Shark Incidents by Activity
Activity describes what the person was doing when a shark-human interaction was reported. It helps distinguish ordinary swimming or surfing from fishing, shark handling, boating and other contexts.
Raw incident counts by activity are not direct risk rates. Participation differs enormously: millions of people may swim at beaches, while a much smaller number handle sharks during fishing. Time spent in the water, location and behavior also vary.
Use activity pages to understand circumstances, not to rank hobbies from safest to most dangerous.
Normalize similar terms into stable categories while retaining the original source wording in the incident record. Suggested public categories include:
- Swimming and wading
- Surfing and board sports
- Diving and snorkeling
- Fishing
- Spearfishing
- Boating and watercraft
- Shark handling/angling
- Other
- Unknown
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