Unprovoked vs. Provoked - GSAF defines a provoked incident as one in which the shark was speared, hooked, captured or in which a human drew "first blood". Although such incidents are of little interest to shark behaviorists, when the species of shark involved is known and pre-op photos of the wounds are available, the bite patterns are of value in determining species of shark involved in other cases when the species could not identified by the patient or witnesses. We know that a live human is rarely perceived as prey by a shark. Many incidents are motivated by curiosity, others may result when a shark perceives a human as a threat or competitor for a food source, and could be classed as "provoked" when examined from the shark's perspective.Incidents involving Boats – Incidents in which a boat was bitten or rammed by a shark are in green. However, in cases in which the shark was hooked, netted or gaffed, the entry is orange because they are classed as provoked incidents.Casualties of War & Air/Sea Disasters - Sharks maintain the health of the marine ecosystem by removing the dead or injured animals. Many incidents result because, like other animals that don't rely on instinct alone, sharks explore their environment. Lacking hands, they may investigate an unfamiliar object with their mouths. Unlike humans, there is no malice in sharks; they simply do what nature designed them to do. Air/Sea Disasters are accidents that place people into the day-to-day business of sharks. The wartime losses due to sharks result from mans' cruelty to man. Air/Sea Disasters are in yellow.Questionable incidents - Incidents in which there are insufficient data to determine if the injury was caused by a shark or the person drowned and the body was later scavenged by sharks. In a few cases, despite media reports to the contrary, evidence indicated there was no shark involvement whatsoever. Such incidents are in blue.All of the data on this site comes from the Global Shark Attack File (GSAF), a spreadsheet of human/shark interactions, compiled by the Shark Research Institute. It is hoped that this site makes it apparent that shark attacks are extremely rare occurrences, while providing an easily accessible resource for those wishing to know more about the subject.

Context

This US Total Population data was retrieved using the World Bank API and then saved as a .txt file and will be used in my US Shark Attack Analysis.

Content

Each record contains the year and total population of the United States.

Acknowledgements

World Bank API https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/topics/125589-developer-information

Inspiration

This data will be useful in analyzing whether or not the number of shark attacks in the United States is rising with the total human population.

