There be sharks!

Local Journalism Initiative
·4 min read

CANSO — It’s the kind of tale any seadog might tell while sitting on the edge of his seat. But, Billy Bond, Canso fisher of everything from lobster to bluefin tuna for more than five decades, seems almost laid back when he recounts that time on the water, some six years ago, when he interrupted a great white shark in mid-meal.

“I was out there with a few traps doing some experimental work with a professor and some Dalhousie University students, and I saw this seal floating,” he says. “When I got closer, I saw that it had these big bite marks. When we leaned over the boat to measure the marks, we had to let it go because the shark had come right up alongside of us ... I guess he really wanted it.”

The students, he says, were “excited, of course.” They took videos and, afterwards, couldn’t stop talking about the experience. After all, it’s not every day you see a legendary great white – normally associated with Australia’s Great Barrier Reef or Steven Spielberg’s Jaws – in Nova Scotia waters. Or, is it?

Bond, 62, who is also a former director of the Guysborough County Inshore Fisherman’s Association, asserts that sightings of and even encounters with Atlantic great whites – which can grow to 16 feet and weigh 1,700 pounds – off Canso are becoming more common as seal populations boom and ocean waters warm due to climate change.

“There’s more and more of them moving up,” he says. “It seems like every summer and fall it gets worse. More and more people are seeing these fish and they’re coming closer into the harbours now than they ever did.”

Still, it may not be the sharks that worry him as much as Canadian fisheries officials and a 13-year-old conservation policy that seems to be pushing them towards a full-blown recovery plan for the great white in Atlantic Canadian waters. A recently updated section of Environment Canada’s species at risk public registry notes a newly proposed DFO strategy “to address threats to the species’ survival.”

Says Bond: “We’ll end up having to do this, do that, jump through hoops to keep them satisfied. They’ll put more onto us ... I don’t think the great whites are the ones endangered.”

According to some in the scientific community, he may have a point. As originally reported by CBC News last month, Steve Crawford, a biologist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, thinks that DFO’s strategy may be precipitous, if not unnecessary.

“We simply do not have enough information or knowledge about the northwest Atlantic white shark with which to assess them at all, let alone as endangered,” he told the public broadcaster.

In an email to The Journal, he elaborated from an evaluation he submitted to the Species at Risk Act directorate on April 20: “The existing evidence required DFO to formally recognize the northwest Atlantic white shark population is data deficient, which in turn should require it to develop a data sufficiency plan to collect essential knowledge for the population so that the file can be effectively reconsidered.”

DFO’s proposed recovery strategy acknowledges other “data” that suggests “an increase in [great white populations] following implementation of conservation measures in the 1990s ... Increased tracking efforts may reveal that Atlantic Canadian waters are used more frequently by white sharks than was previously thought. While climate change may lead to white shark habitat degradation on a global scale, it could also create preferential habitat for [them] within Atlantic Canadian waters.”

The Atlantic White Shark Conservancy in Chatham, Massachusetts, actually keeps a publicly available White Shark Catalogue that, it says, contains photo IDs of 700 white sharks “from Nova Scotia to Florida” since it began monitoring the population in 2014, “including 91 new individuals in 2023.”

Ultimately, DFO says “a proposed action plan” won’t be completed until years after it delivers the final version of the strategy, and it’s not clear when that will be.

All of which may offer some comfort to Bond and others who make their living on the water. Meanwhile, he insists, the sharks aren’t going anywhere. And, while he can’t speak for all fishers in Canso – or of the sharks’ impact on commercial catches in the area – he says the creatures are making a big enough impact without government protection.

“They do love our fish. In the fall, when we are fishing tuna, they bite right through them. Once these bluefins are bit, they are no good to us. DFO absolutely refuses to give us extra tags [for more tuna] ... The fact is we don’t bother the sharks. They bother us.”

Alec Bruce, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Guysborough Journal

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