How influencers are the reason for rise in shark attacks experts shocked that they have to issue warning

Jaws and effect.Just when you thought it was safe to Go-Pro back in the water: French scientists have attributed the spike in shark attacks to selfie-taking influencers encouraging tourists to pet the toothy predators, per a “Jaws”-dropping study in the journal Frontiers in Conservation.Contrary to sharks’ portrayal as mindless killing machines in movies, researchers argued that many of the so-called attacks were defensive responses to being poked and prodded by online clout-seekers.“I don’t encourage, as many influencers do on social networks, [people] to cling to a shark’s dorsal fin or stroke it, under the pretext of proving that they are harmless,” lead researcher Professor Eric Clua of PSL University in Paris, France, told the Times of London.He was citing the growing genre of videos in which content creators film themselves swimming with and even poking the toothsome sea beasts.

In one popular Instagram clip, wildlife photographer Taylor Cunningham is pictured touching the nose of a tiger shark off of Hawaii.“The sharks here feel like family,” the self-proclaimed “crazy shark lady” gushed in the caption.Coincidentally, the study comes just two months after a Canadian tourist lost both her hands after getting bitten by a 6-foot shark that she was trying to film in Turks and Caicos.

Earlier this month, Barak Tzach, 40, a father of four who was killed while trying to film sharks in the water off Hadera, Israel.Although it’s unclear in either case if the victims touched or fed the predators.To examine the cause of recent shark attacks, Professor Clua and his team examined records of encounters off the coast of French Polynesia between 2009 and 2023.They found that of the 74 bites recorded during this period, most of which were from smaller and medium-sized sharks, around 5% were likely to have been the result of sharks acting out in defense.He noted that these defensive bites came without warning and involved several bites, which general...