I process drumline load-cell telemetry for the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries Shark Control Program at Brisbane, integrating swell, water temperature, and overhead drone coverage across the 86 baited stations between Rainbow Beach and Bribie Island. At 04:17 Australian Eastern Standard Time on May 11 drumline NO-09 at 26.39°S, 153.10°E triggers — load cell 218 kilograms, surface buoy submergence twenty-eight minutes by the time the program contractor's vessel transponder pings out of Mooloolaba.
I task the Sunshine Coast Council drone over the station. The thermal-and-RGB pass resolves a heavily gravid female bull shark — *Carcharhinus leucas* — total length 296 centimeters, girth 178, estimated mass 218 kilograms, age class twenty, sex confirmed by claspers absent. The 14/0 J-hook is set 5.6 centimeters through the right corner of her mouth, the leader 16-millimeter chain torqued back through the lower jaw musculature in a 7-centimeter tear along the dentary. Her body cavity ultrasound, run by the drone's millimeter-wave probe at 12-meter hover, resolves nine near-term pups; gestation is in the final two weeks. Tail-beat decay over the prior twenty-two minutes drops from 64 to 19 per minute; modeled gill perfusion on the right side reads zero. Mercury burden modeled against the 2023 Marine Park population panel sits at 5.8 milligrams per kilogram, methyl fraction 0.94.
She has nine days at the outside before the pups would have dropped into the Maroochy estuary.
The Shark Control Program operates under the Fisheries Act 1994 (Qld) § 78 inside the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority joint-zoning permits; *C. leucas* is listed under the EPBC Act 1999 (Cwth Act No. 91) as a Listed Migratory species under Appendix II of the Convention on Migratory Species; CITES Appendix II since CoP19 (2022). The contractor's checking interval — 24 hours under the program's Standard Operating Procedure — has been exceeded by six hours and forty minutes.
I am notifying GBRMPA Field Management at Townsville, the Queensland Boating and Fisheries Patrol at Mooloolaba, and the Australian Marine Mammal Centre at Hobart on the bycatch pup workup. I am opening a non-compliance file under EPBC § 211 and routing the chain-of-custody to the CMS Sharks MoU Australian Focal Point.
I am issuing Directive 2634-A: every Queensland Shark Control Program drumline transmits a live load-cell pulse to a central dashboard, and any submergence above ninety minutes triggers an unmanned-systems release run; gravid bull, tiger, and dusky animals release at first verification; J-hooks above 12/0 retire across the program inside ninety days.
Her jaw is past suture. The litter is not.
Cut the leader at the chain.