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Earlier this year, a Canadian tourist on vacation in the Turks and Caicos attempted to take a selfie with a shark—and ended up having both her hands bitten off. This comes after a viral video emerged of tourists taking photos with a huge shark that had been caught and dumped on a Florida beach. Now, a new study in Frontiers in Conservation is suggesting that selfie-chasing tourists may be contributing to an increase in sharks biting humans.

Blaming social media influencers for encouraging tourists to try to photograph or touch sharks, the scientists point out that these animals do not tend to bite unless provoked or harassed. Professor Eric Clua, the study’s first author and a shark specialist at Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL) in Paris, told The Times of London: “I don’t encourage, as many influencers do on social networks, to cling to a shark’s dorsal fin or stroke it, under the pretext of proving that they are harmless and supposedly working for their conservation.”

While shark bites are incredibly rare, with only around 100 incidents globally and a handful of fatalities, Professor Clua suggests that tourists’ lack of knowledge means they are ignorant of the risks. “People know the difference between a [Yorkshire terrier] and a pit bull,” he says, “whereas they don’t know the difference between a blacktip reef shark and a bull shark, which are their marine equivalents.”

Looking at records of shark encounters in French Polynesia between 2009 and 2023, the researchers found that about 5% of the “attacks” were probably defensive, occurring soon after a human interaction that was likely perceived as threatening by the shark. “We show that defensive bites by sharks on humans—a reaction to initial human aggression—are a reality and that the animal should not be considered responsible or at fault when they occur,” said Professor Clua. “These bites are simply a manifestation of survival instinct, and the responsibility for the incident needs to be reversed.”

Read more here.