Shark attack: Why sharks are getting hungrier for humans

The screams were unmistakable, as was the fin circling the man in the pristine blue of the Red Sea. Last month 23-year-old Vladimir Popov became the latest victim to be mauled by a shark in the coast between Egypt and Saudi Arabia - the third attack to take place there in the space of a year.

The Russian tourist was dragged underwater by a tiger shark in Hurghada, one of Egypt’s most popular resorts.

Further afield, fatal attacks have taken place over the past year in Australia (Briton Simon Nellist was mauled by a great white in Sydney last February), Mexico, Brazil and South Africa. Florida annually records among the highest number of bites globally, with bull sharks carrying out 21 attacks there over the past decade.

Although some shark populations are declining, around five fatalities still occur each year - and three occurring within the same spot in 12 months has led some experts to believe that a pattern may be emerging. So are shark attacks increasing?

The BBC is airing a documentary - Why Sharks Attack - exploring the dangers just beneath the water’s surface. While attacks are “incredibly rare”, the programme’s timing, at the outset of the European summer tourism season, makes for stressful viewing.

More than four million tourists visited the Red Sea last year, and “when you have more people utilising a specific area, and you have sharks in that area, you’re increasing the probability that something’s going to happen”, says Ralph Collier, director of the Shark Research Institute’s Global Shark Attack File. More sharks in close proximity with humans means, “unfortunately, that it never works out well for us”, he says.

One of the theories the programme puts forward about this recent spate of attacks in the Red Sea is that fishing has led to reduced stocks, making it far more likely sharks will swim to warmer, shallower waters in search of food.

Lower fish stocks are thought to impact shark attacks on humans. Photo / 123Rf

“They don’t have an adequate supply of prey anymore,” Collier says. “Fish stocks are down. So the sharks naturally go to the place where they can find their food, which is close to shore because that’s where the reefs [which are protected from fishing] are.”

Sharks typically swim in far deeper water, but in the Red Sea, depths of 500-600ft rapidly shrink to 100ft near the beaches’ golden sands. The arrival of “larger deepwater aggressive sharks very close to shore” that are hunting for something to eat may make them more likely to strike.

Around 90 per cent of bites are accidents, according to Gavin Naylor, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research, “where the animals are looking for schooling fishes, and they see somebody’s foot and they just grab … they sort of bite first and think afterwards”.

But the attack on Popov, whose body was toyed with by the predator for two hours afterwards, was a “clearly intentional, targeted bite”, he says, which is “very unusual. We don’t see that kind of behaviour much at all”.

It is the bull shark species - considered to have the strongest bite of any shark - that is thought to have been responsible for mauling a teenager from Florida, Addison Bethea, last summer. Scalloping off Keaton Beach with her brother, Rhett, she felt “the tension of something grabbing me”, she tells the documentary. Bethea, then 17, assumed it was her brother playing around - until she was pulled under.

“I didn’t feel any pain or anything. But then it started kind of shaking, and that’s when I knew it was something else.”

Its jaws were sunk into her right thigh. She tried to gouge out its eyes, but “it started swimming away with me”. Rhett began hitting the shark, and both were pulled onto a nearby boat by its skipper, who carried them at top speed to the shore. Addison was airlifted to hospital, where her right leg was amputated.

Naylor reiterates that “we don’t get many bites on the Gulf side” - but these cases, especially in the age of social media, give the impression they are far more common than before.

Amateur diver Dan White had a brush with an oceanic whitetip shark a few years ago.

He and his fiancée signed up with Get Hammered, an adventure tourism company that promises to bring divers up close with sharks in the Red Sea.

“It was the next step up to the bucket list within diving,” he explains and, having swum with the sharks on the first day, who were “chilled out and just cruising along”, the second day’s itinerary promised more of the same.

Within 10 minutes of the second outing, however, he watched as a shark sank its teeth into the legs of another diver, a plume of blood spilling into the water. White, who filmed the attack on his GoPro, says that in the depths of the ocean, without the shore or boat nearby, there was nowhere to turn.

Besides, “it’s not like you can quickly swim faster than a shark back to the boat”. The victim, whose calf muscle had been torn off, was given emergency first aid on his dive boat, and his leg was later saved in hospital following extensive surgery.

White says he hasn’t been put off going on similar excursions in the future, but his video shows “there [were] too many divers around it when the shark went and had a go”, according to Nour Farid, managing director of the Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association. “There’s more people now in the Red Sea, [so] there’s a higher probability that a shark comes and bites someone. It’s simple.”

Collier says he has “probably examined more fatal shark attack victims than anybody currently on the planet. And it never, never gets easy.” But while the horror of “being eaten alive by an animal must be unfathomable”, he adds that hundreds of millions of people swim and surf in the ocean each year, with minimal “contact hours” - less still, fatal ones - recorded between humans and the predators. If anything, he says, “I’m surprised we don’t have more of these events.”