Juvenile great whites aren’t looking to eat people. Photo: Oleksandr Sushko//Unsplash
A new study published in the journal PLOS ONE has found that juvenile great white sharks have almost no interest in eating humans.
“I think what we’ve finally done is put a nail in the coffin for the old myth that if you’re in the water with a white shark, it’s going to attack you,” study co-author Chris Lowe, a marine biologist at California State University, Long Beach, told Live Science.
If you surf around Southern California, there’s a decent chance you’ve surfed with great whites nearby. There’s also a good chance that you already know that, but sometimes pushing something to the back of your mind and burying it makes life a little easier. A couple of years ago, I was surfing junk waves in Manhattan Beach when a juvenile white cruised under my dangling legs. Everyone saw it. No one cared.
I was floored. Sure, it was a juvenile, but it was probably four feet long. No one screamed shark. No one vanished violently beneath the surface, only to reappear in a great fountain of blood. Everyone just continued bobbing around, scanning the horizon for the next junk wave as the shark weaved around us until it disappeared into the murky depths. It’s a relatively frequent occurrence in certain places and at certain times of the year, and it’s likely that it happens far more than we think.
The chances of being attacked by a shark are, as you know, slim. According to the University of Florida’s International Shark Attack File, in 2022 there were only 41 unprovoked bites and one fatality reported in the U.S. Despite the numerous reports that shark attacks are rare, the general public’s perception is still (and considering the consequences of a shark attack, this is understandable) that sharks are man-eating beasts consumed by bloodlust.
They’re not, of course. They’re just animals that have evolved to survive, and the more we’re in the water around them, the more mistakes are made. A study in 2021 found that almost all shark attacks on humans are cases of mistaken identity. The issue is, though, that when a great white gives a test bite, it’s not likely to be a little scrape.
To figure out whether we were on the menu, a researcher flew a drone over SoCal beaches for two years. They spotted the most great whites in Carpinteria, which is just south of Santa Barbara and in Del Mar, which is just north of San Diego. Both are popular surf zones. Live Science reported that, “Along those beaches, the research team spotted a human-shark interaction on 97 percent of the days they took the drone out.”
Ninety-seven percent is an extraordinarily high percentage. Far higher than you’d expect, judging from the times you actually see a shark while you’re surfing in either of those spots. But they are indeed there, and they’re there a lot.
While most of the sharks were spotted outside the surf zone, they were often within easy reach of the people in the water. Over the course of the study, however, there was only one report of a shark bite along these beaches.
It’s more likely that the juvenile sharks were looking for their more usual prey: stingrays or fish. It should be noted that the study looked at juvenile whites, and not full grown adults. Adults tend to move into deeper waters as they age, hunting seals and sea lions.
“For years, we’ve been saying we really don’t think sharks are as dangerous to people as people think or as they’ve been taught to believe,” Lowe said. “And what this research shows, for the first time, is that that’s true.”
Editor’s Note: Learn how to minimize chances of an adverse shark encounter as well as critical information about shark behavior, shark personalities, shark language, what to do in the unlikely event of a shark bite, and more in 20-plus video lessons in Ocean Ramsey’s Guide to Sharks and Safety.
