Are shark attacks on the rise in Australia? And what is being done to reduce the risk of fatal interactions?

There has been an increase in bites, but not deaths, say experts who praise Smart drumlines, live tracking, drones, high-tech wetsuits and better first aid

Mercury Psillakis had spotted the shark. Moments before he was fatally attacked by what is believed to have been a 3.5-metre great white last Saturday at Long Reef beach in Sydney, the surfer warned his friends about the animal.

“Merc saved his friends in the surf,” his family said in a statement this week. “He was aware of the risks of the ocean, and while he loved surfing, he was always vigilant about keeping himself safe. Unfortunately, this was a tragic and unavoidable accident.”

Psillakis’s death came as some of Australia’s best scientists are working to make shark encounters less common – even if the risk will never be zero.

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Are shark attacks on the rise?

According to the Australian Shark Incident Database, maintained by Taronga Conservation Society Australia, there were 1,285 shark “incidents” between 1791 and June 2025. Some are classified as “provoked” incidents, for example, when a person creates bait by spearfishing or snorkels close to sharks.

Others are “unprovoked”: when a shark attempts to bite a human not engaged in provocative activities.

Short-term trends within the data are hard to pin down. This year there have been four fatalities, all from unprovoked bites.

Last year, there were 13 unprovoked bites resulting in no fatalities – 10 fewer unprovoked bites than in 2023, when there were four fatalities. In 2020, there was a gruesome tally of seven unprovoked fatal attacks.

But over the longer term a trend has emerged.

“Broadly speaking, across Australia and over the last two decades, there’s been an increase in the number of shark bites,” says Prof Charlie Huveneers, the director of Flinders University’s Marine and Coastal Research Consortium.

More people are using the water than ever before – but that is only part of the explanation.

Coastal population growth, climate change, habitat depletion, uptake of watersports, weather anomalies, distribution of prey and even better wetsuits – keeping us in the water for longer and over cooler months – are among 40 factors that, depending on the location, are likely to have contributed to the rise, Huveneers says.

Scientists know that bites occasionally occur in clusters, but even those are hard to explain.

Fatalities are a different story. Rob Harcourt, emeritus professor of marine ecology at Macquarie University, says the number of deaths from shark bites today is likely to be the same or lower than in the 1930s, per capita, because of faster emergency responses, tourniquet kits at every surf lifesaving club and first aid training.

At any rate, the odds of being bitten are minute. While it’s impossible to accurately gauge how many people enter the ocean on any given day, Surf Life Saving Australia’s annual national coastal safety survey found there were 16.6m visits to the coast last year.

Florida Museum’s International Shark Attack File lists the odds of death by shark attack in the US at one in 4.3m. The lifetime risk figure was calculated by dividing the 2021 population by the number of shark fatalities and a person’s life expectancy.

Even for a surfer who enters the territory of predatory sharks every day, the risk remains tiny, Huveneers says. Yet, the dread runs deep.

“It’s a primordial fear, and it’s based on a lack of control,” Harcourt says. “Humans are very poor at gauging risk – you’re much more likely to die drowning in a rip than you are to be eaten by a shark.”

The fear, perhaps, partly comes from the knowledge that sharks are what the Marine Stewardship Council’s Dr Adrian Gutteridge calls an evolutionary success story, predating dinosaurs.

“If you’ve been around for that long, you’re doing something right,” he says of the top-order predators.

Australia’s strict fisheries management means its waters are a “lifeboat” to some shark species that are threatened elsewhere in the world. But while Gutteridge is proud of healthy oceans that typically mean healthy shark numbers, he says attacks like Saturday’s are hard to talk about, striking at the heart of what it means to be human.

“When it comes to being an ocean user myself – and Australians being amongst the highest users of oceans – questions certainly need to be asked about how we can be as safe as we can be,” he says.

Managing risk

The desire to mitigate the risk, no matter how low, means Australia has become a world leader in shark research, a discipline that has taken off in the past 20 to 30 years. Today, managing the overlap of sharks and people is more nuanced than it’s ever been.

