Brutal discovery at Aussie beach prompts $5,200 fine warning: 'Foolish behaviour'
Posting to social media on Tuesday, a Queensland woman questioned the presence of the shark remains at a beach in Townsville in the state's northeast — prime croc country. Vision shows a large-looking shark torso, headless and without a tail.
Speaking to Yahoo News Australia, Dr Leonardo Guida, shark campaign manager at the Australian Marine Conservation Society, said though the animal in question was butchered to the point it was unidentifiable, killing big sharks in the state is strictly forbidden.
"It's illegal in Queensland waters for a recreational fisher to retain a shark over 1.5 metres," he explained, adding the law is in place to protect mature and breeding individuals.
Size limits exist because larger sharks are usually apex predators, crucial for controlling prey populations and ensuring a healthy marine environment. Bigger sharks are often older and more mature, contributing significantly to reproduction. Protecting them helps sustain populations.
Conversationists say that ensuring only smaller, younger sharks are taken allows populations to replenish and prevents overfishing.
But, that's not the only issue with this scenario. In Queensland, leaving fish remains on beaches is strongly discouraged due to environmental and safety concerns.
Improper disposal of fish scraps can attract predators such as crocodiles, especially in northern regions, posing significant risks to public safety.
In response to such dangers, Queensland has enacted laws imposing substantial fines on individuals who discard fish scraps in areas inhabited by saltwater crocodiles.
Leaving scraps or animal remains in areas inhabited by saltwater crocodiles can result in an on-the-spot fine of $483. More severe penalties may apply if the action is deemed to intentionally feed or attract crocodiles, with fines reaching up to $5,222.
While Townsville isn't as densely populated with crocodiles as some areas further north, such as Cairns or Cape York, it is firmly within crocodile territory, and locals are accustomed to living with the predators.
Responding to the woman's post online, a number of locals said they thought the Townsville killing was "a crime". And while it may be, depending on the kind — some sharks species are protected, and killing them is unlawful — and the size, it appears in this case it might have just been a poor idea, Guida said.
"Irresponsibly disposing of an animal's body can result in potentially dangerous situations because of a carcasses attracting predators. Any large whole carcasses or remains should be reported to the appropriate authorities for further instruction," he told Yahoo.
"Personally, I wouldn't target sharks for a feed as there's far more environmentally sustainable choices on offer, that are a great fishing experience.
"Secondly when you do fish, you should only take what you need. The GoodFish [website] is a great resource to understand what sustainable seafood choices there are."
Last year, authorities issued a desperate warning against what they described as "foolish behaviour" near the water's edge in croc country.
Officers with the Queensland Department of Environment, Science, Tourism and Innovation (DETSI) said they'd received multiple, separate reports of crocodiles "hanging around" boat ramps waiting to be fed, after learning to expect discarded remains at popular fishing spots.
Fishermen's 'foolish' act at boat ramp in croc country
Sinister discovery in Aussie waterway sparks $36,000 fine
Rare crocodile moment captured in confronting drone footage
DETSI director Lindsay Delzoppo urged fishers to take their scraps with them. "Many fishers clean their catch at boat ramps and throw the heads and frames away at the water's edge, thinking they are doing the right thing by 'recycling', but this should never be done in croc country," he said.
"This foolish behaviour... needs to stop. People should dispose of fish frames and unwanted bait away from the water, because crocodiles have an amazing sense of smell and will be attracted to come along for a feed."
