Black wetsuit may have triggered fatal Sydney shark attack, experts suggest

Simon Nellist was thirty-five years old and British, a diving instructor who had fallen in love with Australia six years earlier after leaving the Royal Air Force. He lived in Wolli Creek, about ten kilometers from Little Bay, and made the trip regularly to swim in the channel between Little Bay and Malabar. On Wednesday afternoon in February, he entered the water in his black wetsuit to train for the Malabar Magic Ocean Swim, scheduled for the following Sunday. A great white shark, measuring four and a half meters, attacked him near Buchan Point. He did not survive.

What made Nellist distinctive among the swimmers who used that stretch of water was the wetsuit itself. The water was warm enough that no one else wore one. Barbara, an eighty-five-year-old regular at the bay, had watched Nellist arrive for years and could always spot him immediately because of it. She told reporters she greeted him often on his visits. After the attack, she said she would keep swimming. One fatal attack in sixty years, she reasoned, was not reason enough to stop.

Expert opinion quickly converged on a theory: the shark had mistaken Nellist for a seal. Lawrence Chlebeck, a shark researcher, suggested the animal's vertical attack pattern supported this. Seals are what great whites hunt—they consume one roughly once a day. A man in a black wetsuit, seen from below in murky water, might resemble prey in a way a bare-skinned swimmer would not. This theory gained weight from the sheer ferocity of what happened. Most shark encounters with humans are brief and exploratory. Sharks bite, recognize that a human is not adequate food, and leave. Blood loss from a single bite is responsible for most fatal shark incidents in Australia, not multiple wounds from sustained attack.

Dr. Chris Pepin-Neff, a Sydney University academic who has written extensively on shark policy, placed the attack in stark context. In the last thirty years worldwide, there have been perhaps ten to twelve incidents of this magnitude—attacks of such violence and consequence. He compared it to the 2001 death of seventeen-year-old Jevan Wright, a South Australian surfer who was attacked near Port Lincoln and dragged out to sea, his remains never recovered. Attacks like these are not merely rare; they are anomalies within an already uncommon category of human-shark interaction.

Why this particular shark behaved so differently from the statistical norm remained unclear. Dr. Pepin-Neff noted that all sharks have different temperaments. Hunger might have played a role. The animal might have been passing through the area by chance, drawn by ocean currents, or simply moving through its range as these large predators do. Vanessa Pirotta, a marine scientist, told reporters that such incidents are uncommon and that the shark was almost certainly long gone by the time authorities deployed smart drum lines from Little Bay to Long Bay in search of it. These animals are capable of traveling vast distances. The official swim scheduled for Sunday was cancelled.

Nellist had been planning to marry his partner, Jessie Ho, later that year. The wedding had been postponed once already because of the pandemic. Friends described him as someone who made the earth lighter, someone for whom everything was connected to the ocean and to water. He had grown up in Penzance, in England's southwest, but had not returned home in several years. He loved diving. He loved the water. Tributes flooded social media in the days after his death, and the story of his black wetsuit—the detail that made him visible to Barbara, the detail that may have made him invisible to the shark—became the thread through which people tried to understand what had happened.