Influencers' shark encounters spark safety concerns as bites surge

Tayane Dalazen felt the pressure before she felt the pain. A nurse shark, more than two metres long, had locked its jaws around her thigh during a diving expedition off the Brazilian coast in April. She stayed underwater for several seconds before the animal released her, leaving lacerations that would become the subject of tens of millions of online views. Dalazen, a 37-year-old lawyer from São Paulo, later learned that the tour operators had been deliberately feeding the sharks to encourage them to interact with tourists. She had not touched the animal or provoked it, she insists, though she acknowledges she was closer than she should have been.

What happened to Dalazen is no longer an isolated incident. At least three influencers have been bitten by sharks in less than a year. In July, a fishing content creator nearly lost his leg to a reef shark while spearfishing. In December, a Chinese creator was bitten in the Maldives. Both attacks were filmed and shared. In February of the previous year, a tourist in the Caribbean had both hands bitten off while attempting to photograph a bull shark from shallow water. Two months later, a snorkeller in Israel carrying a selfie stick was killed by sharks, reportedly while trying to capture images. Researchers at the International Shark Attack File, which monitors human-shark interactions worldwide, have documented a marked increase over the past three years in people being bitten while filming with sharks.

Shark scientist Kristian Parton, who hosts the YouTube channel Shark Bytes, says he is seeing videos of people swimming dangerously close to sharks, touching them, even riding them, with alarming frequency. "I'm seeing these videos every single week now and it's way more than it ever used to be," he says. "We're going to see people ending up in really serious incidents with sharks." A recent study of wildlife swimming expeditions found that influencers and photographers were the most likely to disregard safety instructions. The actual risk of shark bite remains extraordinarily low—roughly 70 unprovoked attacks occur worldwide each year, a figure that has remained stable for three decades. Yet the behaviour captured in social media content suggests a fundamental shift in how people perceive these animals: not as apex predators, but as subjects for engagement.

One of the most prominent figures in shark content creation is Ocean Ramsey, a 38-year-old former model who became famous in 2019 after swimming with one of the largest great white sharks ever recorded. She regularly posts footage of herself touching sharks and holding their dorsal fins. From a boat in Hawaii, where she operates paid shark tour experiences, Ramsey told the BBC that her intent has never been views or clicks. "My intent with all of my content has never been to gain views, it's to gain protection for sharks," she says. She claims that most of her work involves respectful observation from a distance, and that the sharks choose to approach her. When asked about scientific concerns that her videos encourage others to take dangerous risks, she deflects: "You've got to give the general public some accountability."

Shark expert Dr. Jack Cooper dismisses such claims as "ludicrous." He cannot explain how touching or riding a shark contributes to conservation. "All you're doing is showing a shark getting harassed by a human," he says. "And that's not promoting any policies about what we could do to reduce overfishing or to give more protections for sharks." Several content creators interviewed by the BBC denied being motivated by views or revenue, insisting instead that they support conservation or aim to change public perception. Yet the scientific evidence suggests something different is happening. When humans approach or touch sharks, the animals experience elevated levels of glucocorticoids—stress hormones that weaken immune systems, increase mortality rates, and lead to aborted offspring. If a shark is stressed in a nursery habitat, breeding ground, or feeding area, it is deprived of spaces essential to its survival.

Eric Clua, a marine biologist at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris who has researched the motivations behind shark bites, argues that the number of incidents is rising because people increasingly view sharks as less dangerous than they once did. "The message transmitted by influencers is 'Look! Touch the shark, nothing will happen to you,'" he says. Shark swimming and diving experiences have exploded in popularity globally. TripAdvisor alone lists more than 140 such tours in the Maldives, some explicitly advertising "the ultimate selfie" with sharks. Parton offers a simple comparison: "We're talking about a true apex predator, a very large wild animal. You wouldn't walk into the Serengeti and try and put your hand on the face of a lion." Yet that is precisely what people are doing in the ocean, one frame at a time, with the warning from marine scientists growing louder and the cost—to both human and animal—mounting.