Love Australia's weird and wonderful environment? 🐊🦘😳 Get our new newsletter showcasing the week's best stories.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
15 hours ago
- Yahoo
The 21-year-old male research assistant behind 'mankeeping' on what the current discourse gets wrong
Men are feeling called out. Women are feeling fed up. But Stanford undergrad Dylan Vergara is just following the data. Since the term "mankeeping' was introduced in a 2024 research paper by Stanford University sociologist Angelica Ferrara, it has landed squarely in the 2025 zeitgeist. Referring to the emotional labor that women often do for their male partners, the concept has since polarized the sexes, sparked TikTok debates and inspired comment-section screeds. Think: wives who are their husbands' best friends, romantic partners and therapists. After learning about mankeeping from social media or buzzy articles, many women have felt seen, vindicated — finally, a word to describe the hard-to-quantify exhaustion of being in a heterosexual relationship! Many men, on the other hand, felt that they were being unfairly accused of over-burdening their female counterparts — or that normal relationship behavior was being vilified (comments sections offer evidence). For academics like Ferrara and her research assistant, Dylan Vergara, it's a big deal for their study to become part of the cultural conversation. But alongside the hype come myths and misunderstandings. We examined the comments from men (and women) and spoke to Vergara, a 21-year-old (male) Stanford student getting his bachelor's in political science and his master's in sociology, simultaneously, about the meaning of mankeeping. The meaning Mankeeping, as Vergara and his mentor defined it, is an outgrowth of a much older term in sociology: kinkeeping. That term was coined in 1985 by Carolyn Rosenthal, whose research showed that women were far more likely to do the largely 'invisible' labor of household chores, child care and simply keeping the family together and in touch with one another. It's a familiar phenomenon that hasn't gone away and, some research suggests, only intensified with COVID and remote work. Mankeeping is the work of the same nature that women do, but in support specifically of their husbands or male partners, rather than the whole family. Specifically, it's about the way that men '[rely] on women as their predominant source of emotional support, creating undue labor on the part of women,' Vergara tells Yahoo. He and Ferrara have interviewed nearly 100 men from around the world, 'and we see that men far and wide, when naming their top five sources of social and emotional support, label their wives, girlfriends or partners as their number one,' he says. And perhaps more importantly, 'a lot of times men don't even have a top five,' he adds. So instead of having that one friend you call about your romantic woes, that other you text whenever your boss is being difficult and a sibling you vent about your parents to, for many straight men, those people are all the same person: their female partner. 'There often comes an inflection point when I'm interviewing a man when they realize, 'Oh, wait, this is a lot'' that they're asking their female partners to do, says Vergara. Myth #1: Mankeeping is just describing a normal relationship It's a sentiment Vergara reports that he hears repeated frequently. 'We are not saying you shouldn't go to your partner for emotional support. Of course you should,' he says. Instead, the problem of mankeeping arises when men only talk vulnerably with their female partners. 'Because men just tend not to have as many people they can go to for support, it's creating a burden on the women in their lives, specifically,' says Vergara. 'Obviously, communication is key to a healthy relationship. But it's also important to ensure that you're not creating some extra labor on the part of the woman.' And it's not just the mankeeping paper that indicates it's good to have multiple people you can talk to — or that men tend to go to their partner for support first. The Survey Center on American Life found that 85% of married men go to their spouse for personal support before talking to any friends or relatives, compared to 72% of married women. And while emotional connection and sharing are part of good relationships, research suggests that at a certain point emotional labor can exhaust people and put them at greater risk of mental and physical health problems. Conversely, people with more close friends are less at risk for depression, multiple diseases and death, from any cause. In other words, there's evidence to suggest that more friends would be good for men, and distributing the emotional support would be good for their female counterparts. Myth #2: Mankeeping is the result of personal failings It's easy to blame the individual men for leaning too heavily on their female partners, but the researchers think the root cause of mankeeping lies beyond their control. 'We too often view isolation as something that's an individual's fault,' says Vergara. 'But it's more of a structural issue.' Mankeeping, he and Ferrara argue, is a result of the much-talked-about male loneliness epidemic. Vergara points out that there used to be many men-only social spaces: barbershops, men's clubs, pubs, fraternities. 'Although we don't endorse patriarchal structures that exclude women, the degradation of those places has had a key detrimental effect on men's ability to seek out friendships with other men,' he says. What was once a bustling social infrastructure for men's friendships has all but disappeared. 'That's led to this female curation of male social and emotional well-being,' says Vergara. The point then is that men's loneliness isn't simply an isolated failing of each guy, nor even of the male species as a whole. Ferrara and Vergara's research — which started by tracing male friendship and social habits throughout history — suggests that it 'affects women and the entire infrastructure of men and women together,' says Vergara. And, other scholars have argued, while women certainly can (and arguably should) care about men's loneliness problem, that doesn't mean they are responsible for fixing it. Myth #3: Men who respect women never mankeep Vergara is a student of feminist literature (among other things), and describes himself as 'very fortunate' to have grown up with parents who each have their own close social circles. Though he did feel lonely when he first arrived at Stanford, Vergara considers himself highly social and has a robust circle of friends. But after he and his mentor published their paper, one of Vergara's male friends called him out: 'He said, 'You also do mankeeping!'' recalls Vergara. The friend pointed out that Vergara told details of his life to a female friend he'd only known for six months that he'd never shared with him, a friend of several years. 'I was relying on my female friend to be that emotional support. I was being that guy,' says Vergara. The moment inspired Vergara to try to treat both his male and female friends better, by opening up more to the men in his life, and burdening the women less. How does he burden the women less? How does any man do it? There isn't a terribly specific prescription yet (though there are men's retreats, and lots of online support groups to sift through). But Vergara, personally, is trying to build a strong foundation. 'I'm trying to just watch myself for moments when I might be guilty of mankeeping,' he says. 'But the deeper strategy is to formulate and maintain close bonds with people other than your partner.' Vergara doesn't have a partner, but he's building the friend sector steadily and practicing being the first one to reach out to male friends in particular. 'I think that goes a long way to ensuring you have multiple pathways for emotional support, so you're not burdening one specific person. I think that's my path forward,' he says.
