California clocked a new high-water mark for shark encounters in 2025. 10 incidents statewide. One fatal.

Peter Tira, an information officer for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife told SFGATE, it was the “highest total number of shark incidents recorded in a single year.” 

But there’s a caveat.

“Only 3 incidents with injuries last year, far below the highest year, which was 1974 with 7 injuries confirmed,” he wrote in a statement. 

Just two weeks into 2026, a surfer was attacked by a shark in Northern California, not far from where M Feb was whittling down boards in EAST. On Tuesday morning, Tim Civik, 26, was surfing the Gualala River mouth in Mendocino County, when a shark (species unconfirmed as of now, but likely a great white) launched him from his surfboard, piercing its teeth in his thigh, and snapping his board in half. “I heard from them that it hit the surfer and the surfboard, threw the surfer up in the air a bit, and broke the board in half,” South Coast Fire Protection District Chief Jason Warner said. “The shark latched on to half of the board and [was] kind of thrashing it around.”

In the US, shark encounters have certainly been far less lethal than they have been across the ditch in Australia. Despite a population 12-13x smaller, Australia suffered 15 encounters in 2025, with five of them turning deadly.

As a result, many Australians have called for a removal of Great White Sharks protected status which would allow for their systematic killing. Late last year, the NSW Shark Safety Program received a $2.5 million boost to rollout more alert systems and shark kits across 50 beaches.

Gathering good data on sharks which pose a threat to humans is notoriously challenging. As anyone with a BSc will tell you, ‘you can’t conflate correlation with causation’. Reason being: there’s far more methods (drones, tagging stations) of detection than there were historically.

Ergo, there’s a chance there’s just more people watching and reporting encounters, rather than a true spike in interactions. 

We’ll be trying to lay it all out on the table in an upcoming Jubilee-inspired project, pitting pro-cull voices against anti-cull conservationists.