Everything you thought you knew about sharks is wrong!

Is this peculiar statement intended to mean that anybody who quotes figures is to be considered a liar?

The mathematically illiterate (sometimes referred to as "innumerate") like to assert that "you can prove anything with statistics." But what this really means is that if you are innumerate, and do not understand statistics, you can be fooled. Similarly, if you do not know what money looks like, you may be fooled into accepting Monopoly money as though it were legal tender.

Statistics is in fact the branch of mathematics most responsible for our understanding of the physical world. Quantum mechanics operates entirely on statistics, and it is quantum mechanics that gives us transistors, and therefore the computer you are reading this on. Statistics works. If you cannot understand it, that's your problem. It does not make liars of those who employ statistics to assess risk in daily life, or to design better semiconductor devices.

 

Whose? Yours or mine?

Pianos are dangerous, if they fall on you out of a seven-story window. Matches are dangerous in the hands of a five-year-old. Anything can be dangerous. But sharks virtually never actually eat people. Attacks result from mistaken identity, and sharks almost always spit out the untasty bite.

Humans are not appealing food to sharks.

Yes, sharks can kill people, and have done so, but so seldom as to make the risk almost nil. To avoid the water out of fear of sharks is like spending your entire life in bed out of fear of tigers in major U.S. cities; and to advocate killing them makes less sense than grounding all airplanes because one might crash into your house.

 

Feeding bears is extremely foolish. However the boat captain I was with on this trip has been running shark swims for twenty years and has never had an incident.

Obviously you don't grab them by the tail or otherwise molest them. They have sharp teeth and can bite. The point is that they are not interested in biting people and if you behave reasonably and avoid mimicking their prey, you are much safer around them than you are on the nation's highways. And the payoff is that they are beautiful to watch.

It is not rational that people will go on the highways just for the pleasure of driving, but will advocate avoiding sharks just because they perceive it as dangerous. There are risks all through life. We choose to accept certain risks because of the payoff. (Driving, flying, crossing the street, kicking the coke machine when it steals your $1.25, etc.) Swimming with sharks is a great experience, and while it has some risk, the risk of being bitten is considerably less than the risk of getting in an auto accident on your way to the airport.

The most legitimate reason for not swimming with sharks is that you (probably) have to drive on a freeway to get to the airport to fly to where the sharks are. I accept that risk several times a year because there are places I like to go.

 

Not luck. And statistics are very much in his favor, with only one death by sharks every two years. This guy is only one of many such operators, many of whom operate far more outings than he does. I think it's noteworthy that (I believe) none of these 5 deaths per decade has been during an intentional shark swim, since such operators avoid the sort of low-visibility situations where shark attacks occur. (When the shark cannot see the victim to distinguish that it's a person and not, e.g. a seal.)

Steve Irwin made several two very serious mistakes: 1. He branched out from the crocodiles he knew and understood, to an animal and an environment he was not familiar with. 2. He did something very reckless in grabbing hold of the stingray and trying to ride it. And even with that, it was a fluke that the stinger hit his heart. Anywhere else and it would not have killed him.

It is well known that if you step on a stingray you are likely to get stung, and by analogy anybody that knows the ocean will tell you not to try to do what Irwin did. When we were feeding stingrays we were told not to touch the center of their back or their tail. In trying to ride the ray, Irwin inevitably would have touched both, triggering the animal's stinging response.

Stingrays, of course, cannot eat people. They lack the mouth anatomy for it. They suck up small animals like squid, and you can feel the vacuum as they pull it out of your hand. They don't bit it and pull it away, as a dog would when you hand-feed it. They suck. Sluuuuurrrp! And if they don't like the piece (or are full) they blow it back out. Whooosh!