Why Have Great White Sharks Disappeared From South Africa?

POV Travel
Jul 17
9 min read

Ask most people what a great white shark does, and they will describe something that has almost never happened.

In a typical year, sharks of every species bite somewhere in the region of sixty to seventy people worldwide without provocation. Of those, fewer than ten die. There are more than five hundred species of shark, and a mere handful appear in that tally at all.

In the same year, human beings kill somewhere in the order of eighty to a hundred million sharks.

Hold those two numbers side by side. Then consider that one of them supports a global industry of fear, and the other is barely mentioned. Somebody has taught us to be frightened of an animal we are eradicating, and it worked so well that when the great whites of South Africa began vanishing from the coast, most of the world was quietly relieved rather than alarmed.

Then the sharks were gone, and everything else started to unravel.

Why have great white sharks disappeared from South Africa?

Quick Answer

Great white sharks have effectively vanished from False Bay and Gansbaai, once the most reliable places on Earth to see them. Nobody agrees on why.

The popular explanation is two orcas, known as Port and Starboard, who kill white sharks and eat their livers. Sharks flee an area after such an attack. That part is documented.

But the collapse appears to have begun years before those orcas arrived. Shark nets, drumlines and a longline fishery have been estimated to kill something like seventy to a hundred white sharks a year, against perhaps one attributable to the orcas.

One story blames nature and asks nothing of us. The other blames policy. Notice which one travelled around the world.

What was actually there

Before the argument, understand the loss, because the scale of it is hard to convey to anyone who did not see it.

Between roughly 2004 and 2012, several hundred individual white sharks moved through False Bay, near Cape Town. Researchers knew them by name, identifying each animal from the pattern of its dorsal fin as you would a fingerprint. One scientist counted forty two in a single day in 2012. At dawn, off Seal Island, sharks launched themselves clear of the water hunting Cape fur seals, and the footage of it travelled the planet.

Down the coast at Gansbaai, an entire industry grew up around how reliable these animals were. Over a hundred thousand people a year came to South Africa to see them.

Then, within about five years, nothing. A charity that patrols the beaches daily, watching for sharks, went an entire year without a single confirmed white shark sighting. Not scarce. Absent.

Whatever happened, it happened fast, and it happened to the most closely studied population of white sharks in the world. If it can go unnoticed and unexplained there, consider how much is happening in the ocean where nobody is counting at all.

The story you have been told

The explanation that reached the headlines arrived in the shape of two animals.

Port and Starboard are adult male orcas, recognisable because their dorsal fins have collapsed, one folding left, one folding right. They were reported in the region as early as 2009 and began appearing regularly from around 2015.

In 2017, white shark carcasses began washing ashore between Danger Point and Struisbaai. Each had been opened between the pectoral fins. Each was missing its liver. Some carried the rake marks of orca teeth. A shark's liver is enormous and extraordinarily rich in oil, which makes it the most valuable organ in the animal, and the orcas had learned to take it with something close to surgical precision. In 2022 a drone filmed the technique. The following year, one of the pair was recorded killing a great white alone, in roughly two minutes.

The sharks respond to this. Tagged animals have been tracked fleeing an area within hours of orcas arriving. A single kill seems capable of emptying an aggregation site, possibly because chemicals released from a dead shark act as a warning to every other shark that detects them.

It is a compelling story. It is also, we would suggest, a suspiciously convenient one.

The story that did not travel

Some of the people who have spent the most time in that water argue that the orcas arrived at a crime scene rather than committing the crime.

The objection begins with timing. The decline of white sharks in South Africa, on this reading, was well underway years before Port and Starboard ever appeared at Seal Island. If the population was already falling, the animals blamed for the fall cannot be the cause of it.

Then comes the arithmetic, and it is difficult to argue with. Shark nets and drumlines are strung along the KwaZulu Natal coast, and they kill great whites every year. A demersal longline fishery, targeting sharks near the seabed, has operated for around two decades. Together these have been estimated to remove somewhere in the region of seventy to a hundred white sharks annually.

Against that, the orcas have been credibly linked to something like a handful of white shark deaths across the better part of a decade.

Seventy to a hundred a year, invisibly, by permit. Perhaps one a year, spectacularly, on camera. Which of those emptied a coastline?

And from the other side of the world comes a complication nobody expected. Long term monitoring at a well studied Australian shark site recorded six prolonged absences of white sharks over twelve years. Only one coincided with the presence of killer whales. The longest lasted three months, with no orca anywhere near. Sharks sometimes leave for reasons that have nothing to do with being hunted, and we do not know what those reasons are either.

Follow the comfort

We want to be direct about the thing that interests us most here, because it is not really about sharks.

Two explanations sit in front of us. Both have evidence. One says wild animals did this, it is nobody's fault, there is nothing to be done, and it makes tremendous television. The other says nets and hooks and licences did this, over thirty years, with paperwork, and it could be stopped tomorrow by people whose names are known.

Only one of those explanations went around the world.

We are not going to tell you the orcas are innocent. They demonstrably kill white sharks and demonstrably drive them off. What we will say is that when the evidence is genuinely mixed, and one reading absolves us while the other implicates us, the reading that flatters us tends to become the story, and it does so without anyone having to lie. A marine biologist put the worry plainly: the fascination with the orcas risks distracting attention from the problems human beings could actually solve.

