Ross, you wrote , " I have always suspected the hype and fear about shark
attacks was mondo exaggerated,"
I know that you're right but when we used to dive at Pickles reef 6 miles
out from Key Largo , I would keep getting that picture of the HUGE white
shark that was first hooked off the same reef and took several hours to land
, it was a beauty at about 14 or so feet long . BTW, the shelling there was
incredible. ferreted
-----Original Message-----
From: Ross Mayhew <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wednesday, September 22, 1999 7:37 PM
Subject: Shark attacks - PAS de problemo!!


>        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!!
>