Ep 7 | Dan Webber | What the Science Isn't Telling You | Crossing the Tideline

Dan Webber is a journalist, surfer and longtime observer of the shark debate in Australia. He was in the water for two shark attacks during the Ballina cluster of 2014 and 2015, a two year period that saw twelve incidents across a 70km stretch of coastline between Evans Head and Byron Bay. Out of that experience he built the Ballina Shark Reports page, a real time community sighting tool that was running one shark report per day at its peak before the local mayor asked him to take it down.In the decade since, Dan has gone deep on the research. He's spoken at a Senate inquiry, written multiple academic pieces on shark mitigation technology, and contributed a chapter to an international book on the subject. His work sits in the top 1% of shark related articles on ResearchGate. He is not aligned with the mainstream scientific consensus on a number of issues, and he does not shy away from saying so.This conversation covers what it was actually like inside a community living through a cluster of attacks. How the media arrived, how the fear spread, and how a small group of surfers quietly kept paddling out and looking after each other. We also get into his views on shark nets and why he supports them when most others don't, his deep skepticism of smart drum lines, his theory on bold versus shy shark personalities, and his pointed criticism of what he sees as ideologically driven science that shapes policy in ways that don't serve ocean users.