Australia has suffered another death from a shark after a surfer was bitten in the country’s south, the fourth fatal incident in the region in 18 months.
Shark bites are often traumatic incidents and in an ocean-loving nation such as Australia, each new one can stoke fears of the marine predators.
But what do we know about the rates of shark bites in Australia, and are people’s fears warranted?
Are fatalities from shark bites on the rise?
Dr Daryl McPhee researches unprovoked shark bites at Bond University.
He says there was an average of 2.7 deaths from shark bites in Australia between 2014 and 2023, compared with 1.8 deaths in the previous decade.
He says there is a long-term trend of increasing shark bites in Australia, but it’s partly down to population growth leading to “a lot more people in the water”.
“The risk of a shark bite remains extremely low, and fatal bites are even lower,” he says.
Are there more shark bites in Australia than other countries?
In 2023, there were 10 fatal shark bites globally, with four of those occurring in Australia, and three of them off the coast of South Australia where Appleby went missing. Researchers are still checking the data for 2024.
Dr Gavin Naylor is the director of the Florida Museum of Natural History’s shark research program that coordinates the International Shark Attack File – a verified database of global shark incidents.
Naylor says that, while the data isn’t yet finalised, 2024 had been “fairly quiet” for shark bites globally.
Why does Australia see more shark deaths than other places?
“Australians are born swimming,” Naylor says. “They’re sporty and they’re out in the ocean. So it’s no surprise there are a bunch of bites. Australia will always have a higher proportion of fatal bites.”
But Naylor says Australia’s beach rescue services that are available to respond to bites are “second to none” and this likely keeps the number of fatalities down.
A 2022 study of 200 years of Australian shark bite records found a large rise in the percentage of people surviving a bite in recent decades, likely because people were in closer proximity to others that could help, they were on a surfboard or other watercraft, and emergency responses have improved.
There was an 88% chance of surviving a bite from a white shark if the person was on a watercraft, such as a kayak or surfboard, but this survival rate dropped to 45% for people swimming or diving.
What’s the risk in Australia of being killed by a shark?
The current rate of just under three deaths a year from a shark bite can be compared in Australia to the 150 deaths from drowning at coastal locations from July 2023 to June 2024, including 84 drownings at beaches.
McPhee says: “You’re about 20 times more likely to drown at a swimming beach than be killed by a shark.”
Who is most likely to be attacked by a shark?
McPhee says: “There’s a shift from it being mostly swimmers being bitten, to it being mostly surfers.”
He says surfing took off around the world after the second world war and the sport is becoming more and more popular.
“Surfers spend more time in the water, and they are out further,” he says.
Naylor notes surfers hang around surf breaks where the water is murky – the same place where sharks could be looking for food, but with poor visibility.
“Sharks then make a mistake,” he says, as they bite to investigate what they think could be food.
Research suggests that while it is not undocumented, sharks rarely deliberately target humans for food.
“If sharks did target people, there would be a lot more deaths around. But there aren’t,” Naylor says.
Why do people fear sharks if the risk is so small?
McPhee says there are four main factors that cause people to fear sharks:
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Humans are evolutionarily predisposed to fear the kind of things our ancestors feared, such as bears, snakes – and sharks.
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Fear is heightened if humans can instantly bring a hazard to mind, and he says the theme tune to the 1975 film Jaws helps people instantly picture a shark.
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Humans have a greater fear of things they think they can’t control.
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Fear is greater for things that are in the present, and media stories of shark bites bring people’s attention to them.
“There’s a reason the Discovery Channel has shark week, but not prawn week,” he says.
Dr Brianna Le Busque, of the University of South Australia, researches public perceptions of sharks.
She says people tend not to fear drowning – even though deaths far outnumber those from shark bites – “because we fear what we think we don’t have control over”.
“People know they can swim and can control their actions in the water – at least, that’s their perception.”
Her state of South Australia has seen four fatalities from sharks, including the most recent, in the past 18 months.
“There’s a thing called recency bias – we tend to remember the last thing we hear,” she says.
“It’s natural that people fear sharks, because they can hurt us. [But] our perception of the risk is distorted … if we hear about something all the time, we just think it’s more common than it is.”
