New data reinforces the idea of a recent downward trend for unprovoked shark attacks following decades of incremental rise. The International Shark Attack File (ISAF), collated by Florida Museum, reveals 57 unprovoked bites in 2022, of which five were fatal. This is below the ten-year average of 74.
“Over the past four or five years, the numbers do seem to be tilting downwards, but it’s not enough to be statistically significant,” says ISAF program director Gavin Naylor. “If it’s correct, a very obvious reason is that there’s fewer sharks in the water. We know from fishing and by-catch statistics that the number of most species of sharks has dropped precipitously over the last 40 or 50 years.”
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Indeed, a study published in the journal Nature in 2021 found that “since 1970, the global abundance of oceanic sharks and rays has declined by 71 per cent owing to an 18-fold increase in relative fishing pressure.”
“All other variables being equal, we’d expect shark bites to go down equivalently,” says Naylor. “But we don’t see that.”
The effect of fewer sharks may be clouded by an increase in the number of people using the sea recreationally, improvements in safety protocols, or changes in shark distributions, for example. Naylor also notes that the dataset is likely to over-represent attacks in the US and Australia at the expense of regions that lack mechanisms for recording bites.
“Disentangling any of this data from the unimaginably complex background noise is just about impossible," says naturalist and shark enthusiast Steve Backshall. “Next year could have zero fatalities, it could have 20, and that wouldn’t necessarily tell us a great deal. Probably the only year when you can draw direct correlation between big picture events and shark bite statistics is 2020, when recorded bites were lower down to travel and water use being reduced during the pandemic.”
Backshall stresses that the risk to individual humans remains vanishingly small. “You’re more likely to be killed taking a selfie, and hundreds of times more likely to be struck by lightning.”
Main image: According to the University of Florida’s International Shark Attack File, none of Florida’s 16 unprovoked bites in 2022 were fatal, but two — likely from bull sharks — required medical treatment. © Gerard Soury/Getty