I recently stood on the northern headland at Stanwell Park and watched a vessel doing some service work on our shark listening station, installed about a year ago. (This station has been described in a previous issue of Hello Fish.)

Since that was installed I have collected all the notifications of shark detections and now have a year of data. Over the next few months I shall write some stories about the visitors we have had.

We have had detections of all three species of tagged sharks: great whites, bulls and tigers. Other species (e.g. hammerheads) visit the beach, but these are not considered to be a potential hazard to humans and are not part of the tagging program reported on via the Shark Smart app.

From 20 June 2022 to 28 May 2023, we had 59 pings from tagged sharks entering the detection zone – which extends about 500m around the listening station. Six of these were from the same shark over a short period of time as it entered and then re-entered the zone for whatever reason – maybe swimming in a zig-zag pattern.

Bull sharks were more commonly detected in the months of January to April whereas the white sharks were in the colder water months. We only had three tiger shark detections, all in late summer, early spring. They are mainly a tropical species so they likely follow the warmer water.

The data supplied by the pinger includes the shark species and tag number, time and date of the most recent ping plus the time, date and location of the previous ping, and in some cases the date and location when the shark was first tagged.

There are 37 listening stations along the coast and in theory it would be feasible to collect all the data and do a wider analysis but this is a big job and the fisheries department is likely doing this.

In upcoming issues I’ll do what analyses I can.