A fish head attached to a rope lures sharks closer to tourists. Photograph by Bret Muter

Others pay for it.

Thousands of tourists flock to South Africa, Australia and the United State’s West Coast every day to catch a glimpse of the white shark. Half-day trips to view white sharks in South Africa run more than $150 per person, while outfitters in other parts of the globe offer week-long holidays starting at $3,000. These thrill-seeking excursions contribute to a multi-million-dollar annual shark diving industry.

Some scientists and activists aren’t so thrilled. They say increasing popularity of shark tourism could endanger tourists and beach-goers.

Tourists typically view white sharks from the safety of the boat’s deck or from a reinforced steel cage. Shark-diving operators attract sharks to the boat with chum (a soupy mixture of mashed fish parts, blood and fish oil), and lure them closer to the cage with a fish head attached to a rope. While divers are not permitted to feed or touch the sharks, in places like the Bahamas, tourists can have even more intimate encounters with smaller, typically less-aggressive species (including nurse sharks and blacktip sharks) without a cage. In some places, tourists can pay to feed them.

Chumming and feeding activities may negatively alter shark behavior, said George Burgess, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research and the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

"After a while, sharks begin to associate people with the food source,” he said. "It’s a Pavlovian effect.”

Burgess said artificial feeding from shark tourism can attract unusually large concentrations of sharks into an area, which is what tourists pay to see.

"Sharks are apex predators.” As adults, they have no predators of their own, he said. "Chances of seeing one in normal diving circumstances are fairly small. What tourists are seeing is not natural behavior.”

These types of human-shark interactions sometimes end badly. In 2008, for example, a shark killed a tourist during a shark-feeding dive in the Bahamas. The first reported death in the industry fueled an already heated discussion about shark tourism.

"Unfortunately the shark is usually blamed any time there is an incident,” Burgess said.

Concern that chumming and feeding may be training sharks to associate people with food has prompted surfers and other water-users to question if white shark tourism is partially responsible for recent shark attacks in Australia and South Africa. A string of shark attacks near Cape Town in 2005 sparked the creation of several vocal groups that pointed fingers at South Africa’s growing shark-diving industry.

Scientists have generally been unable to support these claims. A 2007 study by scientists at Simon Fraser University and the University of Cape Town found moderate levels of ecotourism activity did not significantly impact white shark behavior around Seal Island in South Africa. The study’s authors, however, maintain additional research in different locations, and with different shark species, may show differing severity of impacts.

Shark tourism advocates say their industry is actually helping to change public misconceptions about, and ultimately contributing to the conservation of sharks and other marine life.

"Education was the first benefit of the industry,” said Patric Douglas, CEO of Shark Divers, based in San Diego, Calif. "Now the forward-thinking operators are merging science with ecotourism, and the payoff is the data coming back.”

Much remains unknown about white shark migration and reproduction. Douglas said shark-diving operations worldwide sometimes team with scientists to help answer these questions, and often help foot the bill.

Douglas’ company has partnered with the University of California, Davis and the Centro Interdisciplinario de Ciencias Marinas in Mexico to conduct numerous white shark research projects around Isle Guadalupe, including collecting DNA samples and tracking movement patterns with acoustic tags. He said these efforts show the industry’s commitment to shark conservation.

Douglas encourages people interested in booking a shark-diving tour to research whether the company directly supports shark conservation efforts by providing logistic or financial support to conservation organizations and institutions conducting shark research.

Globally, white sharks and many other shark species face serious threats. According to the Wildlife Conservation Society, shark fishing and incidental catch kill hundreds of thousands of sharks each year. Another concern is the Asian fish market’s rising demand for shark fins. This industry has resulted in tens of thousands of sharks being harvested only for their fins, while the rest of their bodies are discarded into the sea.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources listed white sharks as vulnerable on its Red List of Threatened Species in 1996. White sharks are also afforded some protection by Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Flora and Fauna, which strives to regulate trade in white shark products (including teeth, jaws and fins). Additional protections exist in sites with naturally high populations of white sharks, including Australia, South Africa and the U.S.

Despite these efforts, populations of many shark species, including white sharks, are seriously declining. But Douglas said tourism has helped encourage some communities to protect sharks.

In Fiji, for example, communities investing in shark tourism have found that live sharks are more valuable than dead ones.

Although Douglas admits that economic incentives are enticing, he said sharks are "much more than biological ATM machines.

"We’re losing sharks at such a great rate, we need to find additional ways to protect them,” he said.

Bret A. Muter is a second-year graduate student in MSU’s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. This is his third appearance in EJ. Contact Bret at muterbre@msu.edu.

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