Sharks Swim Past Surfers All Day Long (And Almost Never Bite): What Drone Research Revealed

Here's a number that should rearrange how you think about sharks: 97%.

That's the percentage of survey days when juvenile great white sharks came close to swimmers, paddle boarders, and surfers in a two-year study along California's coast. Ninety-seven percent. The sharks were there almost every single day. Swimming right past people. Sometimes directly underneath them.

The number of attacks during that period? Zero.

This finding, published by researchers at Cal State Long Beach's Shark Lab and covered in Scientific American, Nature, and dozens of other outlets, fundamentally challenges the popular understanding of shark behaviour. It suggests that sharks and humans share coastal waters far more often than anyone realized, and that the sharks, for the most part, simply don't care.

The research was made possible by drones. And it's one of the best examples of how aerial technology is changing our understanding of marine life.

The Problem with Studying Sharks the Old Way

Before drones, shark research was limited to what researchers could observe from boats, what divers could see underwater, and what acoustic tags could tell them about shark movements. Each method had serious limitations.

Boats are loud and visible. Their presence changes shark behavior, so you're never really seeing what sharks do when humans aren't around. Diving gets you close, but visibility is limited, and divers can only stay down so long - plus, again, the shark knows you're there. Acoustic tags tell you where a shark went, but not what it did when it got there.

None of these methods could fully answer a basic question: what happens when sharks and humans share the same water?

The assumption, driven by decades of "Jaws"-influenced popular culture and occasional high-profile attacks, was that proximity meant danger. If a shark were near you, you were at risk. Beaches were closed when sharks were spotted. Warning systems were built around the idea that shark presence equals shark threat.

Drones revealed that this assumption was almost entirely wrong.

What the Research Actually Found

Dr. Chris Lowe's Shark Lab at Cal State Long Beach has been studying white sharks in Southern California for years. When they started adding drone surveys to their research toolkit, they began seeing something unexpected: sharks and people, together, constantly.

The methodology was straightforward. Researchers flew drones along pre-programmed transects just outside the surf line, recording high-definition video of the water below. When they spotted sharks, they documented their behaviour: direction, speed, proximity to people, and any apparent reaction to human presence.

In over 1,644 aerial surveys, the team found that juvenile white sharks were near human water users 97% of the time. These weren't distant sightings; the sharks were swimming within meters of surfers, sometimes directly beneath them.

And what were the sharks doing? Mostly nothing interesting. They swam past. They didn't change speed. They didn't change heading. They didn't circle back for another look. They didn't show any of the investigative or aggressive behaviours that would indicate interest in the people above them.

"Frankly, we were shocked," Lowe told the Boston Herald. "Sharks would interact with people every single day, multiple times a day, and they would just swim by. And the fact that no one was being bitten smacks in the face of the misconception that if there's a white shark nearby, you'll be attacked."

Why the Sharks Are There

The beaches where this research was conducted, places like Padaro Beach in Carpinteria and various spots along the Southern California coast, aren't dangerous shark zones. They're shark nurseries.

Juvenile white sharks spend their early years in shallow, warm coastal waters. These areas provide abundant food (mostly fish and rays), fewer predators, and temperatures that help young sharks grow efficiently. The same shallow, warm waters that attract juvenile sharks also attract human swimmers and surfers.

A parallel study published in Marine Ecology Progress Series in 2024 examined what environmental factors predicted shark presence. The team combined drone surveys with measurements of water temperature, swell height, visibility, and seasonal timing. They found that water temperature, season, and time of day were the strongest predictors of shark density.

Sharks were more common during fall months and in warmer water. They appeared more frequently in late afternoon, possibly because they were warming up in surface waters after spending time at cooler depths. This is the same time of day when surfers often hit the water.

The overlap isn't a coincidence. Sharks and humans are both drawn to the same conditions: warm, accessible coastal waters during pleasant weather. They've been sharing this space for as long as people have been surfing. We just couldn't see it until drones showed us.

