The Department of Land and Natural Resources on Friday released additional information on last week’s presumed fatal shark attack off South Maui in a pointed response to “misinformation” about the incident in social media posts.
A 60-year-old woman from Washington state disappeared Dec. 8 while snorkeling off Keawakapu Beach with her husband amid sightings of an “aggressive” shark feeding in the area. Maui County Ocean Safety lifeguards and Maui Fire Department and emergency services personnel, along with the U.S. Coast Guard, searched for the missing snorkeler for two days to no avail. Officials have not released her identity.
“(The Division of Conservation and Resources Enforcement) concluded that this was a tragic accident. It’s unfortunate that this family’s grief is exacerbated not only by not having their loved one’s body recovered, but by misinformation which spread quickly on social media platforms, suggesting that this was something other than what it was,” DLNR said in a news release.
Based on eyewitness accounts, including from the woman’s husband, DOCARE has classified her disappearance as a “shark attack-fatal,” according to the release, which noted the Maui Police Department report on the incident termed the case a “miscellaneous accident-fatal.”
An MPD spokesperson told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser Friday that police are no longer investigating the incident — the first fatal shark attack in Hawaii since Dec. 8, 2020, when a surfer was killed by a 14-foot tiger shark at Honolua Bay, Maui.
Just a few days after the Keawakapu incident, on Dec. 13, DLNR and the Hawaii Police Department reported that a 68-year-old Waikoloa man was swimming about 400 yards offshore at Anaehoomalu Bay in Waikoloa when a shark bit him on the lower left torso.
The man used a diving knife to fend off the shark and was assisted to shore by stand-up paddleboarders and later flown to an Oahu hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries, officials said.
Another serious “shark encounter,” as DLNR prefers to call them, involved a visitor from France who lost her left arm and two fingers on her right hand and suffered puncture wounds to the left side of her torso while snorkeling about 20 yards offshore in Paia Bay, Maui, on Sept. 3.
Despite the alarming spate of serious shark-bite cases, the total number of incidents so far this year remains within the annual average range for Hawaii and, as is usually the case, there has been no obvious pattern or common thread.
DLNR’s Division of Aquatic Resources had yet to list the two latest cases off Maui and Hawaii island on its shark incident website but when taking those into account, there have been eight shark-bite cases across the state in 2022: four off Hawaii island, two off Maui, and one each off Kauai and Oahu.
Shark-bite numbers can vary from year to year for no apparent reason. Over the previous five years, there were eight such incidents in Hawaii in 2021; six in 2020; 14 in 2019, including three people who were bitten while on the same swim-with-sharks tour 3 miles off Haleiwa; three in 2018; and five in 2017.
Over the 10-year period from 2012 to 2021, there were an average of almost nine incidents annually, according to DAR records.
Although tiger sharks are the usual suspects in a majority of incidents, the three 2022 cases in which the culprit was identified involved a Galapagos shark, cookiecutter shark and blacktip shark, according to DAR. All six fatalities that have occurred since 2012, including at Keawakapu, happened in waters off the west or south coast of Maui.
Kim Holland, a research professor with the University of Hawaii’s Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, says Maui sits “in the sweet spot” of preferred habitat for tiger sharks.
Tracking research indicates the ocean predators prefer depths from the shoreline to about 600 feet deep, according to Holland, who says the four-island Maui Nui complex “sits on a big plateau of exactly that depth, so there’s more of that depth in Maui Nui than there is in the whole of the rest of the Hawaiian Islands.”
He said the eight shark-bite cases so far this year are at “the high end” of the average number of incidents annually.
“We’ve had these higher rates in the past and then they fall right back down to one or two the next year,” Holland said Friday. “There’s not a lot to be reading into them. The remarkable thing is how few attacks there are,” especially considering the thousands of residents and visitors who enjoy the ocean each day.
And there’s little to be made of clusters of shark incidents, he added.
“There’s never been any evidence of a rogue shark that’s making a habit of attacking people. It’s virtually certain that if there were two attacks it wouldn’t be the same shark,” he said.
Although shark encounters in Hawaii happen throughout the year in different locations and under different circumstances, Holland said human behavior can increase the risk when entering the ocean.
“I do think that what’s happening is people are going farther offshore on stand-up paddleboards and kayaks, and when you get out of the shallows, they’re in deeper water where there’s more exposure,” he said.
According to the DOCARE report on the Dec. 8 incident, the woman’s husband told officers that he encountered an “aggressive” shark shortly after entering the water to snorkel about 50 yards from shore. He said he and his wife were not snorkeling side-by-side and that he could see her only “from time to time.”
“As the shark continued to circle him, he continued looking for his wife and thought that she might have been diving toward the ocean floor,” the report said.
The man told officers the shark swam off and he continued looking for his wife by “popping his head out of the water and scanning the surface. He did spot something in the distance and then the shark came back, and he could see something red around the shark’s gills. At that time, he said people on the beach began yelling at him to get out of the water because a shark was feeding in the area,” the DOCARE report said.
The husband’s statement was corroborated by an eyewitness on the beach who told DOCARE officers that he had spotted a large shark feeding on something in the water and began looking for the snorkeling couple to warn them “when he saw the shark’s large mouth continuing to feed on something in the middle of the red cloud in the water.”
DLNR goes on in the release to chastise those “who post misinformation and conspiracy theories anonymously to stop and think about how they’d react if they were in the same situation.”
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Hawaii shark incidents 2022
Eight shark-bite cases have been reported in Hawaii so far this year, within the recent annual average range of incidents. Find safety tips for reducing your risk of an encounter at dlnr.hawaii.gov/sharks/.
>> Feb. 9: A person floating at night in clear water about 1.5 miles off Kahaluu Beach Park, Kailua-Kona, was bitten on the right foot and calf by a cookiecutter shark.
>> March 21: A 6-foot Galapagos shark left a puncture wound on the right big toe of a scuba diver in clear water about a mile off Keahole Point, Kailua-Kona.
>> Sept. 3: A snorkeler lost of her left arm and two fingers on her right hand to a shark while also suffering puncture wounds to the left side of her torso in turbid water about 20 yards offshore from Paia Bay, Maui.
>>m Sept. 9: A 7- to 8-foot blacktip shark left lacerations and puncture wounds on the left calf and ankle of a scuba diver in clear water about a mile off Keahole Point, Kailua-Kona.
>> Oct. 18: A surfer suffered a laceration to the right big toe from a 6- to 8-foot shark in clear water about 700 yards from shore at Razorbacks, Kaaawa, Oahu.
>> Oct. 25: A shark bit off part of snorkeler’s swim fin in turbid water about 15 to 20 yards offshore at Kalapaki Beach, Kauai.
>> Dec. 8: A snorkeler disappeared Dec. 8 about 50 yards off Keawakapu Beach, Maui, with reports of a 12-foot tiger shark feeding in the area.
>> Dec. 13: A man was bitten on the lower left torso while swimming about 400 yards offshore at Anaehoomalu Bay, Waikoloa, Hawaii island.
Source: Hawaii Division of Aquatic Resources
