Abstract
The trends of the world’s top ten countries relating to shark bite rates, defined as the ratio of the annual number of shark bites of a country and its resident human population, were analyzed for the period 2000-2016. A nonparametric permutation-based methodology was used to determine whether the slope of the regression line of a country remained constant over time or whether so-called joinpoints, a core feature of the statistical software Joinpoint, occurred, at which the slope changes and a better fit could be obtained by applying a straight-line model. More than 90% of all shark bite incidents occurred along the US, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand coasts. Since three of these coasts showed a negative trend when transformed into bite rates, the overall global trend is decreasing. Potential reasons for this decrease in shark bite rates—besides an increase in the world’s human population, resulting in more beach going people, and a decrease of sharks due to overfishing—are discussed.
Highlights
Sharks are at the top of most people’s minds when entering the sea, for seemingly good reasons, considering the still prevalent shark hype stemming from news outlets around the world [1,2,3]
Considering that sharks still represent the most abundant top predators weighing over 50 kg on our planet and that millions of people swim in the seas each day, this yearly bite count remains extremely low when compared to other predators commonly involved in human incidents [13,14,15,16]
We introduced bite rates [13,14,15,16]: the ratio of annually reported shark bites for a given region to the annual estimated beach attendance for that region
Summary
Sharks are at the top of most people’s minds when entering the sea, for seemingly good reasons, considering the still prevalent shark hype stemming from news outlets around the world [1,2,3]. Considering that sharks still represent the most abundant top predators weighing over 50 kg on our planet and that millions of people swim in the seas each day, this yearly bite count remains extremely low when compared to other predators commonly involved in human incidents [13,14,15,16]. An even more surprising fact about bite count predictions is that the beach visiting populations directly affecting the bite numbers are regularly excluded from predicting long-term tendencies [9]. Such an approach is fallacious because the number of people bitten by sharks directly corresponds to the number of people entering the sea. A model for the global bite rates was created to determine the accuracy of the chosen method by predicting the bite rates for 2018 and comparing this number with the actual incident number of that year
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