The Popular Island With The Most Shark Attacks In All Of Hawaii

With the exception of bears, there is perhaps no creature that gets more press when it attacks humans than sharks. We have weeks dedicated to them on television, movie franchises where each sequel is worse than the last, and countless social media videos giving sharks more attention than they probably ever wanted. For beachgoers in Hawaii, it's always at the back of their mind, even if shark attacks are ultimately rare. But it may be a little more in mind in Maui, where there are more attacks than anywhere else in Hawaii.

According to the International Shark Attack File compiled by the University of Florida, since 1828, the island has been home to 73 confirmed unprovoked attacks, with Oaha coming in at a distant second of 42. On a global scale, shark attacks have risen slightly, with 69 bites and 10 deaths in 2023, which respectively is a few more of each than the five-year average between 2018 and 2022.

Still, when it comes to Hawaii, a difference of more than 30 attacks around one particular island — even it's over the course of almost 200 years — is unlikely to be a random occurrence. And so a team of researchers set out to determine why.

In the National Geographic special aptly named "Maui Shark Mystery," researchers looked into a series of incidents involving tiger sharks by equipping over 40 of them with transmitters in order to track their movements. They found that while "[t]iger sharks across Hawaii stick to their home islands most of the year ... during the winter, they converge on Maui." Attaching cameras to them revealed that the congregating behavior is likely due to the males attempting to mate, among other reasons. It's a specific behavior not seen before with tiger sharks. Other studies have suggested depth preference in Maui could be a factor.

The attacks appear to be more of a recent issue. The Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology found that from 1995 to 2021, Maui saw around 40 nonfatal bites and five fatal bites, far more than the other islands. Since Maui's desirable habitat for tiger sharks is also desirable for people, the unfortunate overlap is seemingly what's leading to the moderate uptick in attacks.

That said, this doesn't mean anyone should be canceling a trip to Hawaii anytime soon. The attacks being rare may sound like a message the sharks are trying to put out there, but it's true. At a talk in Maui (via The Maui News), shark expert Kim Holland mentioned he's actually surprised at how few attacks Hawaii sees, considering the number of sharks and people. "If you think of how many tens of thousands of person hours of ocean users there are in the water and how common we know large sharks are, the fact that we have two (attacks per year) to five (attacks) to zero to eight to two to four to zero attacks per year is really astounding," he said.