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How to Avoid Shark Attack

You’ve heard and read it a thousand times: the chances of your being killed by a shark are so tiny as to not be worth worrying about.

The odds against being attacked by a shark are nearly as long, but the issue here is as much semantic as statistical. Very, very few encounters between swimmers or snorkelers and sharks result in what could be considered an actual attack.

I think of an attack as what a grizzly bear does when she’s protecting her cubs, or what wolves, bears, and even rats do when they’re cornered or threatened. In general, sharks do not attack people; the exceptions happen mostly to scuba divers who unwittingly venture across an invisible line that a shark considers to be its territorial border and then either don’t see, don’t understand, or choose to ignore the obvious warnings issued by the shark.

When a shark feels threatened or crowded, or when it senses that its territory is being violated, its posture changes; its back hunches; its pectoral fins drop; sometimes it shakes its head back and forth; always it looks and acts agitated. It is saying—broadcasting, shouting—“Get out of here! This is my turf.” Fish get the message; they scatter and disappear into the reef. People sometimes don’t, with the result that the shark attacks: it rushes in, bites, and, usually, retreats to wait and see if the intruder withdraws.

For the most part, what we’re talking about when we use the words shark attack are really shark bites, one step in the shark’s normal feeding pattern, motivated not by rage, fear, or frenzy but by curiosity, confusion, and hunger.

Semantics aside, the chances of your being bitten by a shark are ridiculously small. If you added up the shark-bite incidents reported around the world in a given year and divided the total by the number of man-hours spent in the water, you’d get some unfathomable figure like .000003, which would enlighten you not at all.

But if you swim in the sea, there does exist a tiny chance of your being bitten by a shark. The good news is that there are ways to reduce that chance to very close to zero.

Over the past twenty-five years, in the United States and many other countries around the world, there has been a vast shift in population toward the seashore. In the U.S. alone, some 50 percent of our 280 million people now live within fifty miles of the shore. Millions of people who did not grow up near the sea and who know nothing about it are now exposing themselves to the sea, with all its beauty, power, mystery, and danger.

Many are venturing into the sea without according it respect for what it is: the largest environment on the planet, home to more animals than any other—all of which must eat in order to survive. It is an environment in which most of us are not only aliens but also clumsy and ill-equipped to survive.

And yet on every glorious day of every summer, men, women, and children around the world plunge into the sea, taking risks that they shouldn’t … most involving drowning but some involving creatures that sting, pinch, and bite. Including sharks.

That’s why I believe that practically no shark bite is unprovoked. We provoke sharks simply by going into the water, entering their feeding grounds, becoming fair game.

There are some practical steps to take to reduce the risk of shark bite, and the first requires a bit of a change in one’s worldview, a shift of focus from the utopian to the real.

These days, most of us are so rarely in danger from anything in nature that we’ve become complacent. We assume we’re safe everywhere. Australians are an exception, because they’re brought up to know that their lovely nation is home to innumerable dangerous living things. The rest of us have been conditioned to Bambi-ize the animal kingdom, so we tend to regard every animal as warm, cuddly, and friendly, or, sometimes, simply afraid of us. So little are we exposed to wild animals that we have no real knowledge of how to behave around them.

On land, our ignorance is rarely tested: deer eating flowers in the backyard aren’t a threat to life and limb. But when we choose to venture into the sea, we can’t afford to be complacent. Among the many millions of creatures living there is the world’s only large, free-roaming predator that poses a genuine—and sometimes mortal—threat to man in an environment in which he freely chooses to go: the shark.

And sharks can be anywhere: in shallow water or deep, in the surf itself, even, occasionally, profiled against the face of a breaking wave. They can be in the little dips between the shore and sandbars just offshore, where low tide sometimes traps them. They can be in murky water or clear, rough water or calm.

Furthermore, while only a few species of sharks are considered dangerous to man, all sharks—especially all sharks over three feet long—should be respected and avoided by swimmers. I’ve been hassled by a school of three- and four-foot-long sharks, and what began as a game of push-and-shove soon turned into a terrifying mass mugging from which I barely escaped, with bite marks on my fins.

Before you enter the water, stand for a moment and look at the sea around you. If there are birds working offshore—swooping and diving into a school of baitfish on or near the surface—that’s a sign that larger predators are underneath, driving the baitfish upward.

