I think if people knew how frequently they were in water with sharks, they would probably be surprised.” But despite being potentially such an easy meal, sharks are really not that interested in hunting humans. “We are like helpless little sausages floating around in the water,” says Naylor.
Some mature adults will venture out into the open ocean for months at a time, covering tens of thousands of miles and diving to depths of 1,000m as they seek prey. Great whites in the North Atlantic, for example, show seasonal movement patterns, migrating thousands of miles to warmer waters further south during the winter months. But southern Australia has also seen rising numbers of fur seals along its coastline, the favourite prey of great white sharks in the region.īut there is no real evidence that sharks are actively hunting humans, according to the scientists who study them. The large human populations along the southern coast of Australia and the eastern coast of the US mean large numbers of people enjoying the water. This seems like an obvious point, but when you look closer at where attacks are taking place there are some clues as to what might be going on. “The more sharks and people there are in one place, the greater the chance of them bumping into each other.” “Shark bites are strongly correlated to the number of people and number of sharks in the water at the same time,” says Gavin Naylor, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research, which maintains the International Shark Attack File. The eastern US and southern Australia have seen shark attack rates almost double in the past 20 years, while Hawaii has also seen a sharp increase. The average number of unprovoked attacks between 2013-2017, for example, was 84.īut recent research indicates that shark attacks in some parts of the world appear to be on the rise.
It is a figure that has remained around the same level over the past decade.
Mighall was one of roughly 83 people around the world to be attacked unprovoked by sharks in 2009.
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