Possibly the biggest threat to sharks in Australia comes from Queensland’s catch-and-kill approach in the name of beach safety, Gutteridge says. There, sharks are baited with drumlines and killed as part of a program that received an $88m boost after the fatal mauling of Bribie Island surf lifesaver Charlize Zmuda, 17, in February.

In New South Wales, more than 90% of marine animals caught in nets off the state’s beaches over the summer of 2023-24 were non-target species.

In response to environmental concerns about the indiscriminate bycatch, the NSW government had planned to trial a rollback of nets across three councils, including the northern beaches council that covers Long Reef. But on Tuesday, the agriculture minister, Tara Moriarty, said the trial had been halted at least for this summer in light of Psillakis’s death.

“Shark nets are a previous technology, but I have every sympathy with the state government not pulling out the shark nets immediately after someone gets killed. I think that you can remove these things slowly,” Harcourt says.

“We’ve moved from very much 20th-century technology with drumlines and shark nets to highly sophisticated, state-of-the-art technologies. It’s a huge investment for a very low risk, but the social licence is what counts here.”

In NSW, white, tiger and bull sharks are caught in daylight hours on Smart (shark management alert in real time) drumlines, a non-lethal tagging method developed in Reunion Island that lures sharks using baited hooks. When an animal is hooked on one of 305 lines, operators receive a ping and head to the spot in 17 minutes, on average. The shark is tagged, released further out to sea, and then tracked by satellite and acoustically.

The impact on human safety is immediate. “The animals are stressed by their being caught, so they don’t come back to the beaches for a couple of months,” Harcourt says.

Acoustic tags last up to a decade, pinging every time the animal swims near any of the 37 receivers along the state’s coastline. This data is transmitted directly to the NSW SharkSmart app, alerting the public that an animal is close to shore, as well as to the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD).

Since 2015, the state’s shark management program has tagged 1,499 white sharks – about a third to a fifth of eastern Australia’s estimated whites – 719 tiger sharks and 230 bull sharks, according to Dr Paul Butcher, DPIRD’s principal research scientist. One animal travelled 30,000km in three years.

The resulting data, Harcourt says, is “the best in the world”. It is being used in collaboration with Surf Life Saving Australia, DPIRD, Macquarie University, and Risk Frontiers to build a predictive model that forecasts where and when conditions are most likely to lead to shark bites.

“It will allow people to say, ‘OK, today’s a high-risk day for a surf. Maybe I’ll come back tomorrow’,” he says. “This is the way of the future.”

So, too, is another component of the program under development, which uses water samples to detect sharks by analysing environmental DNA, Butcher says.

Then, there is a modern take on simply keeping watch. Drones have become a familiar part of a day on beaches, with surf lifesavers – pillars of shark awareness around the country – operating shark surveillance drones on 50 beaches in NSW, for example.

AI that distinguishes between dangerous and non-dangerous animals is being developed, and trials of unpiloted drones flying from a central location in Sydney are under way, Butcher says. His team also provides Surfing NSW with drones and shark-bite specific first aid training.

Civilians, too, are part of the efforts. In Bondi, Jason Iggleden runs the Drone Shark app, monitoring the world-famous beach and its neighbouring surf and swim spots for marine life. Watching the water through his live drone video, Iggleden has, on many occasions, contacted nearby lifeguards to warn them of a potentially dangerous shark he’s spotted well before anyone else.

“More eyes on the water is a great help,” Harcourt says.

But, like all measures, drones have their limits, particularly in high winds and low water clarity. For Huveneers, the safest approach is a blend of strategies that limit overlaps with sharks and the chance of being bitten.

Some wearable electronic deterrents can reduce the risk of being bitten by 60%, he says. When the worst does happen, the key is reducing the level of injury. Huveneers’ research has found that the same material used in sailing ropes, when integrated into neoprene wetsuits, provides good protection against catastrophic injuries.

“Unfortunately,” he says, “at the moment, there is no silver bullet that’s going to eliminate the risk of shark bites.”