What to Do if You Come in Contact With a Shark

TIME

In the past two months, multiple people have been attacked by sharks in Florida, Hawaii and Texas. And while some of these occurrences may not be out of the ordinary, they still create an element of fear for those wanting to take to the beach during the hotter months of the year.

Transcript

00:00Probably the single biggest misconception that people have about sharks is that they're all dangerous.

00:06And this is simply not the case. Most shark species represent little or no threat to humans,

00:12simply because they consume very small prey.

00:16And even the species that we might consider to be dangerous,

00:20things like tiger sharks, white sharks and bull sharks, they bite people very infrequently.

00:26So these are rare events.

00:29Conversely, millions of sharks are removed from the ocean every year.

00:35And so, you know, we have a real conservation challenge with sharks.

00:39So although we might consider them to be dangerous,

00:42in fact, we're a lot more dangerous to sharks than sharks are to us.

00:45And we need to address these misconceptions in order to have effective conservation measures

00:51and to allow us to coexist successfully with these really ecologically important predators.

00:57The mistaken identity hypothesis is a popular misconception

01:03that stems from viewing shark behavior through a human lens.

01:09Sharks are not mistaking humans for another type of prey.

01:14They are opportunistic predators that routinely explore objects with certain size and movement characteristics

01:22to see whether they are potential prey.

01:25So, for example, when we put small video cameras on tiger sharks,

01:29we see them routinely investigating inanimate objects like floating coconuts, leaves, plastic bags.

01:38Those are clearly not things that they're going to eat,

01:41but they go and they investigate them to see if they are potential prey.

01:44So when sharks bite humans, it's likely because people in the water have size and movement characteristics

01:54that make sharks view them as potential prey.

01:57So sharks are not mistaking humans for another type of prey.

02:01They are simply routinely exploring objects of the right size and movement characteristics as potential prey.

02:09So we all like to go in the ocean, and although the risk of being bitten by a shark is very low,

02:15there are some things that we can do to reduce the probability of being bitten

02:19and also to improve the outcome in the event that we encounter a shark that tries to bite us.

02:27And the single biggest thing that we can do is to always do our ocean recreation activities with other people.

02:34There's more safety in numbers, it reduces the probability of you being bitten,

02:38and if you are extremely unlucky and you get bitten, then there are other people around to help you.

02:44So a lot of the time when there's a shark bite incident,

02:47the severity of the outcome is determined by whether there's somebody close at hand to help the person that's injured.

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