Sharjah 24 – AFP: "They're basically curtains of death," said shark diver Walter Bernardis as he reached over the side of his zodiac inflatable boat to pull up a net bobbing in eastern South Africa's subtropical waters.
The 200-metre (-yard) stretch of mesh is meant to protect swimmers basking on the eastern coast's palm-lined beaches from shark attacks.
But conservationists say the nets trap any large animal that swims too close to shore, making no distinction between sharks, dolphins, dugongs, sea turtles and whales.
"They're a passive system that has been put in the water and everything that puts its head in that net dies," said Bernardis, who quit a teaching job to bring tourists face-to-face with sharks and set the record straight about the fish.
The predators gained a bad name in the 1950s, when a string of deadly attacks prompted people to desert the popular white sand beaches in KwaZulu-Natal province, which now draws more than six million visitors each year.
Steven Spielberg's 1975 thriller "Jaws" compounded fears by gripping the public imagination with incorrect representations of sharks as human flesh-eaters.
Alarmed, the provincial tourist industry set out to keep sharks away from skittish beachgoers.
Today 37 beaches are lined with nets and baited drum lines, spread over more than 300 kilometres (190 miles) north and south of the provincial capital Durban.
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