Shark attacks are increasing primarily because more people are spending time in the ocean than ever before, not because sharks have become more aggressive. But that’s only part of the story. Rising ocean temperatures are also pushing certain shark species into new waters, and conservation successes have rebuilt prey populations that draw large sharks closer to shore. These factors are converging to create more frequent encounters between humans and sharks.
More People in the Water Means More Encounters
The simplest explanation is often the most powerful one. Global population growth, the boom in water sports like surfing and paddleboarding, and the expansion of coastal tourism have put far more human bodies in the ocean over the past several decades. As George Burgess, a longtime shark researcher at the Florida Museum of Natural History, has noted, the raw number of shark attacks has consistently risen alongside the human population. More people are spending time in or near the ocean than at any point in history.
This matters because per capita, your risk of being bitten hasn’t changed much. The increase in total bites reflects a larger denominator of people entering the water, not a fundamental change in shark behavior. At the same time, reporting has improved dramatically. Better tracking systems, widespread smartphone use, and media coverage mean that bites that would have gone unrecorded decades ago now appear in global databases. The result is a trend line that looks alarming but partly reflects better record-keeping.
Warming Oceans Are Redrawing the Map
Climate change is reshaping where and when sharks show up. Tiger sharks in the western North Atlantic, tracked by satellite between 2010 and 2019, have pushed their migrations significantly farther north during years with unusually warm sea surface temperatures. For every 1°C increase in temperature anomalies, tiger sharks extended their range nearly 4 degrees of latitude farther north and arrived in northeastern U.S. shelf waters about 14 days earlier than expected. Analysis of nearly 40 years of tiger shark capture data confirms this isn’t a blip. High-catch areas have progressively shifted poleward across decades, and catches off the northeast shelf have been occurring earlier in the year.
This means beaches in places like New England and the mid-Atlantic, where large sharks were historically rare during early summer, are now seeing them arrive sooner and stay longer. Swimmers and surfers in these regions are sharing water with species they wouldn’t have encountered a generation ago.
Bull sharks tell a similar story. Juvenile bull sharks, a species responsible for a disproportionate share of attacks due to their preference for shallow, murky coastal water, have expanded their nursery habitat northward into traditionally temperate estuaries as water temperatures and salinity patterns shift. While bull shark mothers historically returned to the same estuaries where they were born to give birth, researchers have documented plasticity in this behavior, with new estuaries being colonized as conditions become suitable. That expansion puts young bull sharks in waterways closer to population centers that previously had little exposure to them.
Conservation Success Has Unintended Side Effects
Decades of marine mammal protection laws have worked. Gray seal populations along the U.S. East Coast, for example, have rebounded dramatically since the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972. Cape Cod now hosts thousands of seals where there were once almost none. This is an ecological victory, but it has a direct consequence: large predators follow their prey. White sharks have returned to waters off Massachusetts, the Carolinas, and other coastal areas in numbers not seen in living memory, drawn by dense seal colonies that cluster on beaches popular with swimmers.
The dynamic is straightforward. Seals haul out on sandbars and swim in the surf zone, which is exactly where people swim too. White sharks patrol these areas looking for seals, and the overlap creates conditions for mistaken-identity bites. Similar patterns play out in other regions where marine mammal recovery has accelerated.
Where Bites Happen Most
Florida consistently leads the United States in shark bites. In 2024, the state recorded 14 unprovoked bites, more than any other state, with eight of those occurring in Volusia County alone. Volusia County, home to Daytona Beach and New Smyrna Beach, carries the unofficial title of shark bite capital of the world. The warm, murky waters and heavy surf tourism there create ideal conditions for accidental encounters, particularly with smaller species like blacktip and spinner sharks that feed in the same shallow waters where people wade and surf.
Globally, the pattern is similar: bites concentrate in areas where warm water, abundant marine life, and heavy recreational use overlap. Australia, South Africa, and Hawaii round out the list of frequent hotspots. The only unprovoked fatality in the U.S. in 2024 occurred off the northwest coast of Oahu, Hawaii. Notably, total unprovoked bites actually dropped in 2024 compared to recent years, a reminder that the long-term trend isn’t a straight line upward. Year-to-year numbers fluctuate based on weather patterns, water conditions, and where people choose to swim.
Better Detection, Not Just More Sharks
New monitoring tools are changing how coastal communities track shark presence, which also shapes public perception of the risk. Aerial drones now patrol beaches in parts of Australia, California, and the Carolinas, spotting sharks in real time and triggering warnings. Acoustic telemetry uses tagged sharks to send alerts when they swim near receiver stations positioned off popular beaches.
An emerging approach uses environmental DNA, or eDNA, to detect sharks by sampling genetic material they shed into the water. Researchers testing this method against drone surveys and acoustic tracking found that targeted genetic testing was twice as effective as broader genetic sequencing at confirming white shark presence. The technology is still being refined, since sharks appear to shed less detectable DNA than bony fish, but it offers a promising complement to visual surveys.
These tools are valuable, but they also mean that shark presence near beaches gets documented and publicized far more than it used to. A shark swimming past a beach in 1990 went unnoticed. The same shark in 2025 gets spotted by a drone, tagged by researchers, and covered by local news. This visibility reinforces the impression that sharks are everywhere, when in many cases they always were.
The Real Risk in Perspective
Despite the upward trend in total bites, fatal shark attacks remain extraordinarily rare. Most years see fewer than 10 unprovoked fatalities worldwide. You are far more likely to die from a lightning strike, a bee sting, or drowning itself than from a shark bite. The species responsible for most bites, like blacktip sharks in Florida, rarely cause serious injury. Bites from larger species like white sharks, tiger sharks, and bull sharks are more dangerous but also far less common.
The increase in shark encounters is real, driven by the convergence of more people in the water, warming oceans pushing sharks into new territory, and recovering prey populations pulling them closer to shore. But framing it as sharks becoming more dangerous misses the point. The ocean is getting more crowded on both sides of the equation.