This summer, California is experiencing a notable increase in juvenile great white sharks along its coastline, driven by warmer waters linked to a strong El Niño event. Experts warn this could be the most shark-populated season in a decade.
Researchers have observed similar patterns during previous El Niño periods, with young sharks migrating from Mexico to California to feed and grow. Despite their presence, shark attacks remain rare and humans are not considered prey by these predators.
Surfers, swimmers and fishermen across California will be sharing the waves with an influx of visitors this summer: young great white sharks.
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Juvenile white sharks are already appearing along the coastline, fleeing warmer than usual waters in Mexico during what’s expected to be an incredibly strong El Niño.
But while shark experts say it could be the sharkiest summer in California in a decade, they also say beachgoers shouldn’t be too alarmed as the apex predators have spent generations learning what’s on the menu. And humans aren’t delicious.
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“Humans don’t look like prey, they don’t sound like prey,” Dr Chris Lowe, the director of the Shark Lab at California State University Long Beach, said. “If it doesn’t feel like prey [to a white shark], they ignore it. It’s not a threat, it’s not food.”
Lowe has spent 20 years monitoring white sharks using drones and tracking data. In 2015, the last time El Niño conditions were this strong, his team saw twice as many white sharks along the California coast than usual, to the point that the creatures established a shark nursery near Monterey Bay.
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Juvenile white sharks – those between 6ft and 9ft in length – now make regular pilgrimages between Baja California in Mexico up the California coastline, staying close to shore to feed on fish, rays and squid and grow safely before venturing into deeper waters.
At the same time, shark incidents remain exceedingly rare in the state. There have been just 250 since 1950, and only 17 fatalities, according to data compiled by the California department of fish and wildlife. The number of deadly shark bites, about 2.5 per decade, has also remained relatively stable throughout that period.
Researchers at Lowe’s lab have tested white shark behavior around water-goers to get to the bottom of that good news.
In one study, scientists recorded audio of surfers, swimmers and kayakers in the ocean to see what the different groups sounded like and what vibrations they made underwater.
The team then took that audio and played it back to sharks at sites where they aggregate. The animals weren’t particularly interested in the sounds of surfers or kayakers, but would respond to the sounds of a swimmer, possibly because of the dual sound of slapping arms and kicking feet.
The sharks would move to investigate, get about 10ft from a swimmer, and then leave.
“Our conclusion is we think sharks can actually tell the difference between people, and because we don’t smell like food, sound like food, look like food, they don’t consider us food,” Lowe said. “We know that, because could you imagine the number of people that would be bitten or consumed in California?”
Those figures seem to be a relative anomaly in California, and could be a product of the type of sharks that are becoming more common off its coastline: namely young white sharks, despite their fearsome reputation.
In Florida, long considered the shark bite capital of the world, reef sharks like blacktips are far more common. In 2025, the state saw 11 incidents of unprovided bites, 44% of the total of the entire US.
A spate of shark bites in Australia, including multiple fatalities and serious injuries, have been linked to both bull sharks and white sharks. Climatic factors like warmer ocean temperatures have seen bull sharks spend more time in the Sydney area, a beachside city with a population in the millions.
Gavin Naylor, the director of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the University of Florida, said there’s a reason why shark incidents are more common in some places than others.
“A white shark is about as different from a blacktip shark as a kangaroo is from a dog,” Naylor said. “You cannot compare bites in California with bites in Florida. The bites in Florida are from completely different species.”
While Australia may have some of the same species as California, the country sees more bites on average because the sharks in Australia that are near population centers are a lot bigger.
But even in shark havens like Florida, bites remain rare when you consider how many people flock to the beaches the state’s known for.
“I tell people all the time that if sharks really did target people we’d have about 10,000 bites in the US alone,” Naylor says. “Humans are like little plump sausages, they’re very easy to eat. It’d be a smorgasbord.”
“What that tells you, the sharks are actually doing their level best to avoid people.”
Lowe acknowledges that there’s limited science to demonstrate why sharks bite, because sometimes, they do. The go-to theory for unprovoked attacks, he said, is mistaken identity. And in California, where bites are rarer than in other shark havens, he hypothesized that white sharks may just learn really quickly even if they do bite.
“You’ve got these animals swimming around this environment all the time,” he said.
“Maybe the sharks that mistakenly bite people haven’t been around people much, or maybe they don’t make mistakes very often, period,” he said. “I just don’t know how else to explain it.”
As to how to stay safe in the water? If you would have asked him two decades ago for wisdom about how to stay safe in California waters, he’d give a different answer.
“My advice was any shark that’s bigger than a person could be a potential threat,” Lowe said. But hard drives full of drone data, showing sharks getting curious, and close, to swimmers and surfers before turning away once they recognize it’s not a meal, have eased his own fears.
“Flash forward 20 years … I swim with these white sharks every day and I have no qualms doing it because of the data that we collected.”
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