The SharkEye Project

At UC Santa Barbara, a parallel effort called SharkEye is taking this research further. The project, based at the Benioff Ocean Initiative, combines drone surveillance with artificial intelligence to create something like a shark weather forecast.

The methodology: fly drones along pre-programmed paths at 120 feet above the ocean, recording video continuously. Feed that footage into computer vision models trained to recognize great white sharks. Correlate sightings with oceanographic data - temperature, visibility, plankton density, season - to build predictive models of when and where sharks are likely to appear.

Currently, SharkEye operates a manual alert system: when pilots spot sharks during surveys, they send text alerts to people who've signed up for notifications. The long-term goal is automation - AI processing footage in real time and generating shark reports as routinely as surf reports.

"We think data is empowering and helps us make safer, smarter decisions," says Neil Nathan, a project scientist at UCSB's Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory. "Our goal in this program is to provide data that helps people fall more in love with the ocean. It helps them understand it better and feel and be safer, even though the probability of an incident with a shark is exceptionally low."

Reframing the Conversation

The research has practical implications for how we think about shark safety. The traditional approach, spot shark, close beach, wait until shark leaves, assumes that shark presence equals danger. But if sharks are present 97% of the time anyway, that approach doesn't make much sense.

A more nuanced approach might focus on shark behaviour rather than shark presence. A shark swimming steadily past surfers isn't behaving the same way as a shark that's circling or showing investigative interest. The drone footage makes this distinction visible in ways that weren't possible before.

There's also an implication for conservation. White shark populations along the California coast have been recovering since protections were put in place in the 1990s. That recovery means more sharks in coastal waters - which, the drone research suggests, doesn't necessarily mean more risk to humans. Understanding this helps make the case that shark conservation and human beach use can coexist.

"Right now, co-existence is largely going well," says Dr. Douglas McCauley, the UC Santa Barbara marine biologist who led the Padaro Beach study. "People at these beaches seem to have much more interest in the sharks than vice versa."

What Drones Made Possible

None of this research could have happened without drones. The key insight, that sharks and humans share space constantly without incident, required systematic observation of both simultaneously, from a perspective that didn't alter their behaviour.

A boat would have scattered both sharks and surfers. A diver couldn't have surveyed the miles of coastline covered by the aerial transects. Satellite imagery doesn't have the resolution to identify individual sharks in turbid coastal waters. Only drones could provide the combination of coverage, resolution, and unobtrusiveness that made this research possible.

"One of the strengths of this method is that you can cover a lot of ground in these surveys, and because the sharks have no idea there is a drone overhead, they are easier to count," Nathan explains.

The limitation, he notes, is that drones can only see the surface layer. Sharks swimming deeper are invisible to aerial surveys. Researchers are combining drone data with acoustic tag data from Chris Lowe's team to fill in these blind spots - drone surveys showing what's happening at the surface, acoustic buoys tracking tagged sharks throughout the water column.

The Bigger Picture

We follow this research because we work in marine mammal monitoring ourselves, and the methodological approaches translate across species. But the shark work stands out because it challenged such a deeply held assumption.

Everyone "knew" that sharks near swimmers meant danger. It was intuitive. It was the premise of countless news reports, beach closures, and safety campaigns. And it was wrong, or at least, vastly oversimplified.

Drones gave researchers the data to prove it. Systematic observation, day after day, beach after beach, showing the same thing: sharks and people, together, coexisting without incident. Not because the sharks weren't there, but because the sharks simply weren't interested.

It's a reminder that the natural world is often different from our assumptions about it. And that sometimes the best way to understand wildlife isn't to get closer, it's to watch quietly, from above, and let the data speak.

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Aeria Solutions conducts wildlife monitoring programs using methodologies informed by the latest research in drone-based observation. We follow the marine science literature closely—not just because it's our field, but because discoveries like this remind us why this work matters.