About Shark Incidents
Shark Incidents is an independent information website and data product focused on shark-human incident records, source transparency and practical educational context.
The site exists to make two kinds of information easier to use together: current incident reporting and historical incident research. A breaking report may need to be shown quickly while its details are still developing; a historical record may need careful reconstruction from older references. Shark Incidents keeps those situations separate through visible verification labels and source notes.
What the site publishes
The core of the website is an interactive incident database. Public records can be explored by date, location, activity, classification, outcome and shark species when an identification is supported.
Each incident page is designed to answer:
- What is reported to have happened?
- When and where did it occur?
- What is known with reasonable confidence?
- What remains uncertain?
- Was a shark species actually identified?
- Which sources support the record?
- When was the record last reviewed?
The site also publishes species guides, explanations of incident terminology, geographic summaries and articles about how to interpret shark incident statistics.
What the site is not
Shark Incidents is not a government agency, university, marine laboratory or official shark-attack investigating body. It does not claim institutional authority or scientific credentials it does not have.
It is also not a live shark-tracking service. A map pin represents a recorded incident; it does not show the present location of a shark and should not be used as a prediction of where an incident will occur next.
The website avoids turning raw incident totals into “danger scores.” A location can accumulate more records because more people enter the water there, because reporting is better, or because a much longer historical record survives.
Source-first publishing
A page is not published simply because an automated system sees the words “shark attack” in a headline. Candidate reports go through deduplication, source review, geographic normalization and classification.
Primary authorities are preferred for the basic facts of an event when they are available. Reliable local reporting can provide important additional context. Specialist incident databases and scientific sources may be used for verification and methodology without copying restricted material.
Every public incident should make its source trail visible.
Handling uncertainty
Uncertainty is part of incident data.
A species named in the first news report may later become “unknown.” A location can be approximate. A wound initially described as a shark bite may later be attributed to another cause. Historical dates can be known only to a month or year.
The database is designed to preserve those limitations instead of filling gaps with guesses.
Corrections
Incident pages can change when better evidence becomes available. A correction should preserve an audit trail internally and update the public “last reviewed” date only when the content actually changes.
Readers can submit evidence through the Corrections page. Submissions are reviewed; they never automatically rewrite a public record.
Independent editorial approach
The site aims for calm, descriptive language. It avoids graphic injury photographs, alarmist headlines and claims about an animal’s intent that the evidence cannot establish.
Sharks are part of marine ecosystems. Reporting an incident accurately does not require portraying sharks as villains, and providing species information does not require minimizing a real human injury.
Contact
Use the Contact page for non-urgent questions and source feedback. Use the Corrections page when you have evidence that a specific incident record should be changed.
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