--- title: Are Shark Attacks on the Rise? | TIME description: A shark researcher investigates a rise of shark attacks off the coast of Hawaii in 2012. canonical: https://time.com/video/cibWV3FS/ og:title: Are Shark Attacks on the Rise? og:description: A shark researcher investigates a rise of shark attacks off the coast of Hawaii in 2012. og:url: https://time.com/video/cibWV3FS/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/cibWV3FS/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Are Shark Attacks on the Rise? twitter:description: A shark researcher investigates a rise of shark attacks off the coast of Hawaii in 2012. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/cibWV3FS/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Are Shark Attacks on the Rise? > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Are Shark Attacks on the Rise? [Watch (HLS stream): Are Shark Attacks on the Rise?](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/cibWV3FS.m3u8) (5:26)  _Published 2013-02-19. A shark researcher investigates a rise of shark attacks off the coast of Hawaii in 2012._ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:30 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Shark Attacks Surfer Off Southern California Coast in a 'Terrifying Situation': Coast Guard](/video/MaJi7iti/) ### Shark Attacks Surfer Off Southern California Coast in a 'Terrifying Situation': Coast Guard [California Man Killed in Shark Attack While Swimming in Hawaii](/video/uCNi1Edv/) ### California Man Killed in Shark Attack While Swimming in Hawaii [How to Survive a Shark Attack, According to Experts](/video/Y0GIRKgu/) ### How to Survive a Shark Attack, According to Experts --- ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] Josh Holly lives in Hawaii and has been surfing for 20 years. It was a beautiful Tuesday morning, it was my day off. Caught this really nice 8 foot wave, it was a bomb it came down, did everything a surfer does on a wave, and pulled out of the wave and was paddling back through the channel to get back to the, the lineup. And that's when it hit. I felt this tremendous force hit me and it felt like being hit by a car. And I look and I'm like, oh my God, this is a shark. [ LAUGH ] And I look at my foot and you know, seeing tendons stick out and parts of your foot that shouldn't be sticking out. You know, it, it was pretty gnarly looking. I'm not gonna lie. And plus the teeth marks It was pretty scary too so. Holly's tiger shark bite severed tendons in his foot and required surgery and three months of healing. It's definitely one of the most terrifying experiences I've ever encountered in in my entire life hands down. The thought crossed my mind once or twice while I was being attacked is this the day I'm going to die? Typically there are three to four shark attacks in Hawaii every year. What made the news recently here is that his was the first of nine total unprovoked shark attacks in 2012. Many people are now wondering why there seems to be a big increase in shark attacks here. So to find out more, we took a ride out with Carl Meyer, assistant researcher at the Hawai'i Institute of Marine Biology. [ SOUND ] If Myer looks completely comfortable hanging off the side of a boat and working with large sharks, it's because he's been studying them for 20 years. One of the most characteristic things about large tiger sharks is they're huge girth, and they also have extremely large heads with very blunt ends, sort of like the front end of a a an old style Cadillac, with teeth. For decades, it was believed that sharks lived and defended their territory in one small area. Because of this, when shark attacks happened, people reacted by culling sharks, which means hunting and killing sharks where the attacks occurred. Once I've piloted it, then I can do the drilling when she's upside down. But in 1991, after a fatal shark attack, scientists wanted to find out if culling really worked, before the state of Hawaii used this method. Meyer was part of the first research team that found sharks weren't territorial, at all. We started studying tiger sharks by going out and actively tracking them. Within [ SOUND ] A couple of days, typically. The sharks that we captured in Honolulu had moved from the island of Oahu to the island of Molokai. So right there, with that first study, we could see that they were behaving very differently from what people had originally believed. Our information. [ SOUND ] Gave the state of Hawaii a very important piece of the puzzle that they've used to, justify their decision not to call sharks. Because there's no point to it. If you go out and fish after an attack, the chances are that the animal that bit somebody will be. Tens of miles away or hundreds of miles away. On this trip we learned that tiger sharks are true individuals, in their movements, and even in their diets. Tiger sharks routinely investigate floating objects and feed at all hours. They are very careful around unfamiliar objects And typically, they shy away from humans, even though we could be easily overpowered. Shark attacks are human tragedies. Somebody gets injured, we don't ever want to see that. That said, they attract a disproportionate amount of media attention. We're trying always to set these very rare events with in a broader context of the shark's biology and to emphasize how unusual they are. This animal in particular, the tiger shark, has more complex and variable behavior than most other marine animals that we study. Meyer says from a scientific perspective, the spike in the number of 2012 shark attacks in Hawaii was due to chance. We're talking about millions upon millions of hours each year that people spend in the water. And, those millions of hours result, typically, in three to four attacks per year, or in 2012, they resulted in nine attacks. Now those numbers are so incredibly low. That it, it's basically impossible for us to identify that as a significant event. Can you come from this angle? Although we've, at this point, nailed down a lot of the basic ecology and biology of the tiger sharks in Hawaii. There's still plenty of mystery left. When Holley was recovering, he found that he was also interested in the mystery of tiger sharks. One thing that surfers we need to remember is when we go into the ocean we're going into their. Their domain. You know, I mean I would bite a guy too if he broke into my house. It educated me a lot, you know, I was, my foot was plopped on a, on a couch for three and a half months, so I bought like this stack of shark books. What I learned is that each shark isn't the same. Every shark is different, and they can't be tamed like a dolphin, and [ SOUND ] they're, they're magnificent. You know, I love sharks. I, I've been intrigued, by them when I was a little kid and I'll always be intrigued by them. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Are Shark Attacks on the Rise?","description":"A shark researcher investigates a rise of shark attacks off the coast of Hawaii in 2012.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/cibWV3FS/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2013-02-19T15:30:40.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/cibWV3FS.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/cibWV3FS/","duration":"PT5M26S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/cibWV3FS/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```