Thursday, March 11, 2021 Illawarra and South Coast residents are being asked to share details of encounters they have had with sharks, in an effort to better understand human-shark relations. While sharks attract a great deal of interest from the public and the media, media coverage and public perception is dominated by encounters that involve shark bites, even though these are comparatively rare. Researchers at the University of Wollongong, are investigating the full spectrum of human interactions with sharks – positive, negative or mixed – and calling on members of the public to contribute their own stories to a crowdsourced map of shark encounters on the South Coast.