INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
The Cookie Cutter shock is not front and centre in people's minds. It's an animal that is rarely encountered. It's a very small shock, and it gets to about 40 centimetres. Very odd. It's basically a cigar or a pencil with teeth. And it lives in the deep, deep oceans but it does come to the surface and it has a very unusual weight feeds. So what it does, it goes up to something like a dolphin or a whale or whale carcass, and it bites them. If suction is on with its teeth, it bites and twists and takes a cookie sized bite the flesh from the very large animals, and it can do this repeatedly.
The cookie cutter shark is suspected of biting through an inflatable catamaran off Cairns causing it to deflate. Does it surprise you hearing of a shark of its type repeatedly biting such an object?
Cookie Cutter sharks are known to bite inanimate objects things that they can't eat. So there's one case where they trying to latch on to a submarine. They have bitten underwater cables. They probably have bitten other boats. But we're probably noticed this time because the boat is obviously inflatable. So very sharp teeth on an inflatable boat is very different than sharp teeth on a steel hull. So that's obviously the reason the boat was damaged.
A few cookie cutter sharks are reported to have circled the vessel and bitten it - is that type of behaviour something you'd expect?
At least to my knowledge, this is not a well studied animal. So we don't really know too much about about their behaviour. It's certainly highly plausible, but that there was more than one, but there's unlikely to be a great swarm of the animals. The sailors were probably unlucky. But you do… it's always gonna be a roll of your dice in Australia, an inflatable yacht with our wildlife, something was always going to bite them.
How prevalent are cookie cutter sharks in waters around Australia?
They're pretty much found around most of the continent. So it's quite a few, quite a few in Queensland. We don't really have any idea of what the numbers are. They do occasionally by people. So probably the last recorded by it. And probably the only verified bike in Australia was a seven year old at Townsville in the swimming enclosure because the small sharks swim straight through, took a cookie size bite out of his calf, and then swim off. And that’s typical of the way they feed so they'll bite twist, and then they shoot off.
