I will bet the caught your attention. It did mine but for reasons more benign than indicated by my sensational blog title: The report comes from an outdoors columnist for Florida’s Treasure Coast Newspapers named Ed Killer. He passed along the latest statistics on shark attacks released Monday by the Florida Museum on Natural History. It turns out that “interactions” with these dreaded aquatic carnivores decreased by nearly 10% to 129 worldwide in 2020. Unfortunately, deaths increased to 13, up by 2 from 2019, including the first ever in Maine. Australia led the world for shark fatalities and came in second to the USA for bites.
“When a surfer gets bit in New Smyrna Beach [Florida], it’s often by a blacktip and requires some stitches to recover from. But when a surfer gets bit in Australia, it’s by a 2000-pound 15-foot-long great white shark. A nibble from a white shark can take off a leg.”
– Gavin Naylor, Director, Florida Program for Shark Research*
All this talk about sharks makes me feel a lot better being homebound in Minnesota for the time being. In 1975 my wife and I moved to California just in time for the premier of Jaws at the local drive-in movie theater. I suffered twitchy-legged nightmares for some time afterwards imagining a great white shark lurking at the foot of my bed. Watching this Danish advertisement provides an antidote my now-revived shark fears.
*See details on the data science behind their The International Shark Attack File (ISAF), and a fascinating animated graphic showing attacks by location worldwide over 50 years, here.