So far, there have been 37 very unfortunate individuals in 2023. They’re those who went out scuba diving, snorkeling, browsing, or in any other case venturing into the ocean and wound up victims of unprovoked shark attacks. Six of the assaults had been deadly; one led to a severed foot; others resulted in various levels of assorted accidents. Thirty-seven is a scary quantity, particularly since summer time within the Northern Hemisphere has simply begun. Final yr, there have been 81 unprovoked shark assaults reported worldwide. For the reason that starting of the twenty first century, the bloodiest yr was 2015, when 111 people—who did nothing to anger the sharks past venturing into their waters—got here beneath assault.
All of this info—and far more—is on the market on the Global Shark Attack File, which retains a operating rely and a spreadsheet of human-shark encounters going all the best way again to 1845. For the curious, studious, or merely morbid, the spreadsheet data every part from the character of the harm to the gender of the sufferer to the species of the shark to the situation of the assault, and extra. However what most individuals wish to know is much less about what occurred in many years previous and extra about what’s happening right now: How protected is it so that you can enterprise offshore this summer time with out winding up as a predator’s dinner? The reply takes some parsing.
For starters, there’s no denying that from 1950 to 2020, the overall variety of unprovoked shark assaults has risen, going from 50 in the course of the final century to over 80 in 2020—and reaching that 111 peak in 2015. So sharks are getting meaner or people are getting extra careless, or one thing else is occurring to place the 2 species in one another’s method, proper? Not essentially.
It’s not simply the uncooked variety of shark assaults that makes a distinction, however the price of shark assaults—what number of encounters per million individuals. Back in 1950, the worldwide inhabitants was 2.5 billion individuals. Today it’s simply over 8 billion. Crunch the numbers in accordance with the speed of unprovoked shark assaults per million individuals and issues keep fairly flat, with 0.012 per million in 1950 and 0.010 in 2020.
However that’s to not say there aren’t some confounding numbers within the knowledge file that consultants are at pains to clarify. From 2012 to 2022, for instance, there was a mean of 12.6 unprovoked shark assaults per billion individuals on earth, and from 1950 to 1960 the quantity was 11.8—not a lot of a distinction. Via the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties, nonetheless, the assault price plummeted, to six.5 per billion.
It’s tempting to attribute at the least a part of this to the so-called Jaws Effect, a time period coined by Christopher Neff, a public coverage professor on the College of Sydney, to clarify the general detrimental impact the film Jaws had on individuals’s opinion of sharks—and the untold variety of vacationers it drove out of the ocean. Arguing in opposition to the Jaws Impact is the truth that shark assaults had been already on the decline in 1970—5 years earlier than the film was launched on June 20, 1975—with 8.39 assaults per billion. Then again, these figures plummeted dramatically in 1976 and 1977—to five.55 and three.08 respectively, maybe reflecting the affect of the film, and bathers’ avoidance of the ocean.
“The socio-psychological saturation of the movie as each a summer time blockbuster and a psychological meme is widespread,” Neff wrote in a 2015 paper. “Importantly, many fashionable representations of sharks mirror parts from Jaws in ways in which recommend people are on the menu.”
But when sharks have gotten a bum rap on display screen—and if the precise price per million of shark assaults hasn’t risen since 1950—that’s to not say we’re not rising our possibilities of a nasty encounter after we hit the ocean. As with so many different issues, local weather change is in charge.
Learn extra: How Climate Change Is Fueling a Rise in Shark Attacks
One 2016 examine in Progress in Oceanography warned that increased ocean temperatures had been pushing shark species from the hotter, extra sparsely populated southern hemisphere to the cooler, extra crowded north—rising the percentages of shark-human encounters. What’s extra, increased temperatures additionally imply extra beach-goers and bathers, offering extra potential chum for sharks.
“Every year we should always have extra assaults than the final as a result of there’s extra people getting into the water, and extra hours spent within the water,” George Burgess, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research, told TIME when the paper was launched. Extra lately, a 2021 study in Scientific Reviews blamed local weather change—and the sharks’ seek for cooler waters—for “unprecedented sightings” of white sharks in California’s Monterey Bay.
Irrespective of how a lot we’re rising the danger of people and sharks operating afoul of each other, in a world of 8 billion individuals, the probability does stay vanishingly small of anybody particular person coming beneath assault. That’s the excellent news. The unhealthy information is that yearly, a handful of individuals do wind up on the unsuitable finish of these very lengthy odds. One of the best recommendation? Swim when you like—however do keep alert.
Extra Should-Reads From TIME
