Phuket Opinion: Phuket sharks are just not into us

The boy, 8-year-old local resident, Naphat Chaiyarak Khrystenko, needed some 33 stitches to close his wounds. We wish young Naphat a speedy recovery, but the poor boy was just unlucky. People swimming at Phuket beaches being bitten by any animal is, in the truest sense of the word, rare.

You have to go back five years for the last report of anyone bitten at a Phuket beach. That incident, just as with the bites young Naphat suffered, was hotly debated whether the culprit was a shark or barracuda.

Before that you have to go back to 2015 when an Australian tourist was bitten at Karon Beach. In that incident the bite clearly was not a shark. Local experts didn’t know what it was, perhaps a pufferfish or trigger fish. But to quell fears officials launched a large-scale search anyway, that found nothing. 

Both of those incidents occurred when millions of tourists were visiting Phuket each year.

As with the few past incidents, this week it was the word “shark” that was spreading fear, as if people had no idea there were sharks in the waters around Phuket. There are, there always has been, they’re just not the types of sharks that make headlines elsewhere in the world.

As one Phuket News reader pointed out, sharks only thrive when the fish they feed on are thriving and that’s a good sign – as pointed out in the return of blacktip reef sharks to Maya Bay. Everyone heralded the return of the sharks to Maya Bay after it had been closed for two years, showing clearly that the bay’s marine ecosystem was on its way to recovery from the stupendous overtourism allowed to take place there.

Yet no-one batted an eyelid at the fact that blacktip reef sharks inhabited the bay until the huge number of tourists visiting there started destroying the marine environment. Yes, the sharks were there while tourists were playing in the water while everyone was promoting how beautiful the bay is and that people should visit it. And yet there was not one report of any tourist being bitten. The sharks we have around here are just not into us.

Kamala OrBorTor Chief Jutha Dumluck was right, Phuket should take this opportunity to highlight how much Phuket’s marine environment has recovered over the past few years without heavy tourism – and take the opportunity to quell fears over the word “shark”. Reasonable, rational fear is needed for self-preservation; unfounded fear based on sensational movies and hype only leads to unnecessary anxiety and suffering.

People should be educated of the reality that sharks do swim in the sea and that most sharks simply are not interested in people. The chance of a beachgoer in Phuket being bitten by anything while in the water is minuscule compared with the risk of physical harm taken by an inexperienced rider renting a motorbike while on holiday in Phuket.