It appears to me shark behavior is being discussed / speculated upon. Since at least one shark was the cause of this young woman's demise, how is this discussion an affront or offensive to the family?
Since facts about sharks are slim and always from a human perspective speculation is part of the discussion.
There is a site for condolences, but this isn't it. It appears to me that someone really is on a soapbox, an emotional soapbox.
At least one shark was responsible for the woman's demise, yes, and a discussion of shark behavior is warranted. That said, where exactly is the notion that this is related to baited shark dives coming from, given we've established there is no such operation within 30 miles of the attack and (to my understanding, at least) the species tentatively identified as responsible doesn't show at feeding operations there?
This discussion originally started off in A&I, the purpose of which is to discuss dive accidents in the hope of identifying causes and learning lessons. Ideally, one starts with the known facts and builds from there; speculation is useful at but if contradicted by the evidence at hand the discussion should move on. Starting with a predetermined conclusion (in this case, "shark feeding causes attacks") and sticking to it despite contradicting information can lead to not learning from an accident and, in my opinion, is disrespectful because it callously uses the death or injury of others to push a self-interested narrative.
As one of my literary idols opined back in the pages of
The Deep Blue Good-by, "I do not function too well on emotional motivations. I am wary of them." I spent yesterday buried in text conversations because a well-known name in shark diving circles recently gave a news interview where he cited some fishery statistics that, to me, seemed pretty far off the mark. Well-intentioned advocacy or not, nothing he said was supported by publicly available state and federal fisheries data that I was able to dig up in a matter of hours, and it was a major setback for the cause he and I are both supporting. I'd rather build my case off accurate data than dramatic inflations, even if the latter has a higher shock factor.
Part of the info dump I prepared for the leads on that conservation campaign included a TEDx lecture by one of my former thesis committee advisors, Dr. Chris Lowe at Cal State Long Beach, where he was discussing the recovery of the California white shark population and its supporting marine ecosystem. The main point to it was recognizing the positive effects of regulatory changes despite the typical doom-and-gloom conservation rhetoric, but towards the close he mentioned that one issue we're seeing now with recovering shark populations is that we now have a generation or two of people using the ocean for recreation who are not "predator-aware." It's taken a couple of decades for the conservation measures enacted in the 1990s to have an effect on shark populations, and now humans who have gotten used to swimming, surfing, diving, fishing, etc. in a decimated marine environment aren't used to coming in contact with large predators (not just sharks, but species such as goliath grouper which compete with fishermen for catches).
There are two potential ways we humans can respond to that. One, we recognize that we are still visitors to their environment and change our behavior to minimize the conflicts. Or two, as we've seen over the last couple years in Western Australia, we throw several decades of hard-won conservation successes out the window and start killing those predators off again so we can treat the ocean like our private swimming pool. Some of the rumblings I've seen out of the Bahamas in the past month have me concerned that the latter is on the table; one of the researchers I spoke to said last year between 12 and 20 large tiger sharks were killed by fishermen off Andros Island while feeding on a dead whale carcass.
