SharkSider.com · Learn All About Sharks & Shark Species

Learn All About Sharks

Shark species profiles, sharks country by country and US state by US state, and a weekly-updated record of every shark attack we can verify — researched by divers, checked against the science.

268 species100 countries7,156 incident recordsUpdated September 2026

268shark species profiles
100country guides
7,156recorded shark incidents
27US state guides

Sharks are the most misrepresented animals in the sea. Most people meet them through film and headlines rather than on a reef, and the gap between the two is enormous. SharkSider exists to close it: what each species actually is, where it actually lives, and what the incident record actually says.

Everything here is built on three sets of pages. The species profiles give measured sizes rather than fishermen's estimates, the current Red List status, how the animal breeds and an honest risk rating. The country and US state guides answer the question people really have before a holiday — what is in this water, and does it matter. And the attack records publish every entry in our database rather than a headline number, so you can see what an incident usually is: one pass, in murky water, at dawn or dusk, on a limb, survived.

Sharks by country

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The guides readers open most. Each one lists the species with a genuine local record, with pictures, adult size and a plain risk rating.

Sharks in the United States

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Sharks live off every coastal state: blacktips and bull sharks in the Atlantic and Gulf, great whites and sevengills on the Pacific coast, salmon sharks in Alaska and tiger sharks around Hawaii.

Shark attacks

Every country record →

7,156 recorded incidents from 1500 to 2026, 1428 of them fatal, updated weekly. The United States alone accounts for 2596 of them, 199 fatal, most of those minor bites in Florida surf.

Read the numbers next to each other and the pattern is hard to miss: bites are rare, concentrated in a few coastlines, and almost always investigative rather than predatory. How to survive a shark attack covers what to do in the water; fourteen things more likely to kill you covers the perspective.

Popular shark species

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From the great white to the cookiecutter — the profiles people look up first, each with pictures, a size comparison against a diver and the species' own incident record.

Latest from the blog

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Longer pieces on how sharks work, what is happening to them, and the people who worked it out.

New here? Start with these

If you know nothing about sharks, three pages give you the whole frame in about ten minutes: what a shark actually is, how one is built and where they came from — a lineage older than trees. After that, the eight orders of sharks turns 500 species into eight groups you can actually hold in your head.

If you are here for one answer instead, shark facts and FAQ is the index: how many teeth a shark has, how long they live, whether they have bones, what eats them, and whether any of the things you have heard about blood in the water are true. And if you came because sharks are in trouble rather than because they are frightening, start at why sharks are endangered — roughly a hundred million are killed every year, and that is the number that should worry people.

Common questions about sharks

What does SharkSider cover?

Three things: a profile for every shark species we can document, a guide to which sharks live off each country and US state, and the full record of shark attacks by country from our own database. Around 268 species pages, 100 country guides and 80 national attack records, all kept current.

How many shark species are there?

More than 500 have been described, in eight orders, and new ones are still named from deep water most years. They range from 20 cm lanternsharks to the 12 m whale shark. Only a handful of species have any meaningful record of injuring people.

How dangerous are sharks, really?

Far less dangerous than their reputation. Our database holds 7,156 recorded incidents worldwide across more than a century, 1428 of them fatal. A typical modern year produces around sixty unprovoked bites and fewer than ten deaths, against billions of hours of human swimming.

Where does the shark attack data come from?

It merges International Shark Attack File and Global Shark Attack File records with local reporting that our team verifies, and it is updated weekly. Every country page lists the individual entries — date, place, activity, injury, shark and outcome — rather than only a total.

Which sharks live where I am swimming?

Pick your country from the sharks around the world guides, or your state from sharks in the US. Each guide lists the species with a real local record, how big they get, where and when you are likely to see them, and how much care the water actually needs.

Who writes SharkSider?

A small team of divers, surfers and fishermen who spend a lot of time in the water with sharks. Every page is drafted by one member and reviewed by another against published species assessments, fisheries and museum databases and our own incident records.

Find anything on SharkSiderSpecies, countries, US states, attack records and shark facts — all searchable in one place.

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