Shark bites tend to trigger our most reactive impulses, and it’s understandable. The damage goes beyond the physical. People stop going to the beach. Political leaders feel the trust of their constituents slipping. There is a general sense that nobody is in control.
It matters what we take out of the water in the name of safety…Removing sharks comes at a cost and therefore isn’t the only answer.
And that is when governments often make their worst decisions. The pressure to do something, visibly and fast, is enormous. But doing something and doing something that works are not the same thing. Shark bites call for responses that are sensitive to the people affected, grounded in evidence, and durable enough to outlast the news cycle. An emotional issue does not require an emotional policy.
The odds of being bitten are extremely low. Sixty-five unprovoked bites worldwide in 2025 sits near the 10-year average of 72, against hundreds of millions of people in the water. Still, low odds are not zero. Bites cluster in particular places, and where they recur, governments have a duty to manage the hazard. The question is how.
It matters what we take out of the water in the name of safety. We know sharks matter. On reefs off northwest Australia where sharks had been fished down, scientists found more mid-sized predators and fewer of the herbivorous fish that keep algae in check and help coral recover. And six decades of catch records from Queensland’s own shark-control nets and hooks show a steady loss in the diversity of large sharks along that coast, resulting in declining ecological functioning. Removing sharks comes at a cost and therefore isn’t the only answer.
What the Law Says
There is no international law of shark bites. No treaty tells a government what to do when someone is bitten. But governments do have legitimate public-safety responsibilities, and those responsibilities are constrained by law, including rules governing protected species, fisheries regulations, and administrative authority.
A recent case from Nouméa illustrates the point. Starting in 2019, the city and New Caledonia’s Southern Province authorized culls of Tiger and Bull Sharks near the beaches. More than 200 were killed by 2023. In December 2023 the administrative tribunal annulled the decisions, finding the culls disproportionate to the goal of protecting human life, in part because no scientific study had been done on the targeted populations or on the environmental effects of removing them. The Paris administrative court of appeal upheld that ruling on 3 December 2025, stating that Nouméa’s mayor could not order nine months of shark culls on emergency powers, because a cull planned months in advance is not responsive to an “imminent danger.”
None of this forbids culling. The tribunal itself said the city could still run fishing campaigns in the future, but under different conditions. What the courts demanded was a legal basis, evidence, and proportion.
Regional and international instruments sit one layer up. The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission’s current shark measure, CMM 2025-06, binds members’ fishing fleets but expressly leaves coastal states’ sovereign rights in their own waters untouched. CITES, which in November 2025 gave the Oceanic Whitetip Shark the first Appendix I listing ever granted to a shark, regulates trade, not beach safety. Neither governs a cull. But a government that commits to shark conservation offshore and then kills protected sharks inshore without evidence has a coherence problem, and courts are starting to notice.
Whether a particular intervention works is highly local. And it should be based on data that answers: did this measure reduce the risk to people, at what cost to the ecosystem, and how do we know?
Does Intervention Equal Protection?
We have been killing sharks to protect swimmers for nearly a century, and we still mostly measure the wrong thing. A systematic review published in Marine Policy in February 2026 looked at 67 studies testing 114 shark-bite mitigation measures and found that unstandardized testing makes them nearly impossible to compare. Most studies of culls, nets, and drumlines count sharks caught. Very few count bites prevented. Those are not the same number.
Where bite data exists, it is not kind to indiscriminate culling. Hawaii ran six shark-control programs between 1959 and 1976 and killed 4,668 sharks. The scientists who reviewed the record concluded the programs had no measurable effect on the rate of shark attacks. Nets aren’t much better. In the 2024–2025 season, New South Wales shark nets caught 223 animals. Twenty-four were target sharks. The other 199, nearly 90 percent, were not.
Still, it would be a mistake to say that nothing works, or that every hook in the water is a cull. Off Recife, Brazil, a program caught potentially dangerous sharks and released them offshore rather than killing them. The monthly bite rate was about 97 percent lower while the program ran. But, that is observational evidence, specific to one coastline, and the program was not mortality-free. In Cape Town, the Shark Spotters program puts trained observers on the mountainside, flies flags, and sounds a siren when a white shark enters the surf zone. A 2017 study found the high-risk warnings got people out of the water when it mattered, reducing the overlap between sharks and swimmers without killing anything.
Whether a particular intervention works is highly local. And it should be based on data that answers: did this measure reduce the risk to people, at what cost to the ecosystem, and how do we know?
The Political Trap
It’s easy to assume a frightened public wants blood. But the evidence says otherwise. University of Sydney researchers surveyed 700 residents of Ballina, New South Wales, after a run of serious bites in 2015, and 600 Perth residents in 2016 in the same week two people died. In both places, support for lethal responses sat between 20 and 25 percent. Majorities wanted education, research, and non-lethal technology instead. Most respondents also believed governments choose lethal measures to calm the public, not to make beaches safer. A cull, in other words, is often a response to a demand that does not exist.
What Durable Policy Looks Like
Still, governments must act, and must be able to show their work. A durable shark-bite policy might contain: (1) a clear legal basis, including any protected-species exemption, secured before a crisis rather than improvised during one; (2) a demonstrated safety benefit, judged against bite incidents, not sharks caught; (3) proportionality, so that lethal measures are a last resort with less harmful alternatives tried or ruled out first; (4) an honest accounting of ecological cost; and (5) a pre-agreed incident protocol that says who closes the beach, who investigates, when independent scientific advice is required, and when a temporary measure ends.
When communities are faced with shark bites, governments must focus on mitigation of risk that works. Thoughtful, evidence-based measures grounded in science are the only durable solution.
