Ross reports ...Interestingly enough, about 2/3 are "unprovoked"....
Some reading I did awhile ago suggested that sharks have a territory or a 'personal
space' and they indicate their unhappiness with body movements when people invade
their space. It is easy for divers to see when they have moved too close to a
shark, but an unwary swimmer may not realize that they have pissed off the shark,
and so although the attack seems unprovoked, it may not have been like that from
the sharks perspective. This is of little comfort to the swimmer, but armed with
this knowledge, maybe swimmers who swim in waters where aggressive sharks may be
encountered would do well to wear goggles or a face mask so that they can see
what's below them.
Of course it is another matter entirely if the shark is regarding you as a meal and
not just as a threat.
Ferret's comment about the high fatalities from sharks when ships are torpedoed has
been explained to me thusly:
Sharks are attracted by electromagnetic stimulations in the water which can be due
to the ship itself or to the high concentration of panicked people in the water.
Possible blood in the water will further whip up their (no pun intended) appetite.
I had even heard that sharks trailed wartime ships. Either they were just
attracted by electromagnetic activity of the ship, or they learned from past
experience that a meal might be forthcoming (if someone opens the 'can' for them).
These war stories have always given me the major creeps, but thankfully, this
scenario is not one we will likely encounter in our peacetime cruises.
Hopefully these are still valid postings. It's fun to contribute and I sure don't
know much about shells. (There, at least I said 'shell')
Nora
Calgary, Alberta
Ross Mayhew wrote:
> I have always suspected the hype and fear about shark attacks was mondo
> exaggerated, so when the recent epidemic of anecdotally-feuled shark
> mania struck the list recently, i joined Shark-L and asked for some hard
> facts about attack frequency. The "definitive" shark-attack-stat site
> is: http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/sharks/statistics/statistics.htm, run
> by The Florida Museum of Natural History.
> To summarize very briefly, less than 1800 shark attack reports
> worldwide have surfaced in this century, and the modern-day average is
> ~50 per year, with about 10 fatalities (versus over 10 times that many
> lightning stirkes, for comparison, and millions of premature fatalities
> attributable to smoking). About half of them occur in Florida, due to
> the massive tourist influx and local water-related activity (although
> fatalities there are extremely rare!). 45% happen to surfers,
> expecially those wearing wet-suits (making them look like seals or
> sea-lions!), the remainder being more or less split between swimmers and
> divers. Great Whites are by far the most frequent offenders, with
> Tiger, bull, Sand-tiger and Requiem sharks lagging far behind, and all
> other species' contributions being rather trivial (hammerhead spp 6th,
> and the oft-maligned lemon shark, only 13th!). Interestingly enough,
> about 2/3 are "unprovoked".
> So, let's do some quick-and-dirty safety-calculations: say a billion
> people go swimming, diving or surfing in the worldwide ocean each year,
> and say they go in about 15 times each. That makes the odds of bieng
> attacked by a shark 50 in 15 billion, or about 1 in 300 million each
> time you go in, and your chances of getting killed are less than 1 in a
> billion. Each time you go for an automobile ride or smoke a single
> ciggarette, you have about a one in a million chance of ending up dead
> as a result: so going for a swim in the sea is over 1000 times as
> dangerous as lighting one up, or picking up a quart of milk at the
> corner store.
>
> I am NOT worried.
>
> Cheers,
> Ross.
>
> P.S.: And forget about cover-ups: shark-attacks are so rare and
> spectacular that they are "Big News", and more than a bit difficult to
> hide from the ravenously-hungry-for-sensational-stories press!!
|