That is worth carrying with you well beyond this coastline. Whenever you are handed a tidy explanation for an environmental catastrophe, ask who is let off by it.

Our own reading, offered as a view and not as a finding, is that the truth is layered. A population thinned across decades by nets and hooks until it was fragile, and then, at the end, two remarkable predators arriving to push over something that was already falling. We hold that lightly. The evidence is still arriving.

The unravelling

While the argument continues, the ecosystem has been answering a different question. What happens when the animal at the top is removed?

At Seal Island, sevengill sharks moved into the empty space and began hunting seals at the surface, something nobody had recorded there before. At Gansbaai, bronze whalers appeared within months and stayed. Cape fur seals, released from the pressure that shaped their behaviour for as long as there have been seals in that bay, have increased. Beneath them, the smaller fish and smaller sharks that seals and sevengills eat have declined. There are now concerns for the critically endangered African penguin.

This is a trophic cascade, and it sounds academic until you watch it happen in water you have swum in. Remove the top predator and the effects tumble downwards, rearranging who eats whom, altering animals that never encountered a great white in their lives.

The great whites of False Bay were not an attraction. They were a load bearing wall. We are watching, in real time and by accident, what the building does without one.

The animal you were taught to fear

Come back to those two numbers, because they are the reason this article exists.

Fewer than ten people killed by sharks in a typical year, worldwide, across a planet where hundreds of millions of us enter the sea. Eighty to a hundred million sharks killed by us in the same period. The ratio is somewhere in the order of ten million to one, and it runs in the opposite direction to everything you have absorbed since childhood.

Where did the fear come from? Not from the water. It arrived, overwhelmingly, in 1975, from a novel and a film about a fish that hunts people, and the author of that novel spent much of the rest of his life trying to undo what he had helped create.

Sharks do not hunt human beings. We are not their food, we are the wrong shape, the wrong size and the wrong texture, and a shark investigating something unfamiliar has no hands with which to do it. The overwhelming majority of bites are exploratory, brief, and survived. Most shark species could not injure you if they tried, and most have never been implicated in a single incident.

We are not telling you the ocean is a swimming pool. It is not. A large predator is a large predator, respect is not optional, and the risk is small rather than zero. But small rather than zero is a phrase that also describes crossing the road, and nobody made a film about that.

The narrative you inherited about these animals was constructed. It is worth asking, once, who built it and what it has cost, because while we were busy being afraid of sharks, we removed most of them from the sea, and now one of the greatest gatherings of great whites on Earth has quietly ceased to exist.

How POV Travel approaches this

We get into the water with sharks, without cages, in small groups, on their terms. We have done it for years, alongside Big Blue Snorkel, and the single most common thing travellers say afterwards is that they cannot understand why they were ever frightened.

That moment is the whole reason we do this. Not the adrenaline, which barely comes, but the strange quiet of realising that an animal you were taught to fear is entirely indifferent to you, and always was.

On our South African expeditions we talk honestly about what has happened on that coast. We talk about Seal Island at dawn and the breaching sharks that are no longer there. We give you the orca evidence, and the fisheries evidence, and the numbers, and we tell you where the science genuinely does not know.

We question. We teach. We leave you with an opinion of your own.

And we would gently suggest that the most important thing to be frightened of in this story is not swimming near a shark. It is how easily an entire civilisation can be persuaded to fear the wrong thing, while the thing itself disappears.

Frequently Asked Questions

Have great white sharks really disappeared from South Africa?

From False Bay and Gansbaai, effectively yes. Sightings collapsed to almost nothing within roughly five years. Whether the wider population has crashed or partly shifted eastwards along the coast is genuinely disputed.

Did the orcas cause it?

Two orcas known as Port and Starboard certainly kill white sharks and take their livers, and sharks flee an area after such attacks. Whether this caused the wider disappearance is contested, since the decline appears to have begun before those orcas arrived.

What else might explain it?

Shark nets, drumlines and a longline fishery, estimated together to kill something like seventy to a hundred white sharks a year, alongside warming water, shifting prey and the slow breeding biology of the species. Human fishing kills vastly more white sharks than orcas do.

Are great white sharks dangerous to people?

Far less than almost everyone believes. Worldwide there are typically sixty to seventy unprovoked bites a year across all shark species, with fewer than ten deaths. Humans kill tens of millions of sharks annually. Respect is warranted. Terror is not.

What happened to the ecosystem after the sharks left?

Sevengill sharks and bronze whalers moved in, seals increased and changed their behaviour, and smaller fish and sharks declined. Removing the apex predator rearranged the whole food web.

Meet them on their terms

A shark on a screen is a monster. A shark three metres away, moving with impossible grace and completely uninterested in you, is a revelation that quietly dismantles everything you were told to fear. From the blacktips of Aliwal Shoal to the great feeding events where sharks, dolphins, whales and diving gannets converge at once, we take you into the water to see the ocean's most misunderstood animals as they really are.

Explore the expeditions: Swim With Sharks & Marine Life →