Yahoo
19 hours ago
- Yahoo
The 21-year-old male research assistant behind 'mankeeping' on what the current discourse gets wrong
Men are feeling called out. Women are feeling fed up. But Stanford undergrad Dylan Vergara is just following the data. Since the term "mankeeping' was introduced in a 2024 research paper by Stanford University sociologist Angelica Ferrara, it has landed squarely in the 2025 zeitgeist. Referring to the emotional labor that women often do for their male partners, the concept has since polarized the sexes, sparked TikTok debates and inspired comment-section screeds. Think: wives who are their husbands' best friends, romantic partners and therapists. After learning about mankeeping from social media or buzzy articles, many women have felt seen, vindicated — finally, a word to describe the hard-to-quantify exhaustion of being in a heterosexual relationship! Many men, on the other hand, felt that they were being unfairly accused of over-burdening their female counterparts — or that normal relationship behavior was being vilified (comments sections offer evidence). For academics like Ferrara and her research assistant, Dylan Vergara, it's a big deal for their study to become part of the cultural conversation. But alongside the hype come myths and misunderstandings. We examined the comments from men (and women) and spoke to Vergara, a 21-year-old (male) Stanford student getting his bachelor's in political science and his master's in sociology, simultaneously, about the meaning of mankeeping. The meaning Mankeeping, as Vergara and his mentor defined it, is an outgrowth of a much older term in sociology: kinkeeping. That term was coined in 1985 by Carolyn Rosenthal, whose research showed that women were far more likely to do the largely 'invisible' labor of household chores, child care and simply keeping the family together and in touch with one another. It's a familiar phenomenon that hasn't gone away and, some research suggests, only intensified with COVID and remote work. Mankeeping is the work of the same nature that women do, but in support specifically of their husbands or male partners, rather than the whole family. Specifically, it's about the way that men '[rely] on women as their predominant source of emotional support, creating undue labor on the part of women,' Vergara tells Yahoo. He and Ferrara have interviewed nearly 100 men from around the world, 'and we see that men far and wide, when naming their top five sources of social and emotional support, label their wives, girlfriends or partners as their number one,' he says. And perhaps more importantly, 'a lot of times men don't even have a top five,' he adds. So instead of having that one friend you call about your romantic woes, that other you text whenever your boss is being difficult and a sibling you vent about your parents to, for many straight men, those people are all the same person: their female partner. 'There often comes an inflection point when I'm interviewing a man when they realize, 'Oh, wait, this is a lot'' that they're asking their female partners to do, says Vergara. Myth #1: Mankeeping is just describing a normal relationship It's a sentiment Vergara reports that he hears repeated frequently. 'We are not saying you shouldn't go to your partner for emotional support. Of course you should,' he says. Instead, the problem of mankeeping arises when men only talk vulnerably with their female partners. 'Because men just tend not to have as many people they can go to for support, it's creating a burden on the women in their lives, specifically,' says Vergara. 'Obviously, communication is key to a healthy relationship. But it's also important to ensure that you're not creating some extra labor on the part of the woman.' And it's not just the mankeeping paper that indicates it's good to have multiple people you can talk to — or that men tend to go to their partner for support first. The Survey Center on American Life found that 85% of married men go to their spouse for personal support before talking to any friends or relatives, compared to 72% of married women. And while emotional connection and sharing are part of good relationships, research suggests that at a certain point emotional labor can exhaust people and put them at greater risk of mental and physical health problems. Conversely, people with more close friends are less at risk for depression, multiple diseases and death, from any cause. In other words, there's evidence to suggest that more friends would be good for men, and distributing the emotional support would be good for their female counterparts. Myth #2: Mankeeping is the result of personal failings It's easy to blame the individual men for leaning too heavily on their female partners, but the researchers think the root cause of mankeeping lies beyond their control. 'We too often view isolation as something that's an individual's fault,' says Vergara. 