South Korea’s most watched animal is free of her canal but not quite ready to say goodbye. Bukangi, the female dusky shark who spent more than a month trapped in an artificial waterway in Busan, has turned up two days running in the harbour, roughly two kilometres from where she was last seen.
Monitoring teams from the state fisheries research institute spotted her on Saturday and again on Sunday close to the Busan Port International Passenger Terminal. She was swimming normally and showed no wounds, the institute said. The spot is still inside the port zone, which the public cannot enter, so it does not count as open water yet.
Getting this far took patience. The shark, about three metres long, first appeared on 18 September in the shallow channel of the North Port waterfront park, where the water is only around three metres deep. Two rescue attempts failed. A third, using nets and a floating pontoon, finally pushed her out on 21 October after about eight hours, yet the next morning she squeezed past the netting and swam back inside. Officials then opened the barrier and simply waited, and on 23 October she left on her own.
Her nickname blends Bukhang, the Korean word for the North Port, with an affectionate suffix. Crowds were huge: about 1.72 million visitors came to the park between mid-September and her departure, though worries grew as the water cooled and nobody saw her feed.
Scientists suspect she made for the deeper part of the basin and then hugged the quay walls. They read her slow progress as a normal phase of getting used to a bigger space and expect her to head further out to sea in the coming days.
