Some Dude Ran The Numbers And Here Are The Actual Odds Of Getting Bit By Both A Shark And A Bear

snarling grizzly bear

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One of the biggest news stories from last weekend was about 20-year-old Dylan McWilliams who in the past 4 years has been bitten by a shark, a bear, and a rattlesnake. All of these attacks are extremely improbable, even more so when you consider the bear attack and the shark attack each occurred within less than a year’s span.

There are only about 80 shark attacks reported worldwide each year. With literally hundreds of millions of people swimming in the ocean the chances of being one of those 80 swimmers attacked by a shark is so tiny it’s hard to grasp. Bear attacks are so rare you almost never hear about them, but there are some stats available.

Ethan Siegel is an astrophysicist and author of Treknology and Beyond The Galaxy. When he first heard about the guy who’d been attacked by a bear and a shark, like everyone else he thought ‘what are the odds?’ So, he published an awesome statistics-based article on Forbes where he lays out the exact odds of getting attacked by both a shark and a bear. Here are a few excerpts from that article which you can read in full by following that link.

First, he lays out the odds of a shark attack:

Only 80 shark attacks worldwide are reported a year, but this varies hugely from region-to-region. In the United States overall, your risk is just 1-in-11.5 million if you go to the beach, but those odds are overall. The odds are highest in (surprise) Hawaii, and are many times higher for surfers and divers than regular beachgoers. Over the past decade, Hawaii averages 7 shark attacks per year, with about half the victims being surfers. Given that there are approximately 700,000 surfers in Hawaii in any given year, that means the odds of a surfer in Hawaii getting bitten by a shark in any year is 1-in-200,000 (0.0005%), which is a long shot, but not as uncomfortably long as you’d like. (via)

So, your chances of getting attacked by a shark are slim to none but slightly elevated if you’re in Hawaii, which is where 20-year-old Dylan McWilliams was attacked by the tiger shark. Next, he lays out the odds of being attacked by a bear:

The best stats on bear attacks come from Yellowstone National Park, which focuses on grizzlies. Overall, only 1 in 2.7 million park visitors are likely to be injured by a bear, but those odds go way up if you’re in the backcountry: to 1-in-232,000 per day. For someone who spends a 90 day summer in the backcountry, that gives them about a 1-in-2600 chance (0.04%) of getting injured by a bear. (via)

The article then goes on to explain multiple biases that come into play when calculating probabilities. Dylan’s odds of being attacked by a bear were higher because he was in bear country. His odds of being attacked by a shark were elevated because he was in Hawaii where the risk of shark attack is high.

What the author surmises is that Dylan’s total odds of being attacked by a shark and a bear were around 1-in-500,000,000 which is close to the same odds of winning the Powerball. People are throwing out numbers like ‘one in a billion trillion’ when talking about this dude who was bitten by a rattlesnake, and attacked by a shark and bear within a year but he was always in situations where the risk of those attacks were at their highest, and that effects the actual odds. When you see someone saying’893.35 quadrillion to one’ that includes the worldwide odds. The odds that someone living in Georgia or Illinois would experience all of those things happen to them. Not the odds that apply to someone traveling to high-risk areas of attack.

You can read the article in full here on Forbes. You can also purchase the author’s books Treknology and Beyond The Galaxy on Amazon.



 
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