Festival in Papua New Guinea: sharks are lured with old songs – and killed

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Since Sunday, the city of Kono in Papua New Guinea has been celebrating its Shark Calling Festival, unique in the world. For three days it’s all about the art of shark seduction. Only here, on the west coast of the island of New Ireland, are the animals lured to the canoes by song and special rattles – and then caught with their bare hands.

“Only the ‘shark callers’ know how they do it, there are a lot of secret things involved,” says event organizer John Merebo, the German news agency. This fishing tradition has been around since humans first settled in this part of the world, he says. “The festival has always existed, but at a certain point it also became known beyond the national borders.” That was around 1975.

Tradition is passed down from generation to generation

“Sharks are hugely important to our culture,” says Merebo. “Nobody else calls them, just us.” The tradition, which prevails in the villages of Kono, Messi and Kontu, is passed down from generation to generation, from father to son. But the Hiruf is not a group event: everyone paddles alone on the Bismarck Sea – a small marginal sea in the Pacific Ocean. Some with elaborate headdresses and the body brightly painted. People are convinced: the spirits of the ancestors live in the sharks, which will protect them from all dangers if they strictly follow the rules.

A few kilometers from the coast, the men finally start singing underwater and banging rattles made of coconuts (“larung”). Some say the sharks are mesmerized by the special sound and driven right into the fishermen’s arms. However, sharks are more likely to mistake the sounds – which are carried far into the water – for those made by schools of fish.

Whoever returns with a shark is a hero

When the shark circles near the boat, the fisherman catches it with a kind of lasso from which it cannot free itself. He then kills the animal with a wooden stick. In the village, anyone who returns with a shark is celebrated as a hero. “This time, 35 shark callers are taking part in the expedition,” says Merebo. “On average about ten sharks are caught during the festival, but once, in the sixties, there were even twenty.” You never know how successful the shark callers will be: “It depends on whether they followed all the rules and fasted beforehand,” emphasizes Merebo.

Usually it’s not harmless reef sharks, but those “that come from the depths of the ocean,” says the organizer. Bull sharks for example, and often also lemon sharks. The people of New Ireland had “a remarkable bond with these majestic creatures,” news site Loop PNG wrote ahead of the festival’s launch. Since 2021, the tradition is a national event in Papua New Guinea, a country of nine million people north of Australia.

And what happens to the predatory fish? “Sharks are a delicacy here in the village,” says Merebo. “Nothing goes to waste, we eat everything from head to tail except the skin.”

But the people of Kono are worried about the future. On the one hand due to climate change, because rising sea temperatures have consequences for all ocean inhabitants. On the other hand, there are controversial deep-sea mining projects in the region.

A few years ago, the Canadian-Australian company Nautilus attempted to exploit a metal ore deposit in the Bismarck Sea containing significant amounts of copper, zinc, silver and gold. There was resistance to this on many islands in the region. The project initially failed in 2019. Some Pacific countries have since called for a halt to all such plans.

“Deep-sea mining could drastically reduce the shark population in our region,” Merebo is convinced. “The locals just don’t have the capacity to fend off the foreigners who want to mine and come with huge fishing nets.” The Shark Calling Festival therefore also wants to contribute to the protection of all marine life in the region and to educate people internationally about the dangers.

(SDA)

Source: Blick