RED SEA SHARKS – FAQ

On this page I hope to answer some of the commonly asked questions about sharks as well as provide some links to the most interesting and relevant Youtube vidoes.

HOW DANGEROUS ARE THEY ?

Hundreds of thousands of tourists come to Marsa Alam every year, many of them diving or snorkelling in areas where sharks are common, but as far as I’m aware there have only ever been two fatal attacks.

The first of these occurred when a French woman was killed by a shark while diving at a remote site off the Marsa Alam coastline in the summer of 2009. However it seems possible that she might have aggravated the shark or offered it food which would have changed the animal’s behaviour.  

Elsewhere off Egypt’s Red Sea coast attacks have also been rare.  A man was killed whilst snorkelling off Sharm El Sheikh in 2004 and there was a brief but extremely unusual series of attacks on swimmers at the same resort late in 2010.

On 30 November 2010,  a 48 year old woman had her foot and arm bitten by an oceanic white tip shark while snorkelling at Coral Bay.  15 minutes later, a 70 year old woman snorkelling nearby had her foot and right forearm severed. The next morning two men were attacked and badly injured off Ras Nasrani. And finally on 5 December 2010, a 70 year old woman was killed by an oceanic whitetip also while snorkelling in the Sharm El Sheikh area.

There was intensive media attention following the series of attacks. Some Egyptians even chose to blame them on an Israeli plot to destroy the country’s tourist industry – something for which there is absolutely no factual basis.  More serious analysts speculated that a more likely cause could have been the dumping of dead sheep into the sea by cargo ships or shark feeding by divers.

RECENT ATTACKS AT SAHL HASHEESH

More recently, in late June and early July 2022, two women were killed in two shark attacks off the beach of Sahl Hasheesh, a few miles south of the Red Sea resort of Hurghada. The first victim was a Romanian woman in her 40s, but little is known about the circumstances of it, as her body showing clear signs of a shark attack was not found until two days later on a coral reef. Nobody witnessed what happened and initially nobody had known why she was missing

The second attack occurred on 1 July. The victim was an Austrian pensioner, aged 68, who died shortly after losing her arm and leg to a either a rare Mako shark (according to initial reports in Austrian newspapers) or an Oceanic Whitetip (according to later reports). Shocked bystanders on a hotel jetty apparently threw either a rope or a flotation device to help her and she seems to have been able to swim to the shore, but she was declared dead soon after arriving at the private Nile hospital in Hurghada. (see reports by the BBC, Dive Magazine, Divernet and National World and video commentary by Shark Tracker on this and other recent Red Sea incidents.)

THE STATISCAL RISK OF BEING A VICTIM REMAINS VERY LOW

Despite these extremely unusual incidents, as of July 2022, we are only aware of six fatalities off the Egyptian coast as a consequence of shark attacks during the last twelve years. If you are aware of others please let us know.  Of the 368 species of shark worldwide only 20 represent any danger to humans.  And statistically shark attacks are very rare. You are more likely to be killed by falling out of bed or by a toaster. Annually over one million people are killed in car accidents every year, but worldwide fatalities from shark attacks average just five a year. The risk of being struck by lightning is between ten and fifty times greater. 

Annual risk of death for a US citizen during his lifetime

Even in the United States, which has recorded the highest number of attacks, the relative risk of death from a shark attack is extremely low. Source International Shark Attack File