Florida passed a shark-feeding ban even though bites are rare

Fewer than one person dies from a shark bite in Florida in a typical year. The state records only about 25 to 30 bites total across an entire year, in a place where millions of people swim, surf, and wade. Those are the actual numbers behind one of the most feared animals in the ocean.

And yet, a federal bill built on the promise of beach safety just cleared the U.S. House of Representatives. The Florida Safe Seas Act would make it a federal crime for shark-diving operators to feed sharks in the waters off Florida, extending an existing ban up to 200 nautical miles offshore. WUSF, in partnership with Inside Climate News and reporter Kate Waxman, laid out the full story on July 19, 2026.

If you swim at Florida’s beaches or care about its coastal waters, this matters. Sharks are not overrunning the shore. It matters because the bill points at the wrong cause. Understanding why means borrowing a core idea from building biology: to fix a problem, you have to find its real source, not just treat the symptom that’s easiest to see.

The numbers don’t match the fear

Start with the data, because it reframes everything.

Gavin Naylor directs the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida, a database of roughly 7,000 incidents stretching back decades. His figure for a typical year in Florida: 25 to 30 bites, fewer than one of them fatal. For perspective, that’s a vanishingly small risk spread across one of the most heavily used coastlines in the country.

Just as important is why those bites happen and where. Most come from blacktip sharks, animals about six feet long that bite not out of hunger but out of confusion. In murky, shallow water, chasing baitfish, a blacktip mistakes a swimmer’s foot for prey. These bites happen where people wade and surf, right at the shoreline.

That geography is the crux of the whole argument.

Why the bill’s logic falls apart

The Safe Seas Act targets shark-diving operators who work miles offshore. They use bait, often sealed in a crate to release only scent, a method called “passive scenting”, to draw sharks close for tourists to observe and photograph. The stated fear is that feeding teaches sharks to associate people and boats with food, putting beachgoers at risk.

But the sharks at those offshore dive sites aren’t the ones biting swimmers. They’re bull, lemon, silky, and Caribbean reef sharks, different species, in different water, miles from the beach.

Stephen Kajiura, a Florida Atlantic University marine biologist who has flown aerial surveys of shark migrations for more than a decade, put it bluntly: “Biologically there’s no good basis” for the idea that feeding sharks miles offshore endangers people at the beach. Naylor said he knew of no bite tied to Florida’s offshore shark-diving operations at all.

Even the state agency backing the bill couldn’t defend the beach-safety claim when pressed. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission endorsed the measure but, asked directly about the scientists’ geography argument, shifted its rationale to protecting the divers on the trips, not swimmers at the shore, and pointed to no shark-specific evidence.

This is the building-biology red flag. When the stated cause and the actual location of the problem don’t line up, you’re looking at a symptom being blamed for something it didn’t cause. Treating it won’t fix the real issue.

The real source: a recovering population and a shrinking pantry

So what is driving Florida’s shark conflict? Follow the people who actually work the water, and two sources surface, neither of which is a dive boat.

First, the sharks are coming back. Several large shark species, hammered by overfishing through the late 20th century, have been slowly rebuilding since protections took hold in the 1990s. That’s a conservation success. But it means more sharks in the water, and fishermen are running straight into them. The term for it is “depredation”, sharks stealing hooked fish off anglers’ lines. Captain Willie Howard, who has run charters since the late 1980s, says it now happens “every other trip” for bottom fish; he once reeled up only a tuna head. “We don’t birth sharks,” as one dive operator put it, the animals aren’t multiplying because of feeding; they’re returning because management worked.

Second, the estuaries that feed the whole system are degraded. This is where source control comes into sharpest focus. Captain Bill Taylor, a marine scientist who has worked out of Jupiter for 30 years, reserves his real anger not for the dive boats but for what’s happened to his home estuary, the Loxahatchee. Decades of canal drainage and altered freshwater flow have wrecked the oyster beds and seagrass that fish depend on. “You’re killing all the stuff that sharks eat,” he said, and he argues that’s a bigger factor than any dive operation.

Put those together and the picture is clear. A recovering predator population is competing with a growing human population over a shrinking supply of prey, because the nurseries that produce that prey, the estuaries, are being destroyed. That’s the source. The dive boats are a visible target, not the cause.

