ROATAN, Honduras (25 Feb 2009) — A shark feeding profiteer in Roatan has been charged with attempted murder.
Waihuka Adventure Divers owner Maurilio Mirabella, who sells shark feeding dives to thrill-seeking tourists, allegedly attacked a competing dive operator underwater at a shark feeding site near Roatan's airport.
Witnesses said Mirabella attacked Willie DeBeer, a Sueño del Mar dive guide who took a group of tourists to the shark feeding site.
Mirabella, apparently attempting to prevent a competing dive operator from profiting off of "his sharks", tried to shut off DeBeer's air supply.
DeBeer fought off the initial attack but the two PADI scuba diving instructors continued to scuffle as horrified scuba diving tourists looked on in shock and disbelief.
DeBeer survived the violent attack and reported the incident to authorities who have charged Mirabella with attempted murder.
Mirabella has declined to comment on the charges but said he sells shark feeding dives because "without sharks, scuba diving in Roatan isn't worth much".
Bad for people, bad for sharks
Despite aggressive and often deceitful pro-shark feeding campaigns by several U.S. dive industry marketing behemoths including PADI, DEMA and Scuba Diving Magazine, shark feeding has been banned in Florida, Hawaii, the Caymans and many parts of the world due to concerns about public safety and scientific evidence that feeding and baiting tours negatively impact sharks and other marine wildlife.
In Roatan, the Bahamas, St. Maarten and a few other destinations where authorities have failed to act, tourists participating in shark feeding and shark baiting dives have been injured and killed.
In 2008, Austrian attorney Marcus Groh died after he was attacked by a shark while scuba diving with Jim Abernethy, a notorious Florida shark feeding profiteer who avoids prosecution by taking tourists and shark photo touts from his Florida base to the Bahamas where harassing sharks is still legal.
In 2002 also in the Bahamas, a bull shark attacked and nearly killed shark rodeo performer Erich Ritter at Walker's Cay, a dive industry-endorsed shark feeding site often green-washed as a "shark conservation and education center" by both American and UK dive industry-controlled scuba diving magazines.
Dr. Denise Herzing, a renowned marine mammalogist who conducts research in the Bahamas says feeding sharks is bad for people and the sharks.
''Feeding the sharks changes their behavior,'' Herzing said. "It's just like feeding bears at Yellowstone. It makes them associate humans with food. It makes them more aggressive. It endangers people.''
Dr. George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History, and a world authority on sharks, said there have been more than two dozen injuries involving shark-feeding dives.
Dr. Burgess opposes all shark feeding, not because of the danger but because it trains sharks to expect food from people and not to fear them.
He said: "They lose their natural caution around human beings. For the same reason on land, you don't feed alligators or bears. It's changing the behaviour of sharks and the ecology by concentrating sharks in one area."
by LAMAR BENNINGTON @ CDNN - CYBER DIVER News Network
