Queensland tests acoustic alarms to ward off whales from shark nets

Queensland has begun a five-week trial of high-frequency acoustic pingers attached to shark nets off Noosa Heads to deter migrating humpback whales and reduce entanglements. The trial is a collaboration between the state government, the University of Queensland and Future Oceans, who developed the new pingers after UQ trials identified a higher-frequency signal as more effective than the device in use for the past 15 years. About 50,000 humpbacks pass the east coast annually; shark control operations coordinator Sam Fary estimates roughly 0.02 percent of whales interact with nets. University of Queensland researchers will visually monitor the nets for 10 hours daily to record whale behaviour and any net encounters.

The trial sits inside a broader, multi-million-dollar upgrade of shark control measures and is promoted as improving swimmer safety, but it draws criticism from conservationists. Humpbacks and High-rises chief Olaf Meynecke says past studies failed to show pingers reliably deter whales and notes nets kill many non-target species, estimating about 20 whale entanglements a year along the east coast and arguing nets should be removed during whale season. Future Oceans aims to refine deterrent frequencies and eventually decode whale signals to reproduce effective alert or avoidance cues; results will shape whether acoustic pingers are adopted more widely.