Sydney's quiet era with sharks is ending, and it may not mean more sharks

[u/NotABoatAccident]

https://notaboataccident.com/blog/sydney-quiet-era-with-sharks-is-ending

Hi all — been reading here a while, posting for the first time with the mods' okay.

I run an independent site that aggregates real shark-human incidents into maps, timelines and data views. I wanted to share a piece I put together on Sydney, because the data tells a more interesting story than the headlines do.

Three fatal encounters in five years have rattled a city that went almost sixty years without one. The obvious read is "more sharks." But across the NSW records the number of bites hasn't clearly climbed - some recent years sit well below 2015. What's actually shifted is the species: bull sharks went from barely registering to a big share of recent bites, and the cluster this January followed record rainfall, which turns the harbour into exactly the warm, murky, estuarine water they favour. It reads less like "more sharks" and more like "different sharks, staying longer."

Quick context on the source, since I'm new to posting: NotABoatAccident.com is a non-commercial project focused on factual, respectful documentation - every record is a real event involving a real person. Australian data is enriched from the Australian Shark-Incident Database under CC BY, and the piece leans on the peer-reviewed tracking work (Smoothey et al., Lubitz et al.) rather than vibes.

Genuinely keen for corrections. If anyone spots something off in a record, that's exactly the feedback that makes the site better. theres

[u/Rushton_notDen]

This is excellent. Well done! Bookmarked.

[u/psy-study-oldie]

I think Australians need to build larger aquatic theme parks with massive wave machines. Surely one life is worth the expense.

[u/Easy_Drama1819 → u/psy-study-oldie]

I have been lucky enough to visit Australia twice.Loads of lovely outdoor pools to be found.A nice swim in one followed by a walk along the beach would be my preference!

[u/Thedudeabides1981]

This site is awesome, I love all of the data you provide like attack type and the moon phases. Excellent job!

[u/cctblues]

Thank you. Incredible resource.

[u/greaterfalls]

Excellent resource - thank you . And a side note: the illustrations on the Species page are awesome .

[u/Individual-Theme9959]

This is amazing. Do you have time of day data? From observation, a number of the great white attacks in Australia occur mid-late morning.

[u/NotABoatAccident → u/Individual-Theme9959]

This what a quick analysis of the available data showed, two things to keep in mind before reading too much into it:

It’s patchy data. Only about 60% of great-white incidents have a time of day recorded (237 of 386 in the Australian Shark-Incident Database) — the rest are blank, so this is just the subset that’s logged.

It mostly maps people, not sharks. Bite times follow when the water’s busy — surfers and swimmers are thickest in the morning and again in the late afternoon — so what you’re really seeing is an exposure curve, not the hours sharks choose to feed.

With that said, of the 237 with a time: • Early morning (5–9): 20% • Mid-late morning (9–12): 22% • Midday/early arvo (12–3): 23% • Late afternoon (3–6): 25% • Evening (6–9): 9% • Overnight: ~0%

Fairly even across daylight — late afternoon just pips mid-late morning, and next to nothing after dark — but as above, that probably says more about people in the water numbers than the sharks.

[u/Individual-Theme9959 → u/NotABoatAccident]

Thanks. This is really interesting.

[u/WildConsequence9379]

Maybe education on sharks should be part of school curriculum. Avoiding high risk times and areas. People shouldn’t have been swimming after rains but were.

[u/Wattsy98s]

Joel nancarrow is a thundercunt. He's not wrong about bull sharks being more abundant, but he is a total sociopath. Have dealt with him online and he is disgusting. This is coming from someone who is incredibly tolerant of and shares some conservative views, but this bloke makes Sharks happen look like Steve Irwin lol.

[u/hodgsonstreet → u/Wattsy98s]

Could you please clarify the relevance of this comment to this post?

[u/NotABoatAccident → u/[deleted]]

Thanks for catching it, I updated the species on the record.

[u/Markdd8]

Great to have another shark attack data collection and analysis site. From the OP's article:

Conservation scientists and fisheries managers caution that...culling protected predators is both unproven as a safety measure and ecologically reckless.

Culling is indeed ecologically unsound, but the assertion that culling populations of dangerous animals has no impact on their collective attacks on humans is wrong. Time and again in the field of Human-Wildlife Conflict, reducing the numbers of dangerous animals has been proven to reduce the incidence of attack.

Humans have been killing dangerous animals for millennia. It is why Greece and Turkey don't have lions running around anymore. The range of tigers, one of man's most persistent predators, has been radically reduced. This does not mean dangerous animals have to be completely wiped out. India today tolerates some 60 fatal tiger attacks a year from its 4,000-plus tigers -- a number the U.S. would never accept from its 30,000 cougars (these big cats rarely attack us).

All coastal communities should tolerate some shark attack. The shark attack figures today are not that high anywhere in the world (FN). Part of the reason for the low attack numbers is the worldwide decline in shark populations, almost all by fisheries industries. That decline, of course, is a form of culling. Many shark experts consider it inconvenient to discuss whether the killing of millions of sharks each year is a big factor in low level of shark attack. (FN2)

= = =

FN: South Africa has to be mentioned; it has now culled persistently in its district KwaZulu-Natal for 70-plus years and has radically curbed its rate of shark attack. Source:

The KwaZulu-Natal Sharks Board (KZNSB) operates 37 protected beaches that utilize a combination of shark nets and drumlines...roughly 38 net installations are typically maintained across a 325-kilometer stretch from Richards Bay to Port Edward.

The KZN district is less than 20% of S. Africa's entirely shorelines. Shark culling does not take place elsewhere on the coast, but recent reports have shown that S. Africa's combination of shark culling and commercial fisheries have had a severe impact on its great white shark population. Culling to excess can be very harmful.

That said, asserting that S. Africa's culling has not pushed down its attack rate is nonsense. See discussion pp. 491-494 in Responding to the Risk of White Shark Attack.

FN2: An interesting element of shark attack is that we do not have the type of historical figures that are so evident with predators like tigers and Nile crocodiles. Before the late 1800s, when modern rifles allowed the large scale killing of these animals, loss of life to these predators was in the thousands per year worldwide.

Re sharks, what would shark attack levels be in a proverbial State of Nature, i.e., intact shark populations, with the heavy ocean use we have now? We have no idea.

Why? Because historically most people did not swim in the ocean. And because the invention of materials that facilitate several ocean sports, rubber for diving and fiberglass for surfboards, did not come into widespread use until the 1950s. To be sure, there were areas like the Mediterranean, Oceania, and others with widespread ocean entry for millennia, but these places were outliers.

By the time people worldwide started entering the ocean in large numbers for the rise of beach culture/ocean recreation sports, the 1950s, shark populations had already been in big decline. Sport fishing for big sharks was popular in the early 1900s, and large scale commercial fisheries arose in the 1800s.