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"We should have more bites this year than last," George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida, said in an interview shortly before the Memorial Day holiday weekend that signals the unofficial start of America's summer vacation - and beach - season. In 2015, there were 98 shark attacks, including six fatalities, according to Burgess. Why the increased bloodshed? Shark populations are slowly recovering from historic lows in the 1990s, the world's human population has grown and rising temperatures are leading more people to go swimming, Burgess said.
A surfer carries his board into the water next to a sign declaring a shark sighting on Sydney's Manly Beach, Australia
Still, the university notes that fatal shark attacks, while undeniably graphic, are so infrequent that beachgoers face a higher risk of being killed by sand collapsing as the result of over achieving sand castle builders. With their fearsome teeth and dorsal fins the inspiration for hit movies, TV series and beach-town souvenirs, it is hard to believe that a century ago American scientists did not believe sharks would fatally attack humans in U.S. temperate waters without provocation.
A tourist swims with a sandbar shark on a cageless shark dive tour in Haleiwa, Hawaii
That changed in July 1916, when four people were killed in attacks near the New Jersey shore, a series of deaths blamed on a sea turtle until a great white shark with human remains in its stomach was captured nearby. Since those attacks, public opinion of sharks has changed dramatically, with swimmers' fears fanned by fiction, from the 1975 Academy Award-winning film "Jaws," based on Peter Benchley's book about a giant man-eater, to the Discovery Channel's modern "Shark Week" summer television series.
A sign posted by local authorities in Cardiff, California April 26, 2008 warns against entering the water following a fatal shark attack yesterday in Solana Beach.
Years before the attacks near the northern Jersey Shore town of Keyport, millionaire businessman Hermann Oelrichs offered a $500 prize in 1891 (more than $13,000 in today's dollars) to anyone who could prove that a shark ever bit a human in nontropical waters. The reward was never claimed. Well-regarded scientists at the American Museum of Natural History in New York pointed to Oelrichs' wager as proof that no shark would bite a human, according to Michael Capuzzo's 2001 book "Close to Shore." Even the New York Times in a 1915 editorial titled "Let Us Do Justice to the Sharks" cited Oelrichs' offer and said, "That sharks can properly be called dangerous in this part of the world is apparently untrue."
HUNTER BECOMES THE HUNTED
