A recent dead whale story (carcass of a beached whale stinking people out of their places) reminded me of this, from last year
July 2002

A Summary from a blog
www.adequacy.net/columns/world/aus/aus2.shtml
And the sharks? Well our tourist-loving great whites have been found off the coast of South Australia, having an all-you-can-eat feast on a huge whale that up and died, floating about 5 kilometres off-shore. Once the word was out that you could see sharks having a whale of a time (ouch), enterprising locals have set up boat-trips, where you and the kiddies can, for a small price, go and see the entertaining site of a rotting, bloated whale corpse being devoured by great white sharks. After home footage was shown on the national news last week of some smart boy patting the sharks nose as they lunged at the blubber, and another dear member of Mensa actually standing on the whale carcass, the South Australian government called in the bomb squad to blow the whale up - seems the no laws were found that actually banned people from shark petting. The bomb squad goes in, lays enough dynamite to blow up a concrete wall of significant size, lights the fuse and ... of course, due to some body-air-fat-weight ratio thing that I can barely understand, the explosives formed a small dent in the whale's flesh, and the sharks continued to gorge.

And they say these things can only happen in America.

News stories
espn.go.com/outdoors/general/news/2001/0727/1231953.html
[also at www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/auspac/07/25/australia.shark/?related]
Includes: South Australian state Environment Minister Iain Evans said he will ask his department to consider regulations preventing people from coming within 109 yards of a dead whale. At present, the law only keeps people that distance from a live whale.

Wrong way to remove a right whale
old.smh.com.au/news/0108/01/national/nationa26.html
...Last weekend it was towed four nautical miles from The Pages islands near Kangaroo Island where on Monday divers inserted explosives inside the carcass.

Instead of opening up a hole that would fill with water and sink it, the explosion made a small dent. The whale's incredibly buoyant blubber and oil-filled bones absorbed the rest of the impact and yesterday the carcass was still bobbing around. But Mr Luks said the blast would help speed up decomposition.

Then there was a sort of side-light on it all at
www.squishedfrog.com/mtblog/archives/2001_07.shtml
[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 2/27/2003 04:38:00 pm