UF Shark Expert: Dive-With-Sharks Vacation Trend Endangers Tourists

March 4, 1998

GAINESVILLE — Unwitting tourists risk injury and even death when they experiment with an increasingly popular vacation trend that encourages them to cozy up to hungry sharks, a University of Florida shark expert warns.

Growing numbers of diving tours use fish handouts near tourists who are eager for a close-up view of the primeval predators but instead may become misdirected targets in the feeding frenzy, said George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File at UF.

“Sooner or later, some tourist will suffer a very serious injury or die during one of these operations,” said Burgess, a UF biological scientist who documents shark attacks worldwide and is the first to raise public concerns about this lucrative business for the dive industry. “It’s not a matter of conjecture. It will happen. It’s just a matter of time.”

More than a dozen attacks already have occurred in the Bahamas on these expeditions, most involving shark handlers because they spend the most time in the water, Burgess said. But in two cases tourists received minor injuries, he said.

“There have been people airlifted from the Bahamas to Florida for medical treatment who didn’t make the newspapers, mostly because they were employees of these dive operations and had a lot to lose if their stories came out,” Burgess said.

Common for years in the Bahamas and now offered by two Florida operations and in other parts of the world, expeditions allowing humans to dive with sharks have become a popular form of ecotourism because of the accessibility of underwater cameras and a reformed image of the ocean predator, he said.

“Everyone wants to go back to Iowa with a picture of a shark in the water, and it’s even better if someone can take a picture of them next to the shark,” Burgess said. “And thankfully, due to a lot of public relations work by scientists and environmentalists, people are beginning to understand that sharks are not the killing machines that they’ve been portrayed as for years.”

The irony is that vacationers seeking realistic glimpses of these creatures in their underwater environment are seeing trained — not natural — shark behavior, Burgess said. “It’s no more natural than watching porpoises perform at the aquarium or tigers jump through hoops at the circus,” he said. “They’re essentially circus animals in a wild setting.”

Sharks at these dive operations have come to expect food when they hear an outboard motor, much like Pavlov’s dog salivated at the sound of a bell, Burgess said.

Besides problems caused by changing a region’s natural ecology by artificially inflating shark population sizes in certain areas, he said he fears such behavior will interfere with the activities of other divers, snorkelers and sports fishermen who don’t wish to attract sharks.

One injured tourist was not even on a shark-feeding dive operation but received scalp wounds while swimming near an anchored boat at the same site on another day, Burgess said.

“It is ironic that we’ve told people for years not to enter the water when sharks are feeding,” he said. “Now we’re getting sharks all excited by revving up engines, putting food in the water and adding a bunch of tourists, most of whom have never been in the water with sharks. Some operations even encourage tourists to reach out and touch the sharks.”

Gary Adkison, manager of Walkers in the Bahamas, said there has never been a close call with any of the 25,000 tourists who have taken its dive tours since 1990. People are told not to grab the sharks, who are fed by a fish ball suspended into the water, and not by handlers directly.

Burgess said when large numbers of sharks swarm around limited food, a pecking order results and less-favored ones in the pack may grow frustrated and strike humans. Burgess, who dived with such a tour in the Bahamas last summer to see what it was like, said he noticed one shark hunching its back and repeatedly opening and closing its mouth, behaviors often seen before an attack.

“The problem is that when attacks occur, it’s pretty safe to assume the blame will be put on the shark, not the human,” he said. “And all the activities and time we’ve spent trying to redesign the public image of the shark will be lost.”