SURIGAO CITY (MindaNews / 10 Nov) – A group of fishermen here caught last week a huge tiger shark in the waters between Bohol and Camiguin islands, and found inside the shark’s belly a human head and a leg, still with half-digested flesh. “It was so disgusting. We can’t bear the awful smell,” said Bodoy Gorgod, 48, one of the five fishermen from Punta Bilar here who caught the shark between the waters of Bohol and Camiguin islands Wednesday last week. Gorgod, 48, said he had never caught a shark before with human parts inside since he started fishing at age 20. The fisherman said the shark was so huge it might have weighed 300 kilos. Even though they know the catch would fetch them a good price, usually at 70 pesos a kilo when sold to fishball makers in Cebu, Gorgod said they ditched the shark, except the head…

On a recent trip to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, I was shocked by a headline in the local paper. On the front page, above the fold, it said, “Great Whites may be expanding their turf” in huge letters. Sharks were never an issue in the area when I vacationed there as a child, so I was interested to find out more about this hypothesis and why it was being put forward. Apparently, during the second week in October, a great white shark was tracked in Wellfleet Harbor for two days before swimming towards Cape Cod bay. The tagged shark, named Katharine, is a 2,300 pound great white that has been tracked since August of 2013. During that time, Katharine has traveled more than 8,000 miles. The tracking device has been followed by the research vessel, Ocearch. During her time near the Cape, the device “pinged” her location as close to the…

It seems like every time a shark attack is reported, there is a violent response. Sharks are culled with baited drumlines and every solution seems to include maiming or killing sharks to protect beachgoers. Reactionary fans of the cull are happy to see Internet images of bloody sharks hanging from the drumlines. They have adopted the theory that only sharks or people can exist, not both, as the solution to any problem. But finally someone has come up with a different solution. In Brazil, the city of Recife is “Brazil’s Venice” and was remarkably free of reports of shark attacks from the 1950s to 1992. For some inexplicable reason, that year triggered a spate of attacks, totaling 55 during 1992-2011. They needed to make their beaches safer and began to view other countries’ solutions. They looked at the drums, nets, and results of the culls. Nets end up killing other…