A mako shark caught off El Quseir on the Red Sea has exposed a crisis far beyond a single animal’s appearance near shore, fueling disputes among marine experts, divers, and officials over how the incident was handled, and the fate of a long-stalled government project to monitor and track sharks.
Experts say the incident points to the absence of a clear scientific system for managing shark sightings near shore, despite repeated attacks in the Red Sea over the past two decades and a government tracking project that has stalled for years.
Video clips spread on social media showing the mako shark being chased near a beach in El Quseir before being caught. Some saw the chase as an attempt to protect beachgoers; specialists described it as a haphazard and unscientific response to a marine creature rarely seen near shore.
The controversy escalated after the National Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries published a statement last Saturday criticizing the handling of the incident as “environmentally and scientifically unacceptable behavior,” saying authorities should follow precise scientific protocols when dealing with large marine creatures, rather than rely on chases and individual improvisation. The statement was deleted hours later. Institute president Abeer Munir declined to comment on why.
The Ministry of Environment did not respond to questions about the fate of its shark-tracking project, launched three years ago, while Red Sea Protectorates director Ahmed Ghallab had not responded to Al Manassa’s calls and messages by the time of publication.
“The system is the problem”
Marine environment experts said the real problem is not the presence of sharks in the Red Sea, where they are a natural part of the ecosystem, but the absence of clear scientific management when they approach shore.
Yasser Bahaa, director of the Aquanaut Red Sea diving center, told Al Manassa that professional divers do not treat sharks as a panic situation, since they do not usually attack humans deliberately, and that many incidents are linked to random movements by swimmers and snorkelers that attract sharks’ attention.
The larger problem, he explained, is the lack of coordination among responsible bodies, including natural protectorates, the Ministry of Environment, and diving tourism chambers. Each authority operates separately, leaving no unified system for managing such incidents, Bahaa added.
The stalled shark-tracking project
Marine experts who spoke to Al Manassa said the solution is not catching sharks haphazardly, but building a real monitoring system to understand their behavior and predict their movements, the stated purpose of a program that has been stalled for years.
The shark behavior monitoring and tracking program was halted last year, three years after its launch, despite millions of pounds being allocated to it, according to a source familiar with the biodiversity file at the Ministry of Environment who previously spoke to Al Manassa.
Contracts were signed for 50 modern tracking devices worth 5.5 million Egyptian pounds, but only three were installed. The rest remain in storage. The source attributed the project’s collapse to “the poor competence of a foreign expert” brought in at the outset, who was later replaced. No alternative plan was announced, and three years later, the project has still not resumed.
Mahmoud Fouad, a former official in the nature conservation sector, was blunt in his assessment. Official bodies treat each incident in isolation, without an integrated scientific database to support decision-making. The same pattern of “shark incident, a chase, then media statements” has repeated since 2006, he said, without a genuine response framework being built.
Fouad said universities and specialized institutes should lead scientific research, while executive bodies should limit their role to management and regulation.
On the tracking project specifically, he said: “We have not seen a single scientific report clarifying the results of the tracking devices. The file is managed with a one-man mentality, and this will not produce results. You cannot convince a fisherman of the danger of his actions if you do not have scientifically supported information.”
The shark’s condition
The results of the shark’s dissection, according to Mahmoud Maati, professor of marine biology at the Marine Sciences Institute in Hurghada, revealed the fish was severely underfed.
“We found that the liver did not exceed 4.5 kilograms against a total weight of 160 kilograms. It should normally account for 15% to 20% of body weight, and the stomach was completely empty,” Maati said. “The shark was dying of hunger.”
Maati said mako sharks typically live in deep waters away from humans, making the shark’s appearance in a shallow area used by children unusual. But he criticized the decision to catch it without consulting specialists, saying such cases demand a calmer, more organized response.
Mahmoud Hanafi, professor of marine environment at Suez Canal University, took a more measured view, saying the decision to dissect the shark was made by specialists with relevant expertise and that nature reserve teams are trained to deal with such incidents.
Hanafi told Al Manassa that catching the shark before it posed a danger gave a negative impression of how Egyptians deal with marine life. “It would have been better to try to return it to deep waters,” he said, “but at the same time the shark had clear problems, like severe hunger and abnormal behavior, so people had genuine fear for the children.”
Environmental and economic losses
Ayman Taher, an ecotourism and Red Sea diving expert, criticized the handling of the endangered species, which is listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Killing and dissecting such creatures, he said, represents “a grave environmental and economic loss.”
Taher told Al Manassa that sharks are central to diving tourism in the Red Sea. A single week-long safari trip costs about 1,200 euros per person, he said, while studies in the Brothers Islands area south of Hurghada found that one shark can generate about two million euros a year through wildlife-watching trips alone.
Over the past two decades, various areas of the Red Sea have witnessed shark attacks, including incidents in Marsa Alam, Hurghada, Sharm El-Sheikh, and El Quseir, which have left deaths and injuries among Egyptians and tourists alike and entrenched widespread public fear.
