“It is quite obvious that beachgoers and beach recreation will become safer with the shark-mitigation technologies, but it is also important for us not to disturb the marine life in general,” says Nabin Sharma, a lecturer at the University of Technology at Sydney. “This is a win-win situation for both sharks and humans.”

One example of Australia’s heightened shark surveillance involves drones that conduct hourly patrols over 40 beaches in New South Wales and eight beaches in Queensland on the country’s east coast. The devices have a maximum flight time of 28 minutes and spend the rest of each hour on standby. In addition to identifying swimming hazards like rip currents, a dozen of these drones carry an AI algorithm called Shark Spotter, which can tell the difference between objects such as swimmers, surfers, boats, rays, dolphins, and sharks.

Developed by the start-up The Ripper Group and underwritten by Australia’s Westpac Bank, the drone’s algorithm was trained to recognize different objects based on examples culled from drone camera footage taken over Australia beaches. “It is not expected that an AI system will work straight away after deployment, as there are many unknown scenarios,” says Sharma, who works with Michael Blumenstein and other AI researchers at the University of Technology at Sydney. “It will become better and more accurate based on further fine-tuning.”

Another shark-surveillance system, called Clever Buoy and developed by the Perth-based Smart Marine Systems (SMS), relies upon underwater sonar arrays to send out acoustic pulses and return an echo of nearby objects. The active sonar can track any sizable marine animal within a certain radius, unlike the passive acoustic systems that many shark researchers use to track specific sharks tagged with transmitters. “What we’re developing is a pattern-recognition algorithm for the ocean,” says Craig Anderson, the cofounder and executive director of SMS. Each animal in the ocean, down to the subspecies level, Anderson says, “has its own unique fingerprint, and that fingerprint is the way it swims.”

If the system’s pattern-recognition software identifies the object’s unique swimming motion as belonging to a large shark—as opposed to a dolphin or stingray—the Clever Buoy texts an alert to lifeguards. The text prompts them to open a mobile app that reveals more information about the shark’s size and allows them to track the shark’s location with updated GPS coordinates.

In 2015, Australia’s New South Wales government announced a five-year commitment to install Clever Buoy at beaches on the east coast. The system has been deployed at Bondi Beach, one of Australia’s most iconic beaches near Sydney, along with City Beach, the main beach for the city of Perth on the west coast. The system has also provided temporary protection during World Surf League championship rounds held in Australia and South Africa.