The Sundarban, spread across India and Bangladesh constitutes the world’s largest and only mangrove habitat of the Royal Bengal Tiger (Panthera tigris tigris). Together, harbouring around 202 tigers, it is also infamous as the worlds most severe human-tiger conflict hotspot. Despite this, very fragmentary and inconsistent information exists on the nature and extent of human-tiger conflicts (HTC) in this landscape. To fill this lacuna, a pan landscape survey was undertaken with the aim to mine information on HTC and explore various facets of HTC occurrence in this landscape. The survey was conducted across 76 villages distributed in the eight administrative blocks on the entire fringe of the Sundarban Biosphere Reserve in India between August 2018 to November 2019. On the whole, human-tiger conflicts (HTC) were reported far more commonly than cases pertaining to conflicts with crocodiles and sharks (species unidentified). The number of cases of human-wildlife conflicts (HWC) recorded were highest in the Gosaba administrative block, followed by Kultali and Patharpratima, which together account for 74% of the recorded cases. This is interesting as in earlier published records almost no consolidated information exists for the south-24-Parganas Forest Division, although it appears that the two administrative blocks here experience the second highest level of HTC in this landscape after Goasba, in north 24 Parganas. Across the forty-year period span of the recorded information, the overall conflicts between humans and tigers appeared to have witnessed a significant increase after 1987. However, this is most likely a result of poor documentation and relatively low probability of people recalling older incidents accurately. The time series change also shows a significant lowering of human-tiger conflicts post year 2000 (Ref. Figure 1.3), which is suggestive of changes brought about by stronger enforcement as well as the beginning of the arrangements for barricading the fringes with nylon nets (Tiger Conservation Plan, STR, 2012; also see, Mukherjee et al., 2012). The level of conflict between humans and crocodiles and humans and sharks, however, did not show significant changes across the same period. The significant lowering of HTC cases held statistically, even when the data was compared across decadal periods. Post completion of the survey, between 1st December 2019 and 31st October 2020, another 22 cases have been recorded, 21 of which resulted in the death of the victims involved. However, these could not be included in the analysis due to the absence of detailed information, which could not be collected due to the paucity of time (and subsequent Covid-19 driven restrictions). Most victims of HTC were males (92%), across all age categories of victims, and the majority of the victims belonged to the working age-class, i.e. 19 to 60 years. On average, HTC victims had at least 5 dependent family members, with majority below the poverty line (BPL, as per classification of Govt. of India), earning on average Rs. 25000 (~ USD 336) per annum. Majority of the victims belonged to classified Schedule Caste groups (~69%) and Other Backward Classes (~13%), while only about ~8% belonged to classified Scheduled Tribal groups (indigenous people). This, however, could simply be reflective of the proportional distribution of the various categories in the region. However, a deeper analysis suggests that across the villages surveyed, those with a higher population of Scheduled Tribes experienced a lowered level of HTC, probably indicating that Scheduled Tribes’ are not engaged extensively in natural resource collection compared to other ethnic populations. 90.14% of the victims were Hindus, and only 9.9% of the victims were Muslim and Christian. Compared to the distribution of different religious groups, where Muslims constitute around 30% of the population of south 24 Parganas, their representation in the sample of victims was relatively low at 9.5% of the total number of victims recorded. Irrespective of the religious background of victims, the majority of HTC victims were illiterate (64 – 77.8%), and around 79% of the victims were dependent on forest-based livelihoods, primarily fishing, crab and prawn collection and honey collection as the primary source of their income. Although around 52.4% of the victims/victim’s family, reported to be owning tillable agriculture land, the average land holding was 0.2 acres, which is extremely small to provide sustainable income from traditional agricultural practices. Further, during interviews, several people reported an increased salinity in their lands due to the inundation of bunds/dykes during natural calamities, leading to saline water inflow into their lands. Such increased salinity of land often renders the land unfit for agriculture. Only 15.6% of the victims or their families owned a fishing boat, indicating that even the majority who were forest-based resource dependent,...

This database contains sampling effort, catch records, biological data, and water quality data for sampling and catches of elasmobranchs in northern Australian rivers, estuaries and coasts undertaken under the National Environmental Research Program (NERP) Marine Biodiversity Hub Project 2.4 'Supporting Management of Listed and Rare Species'. and the National Environmental Science Program (NESP) Marine Biodiversity Hub Project A1 'Northern Australian Hotspots for the Recovery of Threatened Euryhaline Elasmobranchs'. Surveys using gillnets and rod-and-line were undertaken in the Top End region of the Northern Territory and the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Selected animals were tagged for movement ecology, habitat use and mortality estimates (acoustic telemetry), and tissue samples were collected from all fish for molecular analyses (population genetics and close-kin mark-recapture). Sampling was undertaken with a variety of fishing gear, mainly gillnet (46 inch stretched mesh size) and rod-and-line (medium-heavy shark fishing gear; small-medium hook sizes, 4/010/0). Longlines and cast nets were also used on occasion. Sawfish were targeted using gillnets, and river sharks mostly with rod-and-line. Processing catch included taking measurements, determining sex through external examination, photographing each individual, and collecting a small tissue sample from the inner margin of the pectoral fin (for molecular analyses). All individuals were tagged with a PIT tag for individual identification, and a subset was tagged with VEMCO acoustic tags (V9, V13 or V16) for telemetry studies. All fish were released at the site of capture, as was any bycatch. Data sourced from http://metadata.imas.utas.edu.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/metadata.show?uuid=a0cf8cc5-67cd-49bb-bcaa-dedf21ed3287 on 2022-06-01. This link references associated resources (database, reports and publications).