Im sick of comparing shark attacks with lightning strikes and cocnuts
(I do not advocate for any culling or general killing of sharks, they are some of the oceans most important animals and I literally been out in the streets of Sydney to protest shark nets in Sydney, they are my favourite animals in the whole world and I love them with all my heart) All I want is us to have a nuanced view of shark attacks rather than a black and white view of it
I’m not very convinced by the statistics about shark attacks. People often say that you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than bitten by a shark, but I think that comparison is misleading.
Lightning can strike you almost anywhere: in the sea, in a lake, in the mountains, on land, in a city, or in the countryside. A shark attack, on the other hand, can only happen if you are in the water, usually in the ocean or in a river connected to the sea, and generally not too far from the coast.
Because the circumstances in which a shark can bite you are much more limited, I feel that, if you actually spend time in the water where sharks live, being bitten by a shark may be more likely than the lightning comparison suggests.
Risk isn’t about where something can happen, it’s about how often it happens during actual exposure. You don’t live in storms or the ocean—you enter both briefly and occasionally. Once you normalize for time spent there, both lightning and shark attacks are extremely rare.
And the “coconut argument” doesn’t change that—it just repeats the same mistake in a different costume. It compares unrelated exposures (falling coconuts under palm trees vs. time in the ocean) while ignoring the denominator that actually matters: time spent in each environment. Without that, it’s not statistics, it’s a meme pretending to be data.
In reality, coconuts, sharks, and lightning all sit in the same category: statistically marginal risks that get exaggerated because they’re visually or narratively interesting, not because they’re meaningfully dangerous in everyday life.
“Only happens in the ocean” or “more people die from coconuts” isn’t an argument—it’s geography without context and numbers without normalization.