TOPICS: Our 5 most deadly

You can’t be completely sure. It didn’t show up with a birth certificate stating its parents were Jaws and Greg Norman. 

But the CSIRO’s Barry Bruce told the Newcastle Herald that photos taken on the lake by fisherfolk did indeed show the apex predator.

White sharks aren’t new to Hunter waterways. The Stockton bight is a known white shark nursery.

But it got us thinking: what are the Hunter’s five deadliest creatures? The great white would top local charts, wouldn’t it? 

Here’s our best guess.

1. Great white shark: Needs no introduction. While attacks on humans are rare, they’re found from Hawks Nest to Lake Macquarie and you wouldn’t fancy fighting one.

2. Eastern brown snake: While the Nobbys breakwall isn’t quite teeming with them, they’re certainly there. A metre-long juvenile slithered out from rocks in January and brought walkers to a standstill.

3. Blue-ringed octopus: We didn’t know until recently that this rock pool-dweller was in the Hunter, but it’s apparently a regular sight near the Pipeline dive spot in Port Stephens. Tiny, with skin that lights up like neon, it’s one of the world’s most venomous creatures.

4. Leopard seal: More seasonal visitor than resident threat, this Antarctic native migrates our way for sunny winter holidays and hauls itself ashore.

With a taste for other seals and dogs that stray too close, it should be left to soak up the rays.

5. Bull shark: These estuary explorers send chills through Lake Macquarie locals with each sighting, and round out a list dominated by ocean-dwellers. Hunter surfers took a collective intake of breath this year when a bull shark seriously wounded Glen ‘‘Lenny’’ Folkard at Redhead beach.

Do you agree with our list?

OK, what are your five deadliest Hunter creatures?

Celebrity spotting in Lake Macquarie

YOU know that one person you always see at the shops? For us that’s Greg Piper, if you count ‘‘the shops’’ as Lake Macquarie. 

Seriously, 80per cent of the times we’ve been there, whether for council meetings, to get an ice-cream or to run a half marathon (he nodded to us from the crowd, curtly), we’ve seen the former mayor.

So we’re pleased to find out it’s not just us.

Ross Wylde-Browne snapped this candid one of Mr Piper at the weekend’s Rathmines Catalina Festival.

‘‘I thought you might like this photo of Greg Piper waiting for the Catalina to arrive,’’ says Ross. ‘‘He left his hat in the car and the sun was getting to him so the photographer lent him his hat and then put the cooler bag on his own head.’’

Is there a Hunter celebrity who you see all the time?

Faking it

HOW many $100 notes flitted across the Hunter yesterday? 

Probably fewer than any other note – it’s a pain when someone pulls out that slip of green at the counter and needs a ton of change.

However many notes were pulled from wallets, one in particular caught the attention of George Matheson. It had been handed over in his Stroud Newsagency by a man on a motorbike.

Something wasn’t right.

‘‘I picked it up, wet my fingers and a bit of it came off,’’ Mr Matheson said.

‘‘Not that long ago we had an armed robbery, so I thought ‘Not another thing’.’’

Luckily, the man rode back through town. He was dismayed when Mr Matheson confronted him about the counterfeit note.

‘‘It just about blew him over when I told him,’’ the newsagent said.

‘‘The bloke showed me his withdrawal slip, how he’d got it from Warringah Mall in Sydney.’’

It seems we can infer two things.

One: the guy made a genuine mistake (he quickly gave Mr Matheson a genuine note).

Two: counterfeit notes probably aren’t a widespread problem.

But perhaps they’re more common than we thought. 

Have you ever been given fake money?