The Neptune Islands
Thirty-five kilometres off the southern tip of the Eyre Peninsula, where Spencer Gulf opens into the Southern Ocean, a handful of rocky islets break the surface. Treeless, wind-scoured, uninhabited. The Neptune Islands are not a place that invites you to stay.
The seals stay. A large colony of long-nosed fur seals breeds on the rocks — one of the biggest colonies in South Australia. And where there are seals in these numbers, there are white sharks.
Geography
The Neptune Islands split into two groups: the North Neptunes and the South Neptunes.1 The South Neptunes — particularly the main island — are where the research happens and the cage-diving boats anchor. The surrounding waters are protected as the Neptune Islands Group (Ron and Valerie Taylor) Marine Park.2
What makes the site exceptional is the collision of water masses. Cold, nutrient-rich upwellings from the Southern Ocean meet the warmer, shallower water of Spencer Gulf. The result is a dense, productive food web compressed into a small area — seals, fish, and the predators that follow them.
The seal colony
Fur seals explain the sharks. The colony is large enough and consistent enough to make the Neptune Islands a reliable aggregation point for white sharks across seasons and years. Other seal colonies exist along the southern coast — Dangerous Reef, the Pages Islands, sites in Victoria and Western Australia — but none of them have the combination that the Neptunes offer: prey, water clarity for underwater observation, and twenty-plus years of continuous research at the same site.
Rodney Fox
The modern history starts with an attack. In 1963, Rodney Fox was mauled by a great white — 462 stitches, one of the most documented shark attacks in history.3 He didn't leave the water. He went back. Over the following decades he pioneered cage-diving in Australia, opened the Neptune Islands to researchers and filmmakers, and eventually built a commercial operation that brought paying passengers face to face with white sharks.
His son Andrew took it further.4 With Andrew Fox, Rodney Fox, and Dr Rachel Robbins, the Fox Shark Research Foundation became the institutional home for one of the longest-running white shark photo-ID programmes in the world.5 Charlie Huveneers and the Southern Shark Ecology Group at Flinders University provided the academic framework.6 Together they have produced peer-reviewed research on residency, behaviour, and population structure — all of it built on returning to the same site, year after year, and recognising the same animals.
Tourism and science
The cage-diving industry and the research programme share the same boats. That creates tension. The vessels that bring passengers also provide the platform for data collection. Huveneers and his colleagues have studied whether cage-diving affects shark behaviour and residency7 — a question you can only ask if you have decades of baseline data to compare against.
The Neptune Islands are not the only place white sharks are studied. But they are one of the very few places where individual white sharks are known — where the data runs deep enough that a shark can be recognised not just as a species, but as a specific animal with a specific history. That is the Foundation's contribution: twenty years of showing up.
1 Neptune Islands — Wikipedia. 2 Neptune Islands Group Marine Park — SA Marine Parks. 3 Rodney Fox — Rodney Fox Shark Expeditions. 4 Andrew Fox — Rodney Fox Shark Expeditions. 5 Fox Shark Research Foundation. 6 Professor Charlie Huveneers — Flinders University. 7 Huveneers et al. (2018) — "The influence of depth, temperature and sex on residency patterns".
The long-term study of great whites at the Neptune Islands is the work of the Fox Shark Research Foundation. Support their work.