Perhaps those predators are bass or bluefish, but perhaps a shark or two could be stalking the bass or bluefish. Any signs that schools of fish—of any size—are in the neighborhood can indicate the presence of sharks. If you see a concentration of ripples on the surface of the water, or silvery flashes as feeding fish roll out of the water and their scales catch the sunlight, or a patch of action anywhere in an otherwise calm sea, don’t go in the water. Nature’s food chain is in process, and there’s a chance that the apex predator that inhabits the very top of that chain is out hunting, too.

Don’t go in the water if you’re bleeding—at all, from anything, anywhere on your body. The same salt water that may heal your cut or wound will carry away the scent of your blood. The sensory apparati of sharks are so finely tuned that they can receive and analyze the tiniest bits of blood imaginable and can direct the shark to home in on the source of the blood from far, far away.

Blood is not the only attractant that emanates from us humans; we emit sounds, smells, pressure waves, and electromagnetic fields—all of which a shark can detect. That shouldn’t surprise you: you know that your dog or cat hears and sees in spectral ranges far beyond ours, so why shouldn’t a shark? After all, sharks have been around, and very successful, for scores of millions of years longer than cats, dogs, and people.

Don’t swim or surf in water near seal or sea lion colonies. The playful and alluring pinnipeds are the prime (and favorite) food source for, among others, great white sharks. A surfer on a board appears, when seen from below, indistinguishable from a sea lion that has come up for a breath of air. Great whites are, by nature, ambushers; they prefer to blindside their prey, attacking from below and behind, and with such speed and force that they sometimes bite through surfer and surfboard before they realize they’ve made a mistake.

Don’t go swimming at dawn, dusk, or night. Many sharks—tigers, for example—come into the shallows at night to feed. On some islands, locals swear that sharks can tell when six o’clock in the evening comes along, for that’s when fins can be seen crisscrossing the bay or cruising along the beach. Dim light, furthermore, decreases a shark’s vision, forcing it to rely on its other senses and thus increasing the chances of a random bite.

The same holds true for swimming in turbid or murky water. A shark may sense nearby movement of a warm-blooded animal that it can’t see and may decide to bite as a test of edibility.

Don’t swim alone, and don’t swim far from shore or other people. As a lone swimmer you are vulnerable prey—and the farther you are from rescue if something untoward does happen, the lower your chances of survival.

Don’t go swimming where people are fishing from boats. They’ve probably put bait in the water, or even chum, which is a mixture of blood, oil, guts, and fish bits. (Even if you’re not set upon by a shark, you’ll stink for days, especially your hair.)

Finally, and most obvious, don’t go swimming in areas where sharks are known to congregate or feed: steep drop-offs, where tide and current sweep prey to waiting sharks; the passes in tropical lagoons where, every six hours, the change of tide brings new feeding patterns to the entire chain of wildlife in the water; channels into harbors, where fish are cleaned and remains tossed overboard by returning boats.

There are also a few don’ts for when you do go swimming.

Don’t wear jewelry or any shiny metal in the water. It flashes and shines and can, in frothy or murky water, look to a shark like a wounded fish. A friend of mine went swimming wearing a bathing suit with a brass buckle. As he was wading out of chest-deep water, he felt something brush between his legs, and when he reached the beach he found that he’d been slashed open from thigh to knee—by something with extremely sharp teeth, either a barracuda or a small shark, for he never felt any pain. If there hadn’t been a lifeguard handy to put a tourniquet around his leg, he might have bled to death.

Another friend wore a gold cross on a gold chain while he was snorkeling. A shark rushed him from below, ripped cross and chain away, and, with the same slashing bite, tore open his chin.

Don’t swim in the ocean with your dog. Dogs swim with an erratic, ungainly motion that can attract curious sharks.

And don’t you make any erratic movements, either, such as splashing, kicking, or tussling with your buddy. All of those send out signals that say, wounded prey … worth investigating.

Despite all these cautions, it’s important to remember that no matter what you do, the odds are in your favor. Whether or not a person acts with vigilance and common sense, still the statistical chances of being set upon by a shark remain well within the comfort zone, somewhere between slim and none.