Unfortunately, we’ve reported a lot of shark attacks recently. I think most people believe any increase in shark attacks over the past 80 years is largely a result of more humans in the water – diving, surfing, swimming, riding their YoBro Boards, etc. However, marine biologist Scoresby Shepherd has a different idea. He thinks the increase in shark attacks is due to prey-switching.
Prey-switching is when a predator shifts from one prey to another. Shepherd believes that the decline in sharks’ natural prey – like tuna – means they gotta look elsewhere for food. And to sharks, according to Shepherd, we look like great big, juicy meat sandwiches.
[Via Scuba Gypsy]
1. Well, how many shart attacks are there a year where the shark actually eats the person? The international shark attack file lists a total of 1969 unprovoked (I need to check their definition, I think) attacks, of which 464 were fatal. This is over 424 years. It seems that we would have to make some interesting assumptions about shark diet, population, range, and frequency of feeding to link the frequency of shark attacks to anything other than increased availability of people.
Again, the International Shark Attack File carries data up through 2004, and it has some interesting statistics.
http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/Sharks/Statistics/statistics.htm
Posted at 5:46PM on Oct 19th 2005 by mccand