No Go on Fisheries Sharksmart Tracking Feature

If you were wondering whatever happened to Fisheries’ Sharksmart website (the one that promised to share its real time shark tracking in November last year) well, wonder no more – according to Perth Now, Fisheries have dropped the ball on that one and won’t be adding it to its features anytime soon due to ‘publishing protocols’. The Sharksmart website, developed on a whopping budget of $200,000 is yet to figure out how to share its shark tagging detection data to keep our beaches safe. (We've got a few ideas!)

WA Fisheries Sharksmart website will not feature live shark tracking information

While the website does link to @SLSA’s Twitter feed for its shark sighting info, visitors still don’t get a visual location which is tricky for tourists or people who are generally unfamiliar with an area. To help out, iKoast will continue to pin these sightings on our map and retweet it out to the community so they've got a visual reference. We hope that when Sharksmart’s live tracking does eventually kick in, it’ll have the right features and functionality beachgoers can actually rely on.

All’s not lost though, updates to Sharksmart’s website will include some cool features like 23 voiced animations, showing the movement of tagged white sharks off the WA coast and a research data map of all detections recorded by the Department of Fisheries’ Shark Monitoring Network and Cockburn Sound array. This data will be helpful giving beachgoers a snapshot of shark detections much like iKoast’s historical alerts. 

Fisheries if you're reading this - we'd love to tee up!