The exposure pathways the bill leaves wide open

The bill’s framing exempts the activities most likely to actually draw sharks toward people.

Fishing bait near beaches. The bill bans baiting live sharks for tourism but does nothing to restrict baiting them to be caught and killed. Yet shore-based shark fishing happens exactly where swimmers are. Kajiura said the thing that actually draws sharks toward swimmers is fishing: “It has to do with fishermen having their catches snatched,” not offshore dive trips.

Research feeding. The bill exempts shark feeding conducted as part of federally funded research.

The chum that lingers. Naylor, who won’t call feeding entirely harmless, has seen anecdotes where heavy chumming left sharks lingering in an area after an operation closed. But that risk applies to the concentrated baiting the bill leaves largely untouched, rather than the offshore observation it targets.

If the genuine goal were keeping sharks from associating people with food near the beach, the shore-based activity, rather than the operation miles offshore, is the obvious pathway. The bill inverts that. Dive operator Tanner Mansell noticed the double standard: “We don’t operate near beaches. Yet you can throw the same exact fish that we have in a crate on a hook and attract sharks to the beach to catch them.”

The measurable question no one wants to answer

Beneath the beach-safety talk sits a harder question that data can’t settle: how many sharks are enough, and who decides?

NOAA already regulates how many sharks may be caught, down to the ton. The commercial Atlantic shark fishery has shrunk to a capped, permit-limited operation, and the list of off-limits species keeps growing. What no agency can decide is whether a recovered population of predators is a hazard to be thinned or a wild population to be lived alongside.

That’s a values question dressed up as a facts dispute. Catherine Macdonald of the University of Miami describes the science being used in this fight as “a bludgeon that both sides would like to use against the other” more than an actual arbiter. Naylor frames it differently: politicians act on trends, scientists wait for statistical significance, and “action usually precedes statistical significance.” Both are doing different jobs. Neither is exactly wrong. But dressing a values choice in the language of safety hides what’s actually being decided. There is better news on the same reefs, where Mote scientists found coral that survives the disease killing them.

The middle path the bill skips

The most frustrating part, for the people who study this, is that the conflict is solvable, and the bill doesn’t try.

Marine biologist Hannah Medd, who works with both fishermen and dive operators, mapped the dive fleet’s footprint and found that 99 percent of their trips occupy roughly 120 square kilometers. That’s a small, defined area. Her proposed answer isn’t a ban but a framework: permits, a code of conduct, limits on bait and trips, and zones that keep dive boats and fishermen apart. It’s how shark tourism is managed nearly everywhere else it exists.

This is source control applied to human activity. Instead of eliminating one small industry to answer a problem it didn’t create, you manage the genuine friction points and, crucially, address the estuary degradation that’s shrinking the prey base for everyone.

What this means for you

You don’t need to dive with sharks or fish for tuna to take something practical from this story.

Judge safety claims against the numbers. Florida’s 25 to 30 bites a year, fewer than one fatal, is the measurable reality. When a policy invokes fear far larger than the data, ask what problem it’s really solving.

Support estuary restoration. The deepest source here is degraded oyster beds and seagrass, the nurseries that feed the whole coastal food web. Backing living-shoreline and oyster-reef projects, and restoring natural freshwater flow, rebuilds the prey base at its source.

Cut your own nutrient runoff. Follow local fertilizer bans and keep vegetated buffers along waterways. Cleaner estuaries mean healthier fish nurseries, which eases the very competition driving this conflict.

Push for management, not blame. A permit-and-zone framework solves the real friction between dive boats and fishermen. An outright ban just removes a visible target while leaving the source untouched.

Practice basic beach smarts. Since most bites are blacktips confusing a foot for a fish in murky water, avoid swimming near baitfish schools or active fishing, and stay out of cloudy water at dawn and dusk. That addresses the actual, tiny risk directly.

The Safe Seas Act promises safer beaches. But Florida’s beaches are already remarkably safe from sharks, and the science says feeding animals miles offshore won’t change that. The genuine story is a recovering ocean predator running up against a coastline whose estuaries are falling apart. Fix the source, the degraded nurseries and the unmanaged conflict, and you address the real problem. Ban the dive boats, and you’ve treated a symptom that was never the cause.