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 has only ever been one fatal attack.

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 is thought that she may have aggravated the shark by offering it food which would have changed the shark’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 off Sharm El Sheikh late in 2010.

On 30 November,  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, a 70 year old woman was killed by an oceanic white tip also while snorkelling in the Sharm El Sheikh area.

There was huge 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 the  more likely cause could have been the dumping of dead sheep into the sea by cargo ships or shark feeding by divers.

Despite this extremely unusual episode, as of June 2012, we only know of three fatalities off the Egyptian coast as a consequence of shark attacks during the last ten years.  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 ten times greater.