YouTubers keep night watch over shark stuck in Busan canal, endangered dusky shark has drawn 1.6 million visitors since 18 September
105 officials from seven agencies mind her by day while visitors' torches do the damage at night
Images
L-R YouTubers Kim Jong-hwan, Choi Won-jin, Na Tae Soo and Kim Jong-hwan who have been keeping watch over the 3.5-metre shark trapped in a canal in Busan, South Korea. Composite: Supplied/ Yonhap News Agency
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Visitors watch the shark trapped in a waterway in the south-eastern port city of Busan. Photograph: Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images
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Crowds flock to the waterfront park in Busan to see the shark. Photograph: YONHAP/EPA
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This aerial photo taken on 29 September shows the South Korean Coast Guard boats spraying water in an attempt to guide the shark back to the sea. Photograph: YONHAP/AFP/Getty Images
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A female dusky shark has been trapped in a canal in the South Korean port city of Busan since 18 September. A month later she is still there, and after dark her welfare rests less with the authorities than with YouTubers in hi-vis vests who livestream the waterway through the night.
The shark, nicknamed Bukang-i after the city's North Port, has drawn more than 1.6 million visitors to a park that used to count about 2,000 people on a busy Saturday. Authorities have twice tried to guide her back out to sea, and a third attempt is scheduled for Wednesday afternoon. Korean media report that 105 officials from seven agencies are minding the animal, with a team on standby to reach the water within three minutes. Choi Won-jin, who has run a YouTube channel covering trending issues for ten years, disputes those figures — after dark, he says, the watch is almost entirely up to him and a handful of volunteers. In South Korea such groups are called jagyeongdan, a word that sits somewhere between a vigilante group and a neighbourhood watch.
The crowds themselves are the hazard. Visitors shine torches, fishing lamps and campsite lights into the water — Koreans online call them "lantern villains" — and the shark thrashes when they do. Na Tae-soo, a YouTuber who lives by the canal, asks them to switch the lights off, and says most people comply. His footage captured her twisting sharply away from a beam at 2am and striking the side of the canal; the national fisheries science institute has since confirmed an abrasion on her snout and says a visitor's torch likely startled her into the injury. One night Choi's livestream caught a man tipping food waste into the water.
The park closes to the public between midnight and five in the morning, a closure the YouTubers say is impossible to enforce across a park that size. Some of their streams have been watched hundreds of thousands of times. The species is classed as endangered worldwide.
The third attempt to guide her back out to sea is due on Wednesday afternoon. Nobody has seen the shark feed.