In honor of the Discovery Channel’s Shark Attack Week, it’s time to revisit some of the grisly events in Mexico last summer.

Last year, sharks off of Mexico’s Pacific coast killed two people and maimed one. It had been the first shark fatalities in the area in 30 years. (An earlier post on this is here.)

Mexico’s navy responded by patrolling the waters near popular surfing beaches. A line with baited hooks was strung near the beaches in an attempt to catch the sharks that may have been using area as a feeding ground.

A spokesman for a nonprofit group called Wildcoast, told the LA Times in May that Mexico’s navy killed “10 sharks already.” He added that, “they are trying to fish more sharks to tell the surfers that it’s OK, they’ve dealt with the problem. They are worried about losing tourism from the surfers.” Many of the captured sharks were displayed as trophies.

Hunting Down Killer Sharks, Fruitless. But, George Burgess,  a shark expert with the University of Florida hired by Mexico’s government discouraged them from continuing the practice, according to a Wildcoast press release last year. Burgess:

promptly declared that the quest to hunt down killer sharks was fruitless. “The chances of finding the sharks that actually did the biting is practically nil,” he said. On top of that, he said, stringing the animals up, as the authorities here did, only scares away more tourists, just as the bloody after-attack photographs that local newspapers have been printing do.

The shark attacks and the reaction to the Navy’s response is the subject of this video.

This year, most of the shark activity appears to be near Florida in the Gulf of Mexico.

But sharks in Mexico have been in the news again. In June, the Mexican Navy seized more than a ton of cocaine hidden the carcasses of frozen sharks.

Photo by Stormy Dog (Via Creative Commons)

Half of all fatalities resulting from unprovoked shark attacks in 2008 occurred in Mexico, the International Shark Attack File reported earlier this year.

The organization defines an “unprovoked attack” as one in which a shark in its natural habitat attacks a live human without provocation.

Worldwide there was a total of 118 incidents involving sharks in 2008. Of these, 59 were unprovoked attacks. Four fatalities resulted from these attacks, with two in Mexico, and one each in Australia and California.

Strange Sequence of Attacks. Four of the attacks last year occurred in April and May. In April, an American surfer died after being attacked by a shark on the southern Pacific coast of Mexico only four days after another man was killed by a great white shark in San Diego, the Times reported.

In May, there were two more incidents in  Zihuatanejo–also on Mexico’s southern Pacific coast. In one, a surfer was killed by a shark.  In another, a surfer survived an attack.

The victim in San Diego was the first person to be killed by a shark in southern California in 50 years, according to msnbc.com. No one had been killed by a shark on Mexico’s Pacific coast in more than 30 years, the msnbc story said.

Of the 59 unprovoked attacks in 2008, 42 or 71 percent occurred in North America.  Twelve attacks occurred in Australia,  Mexico had three attacks, and Brazil had two.

Number of Attacks Down from 2007. The number of unprovoked attacks in 2008 is down from 2007, which saw 71. The all-high of unprovoked attacks was 79 in 2000.

“Attacks on the Atlantic coast, particularly in Florida, are far more common than they are on the Pacific coast,” the Times article says. Further, the Times cited a Harvard study concluding that “a person’s chances of being killed by a shark in any given year are about 1 in 280 million, compared with a 1 in 6,700 chance of being killed in a car accident.”

Photo by Stormy Dog (Via Creative Commons)