Are shark attacks increasing? Here’s what the data says

sSo far, there have been 37 extremely unlucky people in 2023. They are the people who go diving, snorkel, surf, or otherwise venture into the ocean and become victims of unprovoked shark attacks. Six of these attacks were fatal. One resulted in a severed foot. Others resulted in varying degrees of different injuries. Thirty-seven is a scary number, especially since summer in the northern hemisphere is just beginning. Last year, 81 unprovoked shark attacks were reported worldwide. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the deadliest year was 2015, when 111 people were attacked – doing nothing to anger sharks other than venturing into their waters.

All this information – and much more – is available at Global Shark Attack File, which keeps a running tally and spreadsheet of human shark encounters going back as far as 1845. For the curious, curious, or just obsessed, the spreadsheet records everything from the nature of the injury to the sex of the victim, shark species, to the location of the attack, and more. But what most people want to know is less about what happened in decades past and more about what’s happening today: How safe is it for you to venture outside this summer without ending up as a predator’s dinner? The answer requires some analysis.

For starters, there’s no denying that from 1950 to 2020 the total number of unprovoked shark attacks skyrocketed, rising from 50 in the middle of the last century to more than 80 in 2020 — and reaching a peak of 111 in 2015. So Sharks are getting meaner or humans are getting more careless, or something else is going on to put the two species in each other’s way, right? not necessarily.

It’s not just the raw number of shark attacks that makes a difference, however an average of shark attacks – how many encounters per million people. Back in the 1950’sthe world population was 2.5 billion people. today It’s just over 8 billion. Crunch the numbers for the rate of unprovoked shark attacks per million people and things remain fairly flat, at 0.012 per million in 1950 and 0.010 in 2020.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some confusing numbers in the data records that experts do their best to explain. From 2012 to 2022, for example, there were an average of 12.6 unprovoked shark attacks per billion people on Earth, and from 1950 to 1960 the number was 11.8 — not a huge difference. During the 1970s and 1980s, the attack rate dropped to 6.5 per billion.

It is tempting to attribute at least part of this to the so-called Jaws effecta term coined by Christopher Neff, professor of public policy at the University of Sydney, to explain the general harmful effect of film Jaws On what people think of sharks – and countless vacationers who got out of the ocean. The argument against the Jaws effect is the fact that shark attacks were already on the decline in the 1970’s – five years before the film was released in June 20, 1975– At a rate of 8.39 attacks per billion. On the other hand, these numbers dropped significantly in 1976 and 1977 – to 5.55 and 3.08 respectively, reflecting the influence of the film and the avoidance of ocean bathers.

Neff wrote “the film’s socio-psychological imbibing as both a summer blockbuster and a viral psychological meme goes viral”. In a 2015 paper. Importantly, many modern representations of sharks reflect elements of Jaws In ways that suggest humans are on the list.”

But if sharks have gotten a bad rap on screen — and if the actual rate per million shark attacks hasn’t increased since 1950 — that doesn’t mean we don’t increase our chances of a bad encounter when we hit the ocean. As with many other things, climate change is to blame.

Read more: How does climate change lead to an increase in shark attacks?

One 2016 study in Advances in Oceanography Be warned, rising ocean temperatures are pushing shark species from the warmer, less populated southern hemisphere into the cooler, more crowded north – increasing the odds of human shark encounters. Moreover, higher temperatures also mean more beachgoers and swimmers, providing more potential friendship for the sharks.

said George Burgess, director Florida Shark Research Program, for TIME when the newspaper was launched. Recently, A.J Study 2021 in Scientific reports He blamed climate change — and sharks’ search for cooler waters — for “unprecedented sightings” of great white sharks in California’s Monterey Bay.

No matter how high the risk of humans and sharks coming into conflict with each other, in a world of 8 billion people, the likelihood remains very small of anyone being attacked. This is the good news. The bad news is that every year, a handful of people end up on the wrong end of those very long odds. Best advice? Swim if you like – but stay alert.

write to Jeffrey Kluger at jeffrey.kluger@time.com.