More Than 300 Sharks In Australia Are Now On Twitter

This is a very cool!

I wish something slightly similar could be done to eliminate road kill.

One idea I've thought of to eliminate roadkill/keep them in the woods is to have some type of high pitched sonar attached to the outside of your car. You turn it on and or it activates itself based on location. Animals would hear it coming from a quarter mile away and run in it's opposite direction.

HA that's probably not the greatest solution, but road kill is costly and unpleasant. It would be neat to see someone come up with a good solution!

The Internet of Things that bite you.

Would rather see a rss feed that could be used in an app, with details of the shark locations. But I guess you would have the problem of some yahoo tracking down the shark and killing it, although it is a protected species.

I'm a little surprised it's not GPS-based, with prices on GPS modules these days easily below $20. Make it powered by water movement and you can have receivers nearby to pick up the signals, so that you can see exactly which sharks are where, how fast they're moving, their depth, etc. The signals just have to be strong enough to be receivable when the shark is reasonably near, any since any that are farther away are of less concern. Even better if they show them on a big screen at the beach.

I wonder about the predictability of this. There are 100s of millions of sharks out there. (Maybe more?) How much can the location of 300 predict? Is it that sharks travel in packs, so where there is one, there is many?

To the extent that this moves us away from viewing sharks as monsters, it will be useful.

We kill 100s of thousands of them (maybe even millions?) for every one of us that they get, despite their natural advantage in water. Killing them is a shame.

I read the article looking for one thing. Them mentioning the potential for false sense of security. I was very pleased and Happy they mentioned it. As it was my first thought. After reading what they were doing. I may have overlooked it but did they mention any estimates about how many sharks there are in that area? Even if a wild guess? To reflect are there only 300 of 10,000 sharks tagged or 100,000?

This is cute, but it kind of falls under the "Let's do this thing we've done, but with new social media technology!" category rather than something genuinely useful.

Not being attacked by a shark is a real-time scenario... A shark that is 0.75 miles away could easily be 0.5 miles away by the time you've checked your phone, got off your towel, and tip-toed into the water.

I'm not dismissing the program by making it keep promises that it hasn't made...it just highlights how technology needs to be a strategy...to have these signals out in a public API is very cool, but for it to serve its ostensible safety purpose, the beaches need to be equipped with a public-announcement system that keys off of that data (whether it be a Twitter feed or whatever the scientists were using before).

Nice step forward. This really needs to be all around Australia not just Western Australia. With the majority of the population on the East coast, something like it or even an app like California has "Shark Net" would be super.

I swam at the pictured beach - Gracetown beach in WA - only two days ago. Fortunately there were no sharks that day, although it does have the highest shark death rate of any beach in the country.

#tastysurfers

Just think of the opportunities for marketing promos with the next "Sharknado" movie!

If they had lasers or Fonz jumping over them, that would be impressive.

That's about 300 Shark Fin Soups with a really easy hunt.