John Long on Great White Sharks & His New Book, “The Secret History of Sharks”

Sharks have always scared the bejesus out of me. Growing up near a beach in Australia will do that to you: we have more human fatalities from sharks than any other country. Every summer, our news channels focused on gruesome shark attacks, even though, in reality, there were very few. Little did I know that one day I’d become a scientist working on shark research.

The International Shark Attack File, kept at the Florida Museum of Natural History, is a global record of “negative human-shark encounters,” incidents where humans have been harmed or killed by sharks. In 2023, only 10 deaths were caused by sharks, far fewer than the hundreds of human fatalities in North America caused by “negative human-deer encounters.”