| Love The Shark |
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Forbes Shark hysteria came early to the Northern hemisphere this year. Markus Groh, a 49-year-old Austrian attorney, died in February after a shark bit him in the Bahamas. "Shark Horror," ran the headline in a British tabloid. "They are filling the waters off of Florida," announced an NBC news anchor. Only a few of the hundreds of news reports added that in all of 2007, there was only one shark-attack fatality worldwide. In the last six years globally, sharks have bitten humans at a rate of 63 times a year, of which only 3.8 incidents a year were fatal, says George Burgess, who runs the International Shark Attack File. Shark attacks have increased decade on decade for the last century--but only because as the human population grows, more and more people go into the water. "It's an odds situation," Burgess says. Of some 500 shark species known to humans, only between 10 and 15 have been implicated in biting people. |
