"Shark phobia" has firmly settled in the minds of tourists! Several unpleasant cases of shark attacks on people that have occurred in recent years at popular resorts in Egypt have caused a lot of fuss and scared tourists a lot. But this is Egypt, where sharks have always been around, and they are not averse to sometimes biting off a limb from a gaping swimmer, and even these cases can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
However, suspicious tourists planning a holiday in Turkey "torment" search engines with monotonous queries: are there sharks in Turkey? When was the last shark attack on a person? and so on, in the same spirit.
Well, let's figure it out together.
Sharks in Turkey
There are sharks in Turkey, and in general, it would be strange if there weren't any, given the geographical location and impressive length of the sea coast. But Turkish sharks live peacefully in the sea depths, very rarely approaching the shore. The reason is elementary - there are relatively few coral reefs near the Turkish coast (not to be compared with the same Red Sea), among which fish - the main food of sharks - are found in abundance. No reefs - no fish - no sharks! That's the chain.
As for the presence of potentially dangerous sharks in the seas of Turkey, their main abundance of species is concentrated in the Mediterranean Sea. There are about forty species of sharks here, fifteen of which can be dangerous to humans. These are the mako shark, sand and bull sharks, grey reef and tiger sharks, great white sharks and several other species. Of course, shark attacks on people in Turkey have happened. But, attention! Over the past hundred years, 21 fatal shark attacks have been officially recorded in Turkey. 21 in 100 years... can you even imagine how many tens and hundreds of millions of people have swum in the Turkish seas over this century?..
The Aegean Sea also has "toothy" ones, but there are far fewer of them (the heat-loving nature of most species is reflected). There are about 35 species, a considerable number of which "live" in the Aegean waters far from all year round. Of the dangerous ones, there are four or five species of sharks, no more.
Black Sea resorts are not very popular in Turkey yet, but the reason for this is clearly not the sharks. Although they are here, and what sharks! "Bloodthirsty and ferocious" spiny dogfish (spiny dogfish), which reach a serious size and weight... something like one and a half meters in length and up to fifteen kilograms in weight. That's almost the entire shark population. Poor spiny dogfish do not even think about the tasty limbs of swimmers, because they themselves are the object of human gastronomic interests, so they try to stay away from people. If a shark attack in the Black Sea ever happened, then official statistics are silent about this unique case.
Worldwide statistics of shark attacks on people
Now let's leave Turkey alone for a moment and talk about the shark scourge on a global scale. What can I say - the probability of being attacked by a shark, let alone dying in the process, is simply vanishingly small! In 2012, 68 cases of shark attacks on people were officially recorded, only ten of which were fatal. And this is all over the world, dear friends! Most of the attacks were recorded in "traditional shark" zones: the USA (Florida, South Carolina), Australia, the Bahamas, Mexico, Brazil. Türkiye is as far from those places as the author of these lines is from the art of origami...
In general, statistics show that the probability of dying from a shark's teeth is so small that it loses out to such exotic cases as death from a lightning strike or falling out of bed in your sleep. Oh, by the way, more people die on the planet each year from being hit in the head by a coconut falling from a palm tree than from shark attacks...
Shark attacks in 2013
And finally, let's "run through" the statistics of the current year. At the time of writing, 43 cases of shark attacks on people were recorded, 8 of them fatal. Again, the traditional set of countries, among which Turkey is not even in sight. So, sharks in Turkey in 2013 have not yet mauled or even bitten a single tourist or local resident.
Q.E.D…
