours, and sell eleven seconds of grey shape to television stations that will describe it as chilling.

Operators are paid by the sighting, which has created an incentive structure that researchers describe as unhelpful. A drone operator who films nothing earns nothing. A drone operator who films a shark earns a fee. A drone operator who films a shark near a surfer earns considerably more, and there is no rule preventing him from waiting patiently for that composition to occur.

Kwak noted the sharks have no opinion on this either, being sharks, but that the arrangement has produced a public perception in which Orange County appears to be under siege by animals that have been quietly eating rays in the same six hundred metres since long before anybody thought to point a camera at them.

More in this vein at The Beaverton.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/