'But it's more of a structural issue.' Mankeeping, he and Ferrara argue, is a result of the much-talked-about male loneliness epidemic. Vergara points out that there used to be many men-only social spaces: barbershops, men's clubs, pubs, fraternities. 'Although we don't endorse patriarchal structures that exclude women, the degradation of those places has had a key detrimental effect on men's ability to seek out friendships with other men,' he says. What was once a bustling social infrastructure for men's friendships has all but disappeared. 'That's led to this female curation of male social and emotional well-being,' says Vergara. The point then is that men's loneliness isn't simply an isolated failing of each guy, nor even of the male species as a whole. Ferrara and Vergara's research — which started by tracing male friendship and social habits throughout history — suggests that it 'affects women and the entire infrastructure of men and women together,' says Vergara. And, other scholars have argued, while women certainly can (and arguably should) care about men's loneliness problem, that doesn't mean they are responsible for fixing it. Myth #3: Men who respect women never mankeep Vergara is a student of feminist literature (among other things), and describes himself as 'very fortunate' to have grown up with parents who each have their own close social circles. Though he did feel lonely when he first arrived at Stanford, Vergara considers himself highly social and has a robust circle of friends. But after he and his mentor published their paper, one of Vergara's male friends called him out: 'He said, 'You also do mankeeping!'' recalls Vergara. The friend pointed out that Vergara told details of his life to a female friend he'd only known for six months that he'd never shared with him, a friend of several years. 'I was relying on my female friend to be that emotional support. I was being that guy,' says Vergara. The moment inspired Vergara to try to treat both his male and female friends better, by opening up more to the men in his life, and burdening the women less. How does he burden the women less? How does any man do it? There isn't a terribly specific prescription yet (though there are men's retreats, and lots of online support groups to sift through). But Vergara, personally, is trying to build a strong foundation. 'I'm trying to just watch myself for moments when I might be guilty of mankeeping,' he says. 'But the deeper strategy is to formulate and maintain close bonds with people other than your partner.' Vergara doesn't have a partner, but he's building the friend sector steadily and practicing being the first one to reach out to male friends in particular. 'I think that goes a long way to ensuring you have multiple pathways for emotional support, so you're not burdening one specific person. I think that's my path forward,' he says. Solve the daily Crossword
Buzz Feed
2 days ago
- Buzz Feed
This Australian Household Cleaner Will Be Your New BFF
Often in my research (and daily life), I come across cleaning products that claim to be multipurpose but really only work efficiently for one or two kinds of messes and stains — so I am used to approaching such declarations with skepticism. But every once in a while I stumble upon a truly effective, versatile product that warrants high praise, as is the case with Gumption cleaning paste. I first encountered this Australian household cleaning staple a few years ago when I first started dating my (Aussie) partner, Veronica, who would whip it out from under her sink to tackle everything from dirty, stained dishes to scrubbing the bathtub. There is really nothing this amazing product can't clean, and luckily for those of us who live stateside, it's available on Amazon for only $22. This cleaning wunderkind couldn't be easier to use. It comes as a concentrated powder that you apply to a damp cloth or sponge to quickly and efficiently wipe away stains and filth. It's formulated with natural abrasive particles that somehow are able to clean even the most intense of messes without causing scratches or damage. Like most Australians, Veronica swears by it for just about everything but is particularly enthusiastic about Gumption's dish-cleaning prowess. She says, 'It works like magic, there is nothing it cannot remove. It makes stainless steel shiny and removes all food that might be very tough to clean and stuck. It essentially exfoliates everything away — your pots and pans will be sparkling clean.' She does not, however, recommend using it on items with non-stick coating, as it is slightly abrasive. This international cleaning product has flown under the radar in the U.S., but it's long overdue for its moment in the sun. Those who have tried it have instantly fallen under its spell, myself included, and I have a good feeling it'll make a convert out of you posthaste if you give it a chance. Your house will be gleaming before you know it. Get it from Amazon for $22.70.
