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I’ve talked about sharks before on this blog. To me they are the embodiment of everything that is both wonderful and terrible about nature. But they are also used as pawns in the neo-environmentalist fight and any attempt to characterize them as what they truly are –dispassionate eating machine and the garbage disposals of the oceans– will be met with hostility from marine biologists who have been fighting the Jaws perception for thirty years. These shark experts are doing what they feel is their duty to counterbalance the “man-eater” image many people have of sharks.

Unfortunately, in their zeal they have gone too far.

Their favorite counter-attack to public concern over shark attacks is to spout the “You are more likely to get struck by lightning or killed in a car accident than you are to be attacked by a shark” statistic. It is their “go to” statistic, but almost every one you hear them use will be wrong for one reason: probability pool. You see, they arrive at these statistics by using raw number of shark attacks versus raw number of lightning strikes/automobile accidents/etc…

But here’s the problem: lightning can strike anywhere on the globe at any time so the probability pool of possible victims includes the entire population of the earth.

Lightning strikes the earth at the rate of 100 times per second. People do not come into contact with sharks at anything remotely approaching that frequency.

Ditto cars. How many cars did you pass on the highway today? How many sharks? Of course your probability of being in a car accident is higher.

What’s the real possibility?

Well, fortuitously, Florida has both the highest incidence of both lightning strikes and shark attacks in the United States, and while it is still skewed statistically in favor of the lightning, it gives a better comparison.

In 2003 there were 10 fatalities and about 40 injuries in Florida from lightning strikes. In that same year there were 57 “unprovoked” shark attacks in Florida, four of them fatal.

That means that, according to more true statistics, you are more likely to be bitten by a shark then struck by lightning if you live in Florida.

Now, a word here. This data is from the shark attack clearing house known as the International Shark Attack File. This research group was formed (or at least grew to a true collective as opposed to one guy at the University of Florida) in large part as a response to the movie “Jaws” (no, I’m not kidding), to try and improve the sharks image and calm public fears.

What’s “unprovoked”? And what does that mean?

“Unprovoked attacks” are defined as incidents where an attack on a live human by a shark occurs in its natural habitat without human provocation of the shark. Incidents involving sharks and divers in public aquaria or research holding-pens, shark-inflicted scavenge damage to already dead humans (most often drowning victims), attacks on boats, and provoked incidents occurring in or out of the water are not considered unprovoked attacks. “Provoked attacks” usually occur when a human initiates physical contact with a shark, e.g. a diver bit after grabbing a shark or a fisher bit while removing a shark from a net. The 45 incidents not accorded unprovoked status in 2003 included 18 provoked attacks, nine cases of sharks biting marine vessels, four incidents dismissed as non-attacks, one scavenge, one air/sea disaster, and 12 in which insufficient information was available to determine if shark attack was involved.

Didja catch that? Air/sea disasters are not counted. That means if your boat or plane goes down in the open ocean and you are attacked and killed by an Oceanic Whitetip (an inevitability if you are in the water long enough) then it does not count.

U.S.S. Indianapolis? Never happened as far as the ISAF is concerned. The couple on which the film Open Water was based? Not shark attack victims according to the ISAF.

I know you think I’m lying, but I’m not.

Ask yourself, how is it that the ISAF can claim only 1,500 shark attacks –not fatalities, mind you, just attacks– in the last century when thousands of documented fatalities occurred during the Pacific Naval Campaigns of WWII alone?

Easy, those were naval disasters and not counted.

But if one researches naval disasters one invariably finds that when humans get dumped in the water in the open ocean shark attack is almost inevitable for stays more than 48 hours, especially in warmer water.

In every major naval disaster the US Naval fleet sustained in WWII the survivors report shark attacks on crew in the water.

If you’ve seen the Man vs. Wild where Bear Grylls gets dumped in the open ocean you know that his raft was in the water less than two days before a big Tiger shark came calling.

To promote the idea that one has a better chance of being killed by a flying toilet seat (as one shark expert recently claimed on The National Geographic Channel) than being attacked by a shark is simply irresponsible.

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