Even to one of Alabama’s top marine scientists, back-to-back shark attacks off the Florida Panhandle are startling.

But, despite the horror of the serious injuries to three victims, including two Alabama teens, the incident does not appear to represent an alarming trend.

On Friday, two attacks occurred along the shore of Walton County, Fla.

They happened about four miles apart, within about an hour and a half of each other.

In one, a 45-year-old woman lost her left hand and suffered “significant trauma” to her midsection and pelvis, according to a local fire chief. In the other, Mountain Brook teenager Lulu Gribbin lost a hand and a leg and a friend suffered relatively minor injuries.

Sean Powers is the director of the University of South Alabama’s Stokes School of Marine and Environmental Sciences and a senior marine scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab.

Among the 150-plus published papers he has co-authored are some dealing with sharks, such as a 2013 study on decreases in the size of coastal sharks reported by fishermen, a 2010 paper on the distribution of sharks across a continental shelf in the northern Gulf of Mexico, and a 2007 report on “Cascading effects of the loss of apex predatory sharks from the coastal ocean.”

Even to him, it’s eye-catching to hear reports of two attacks so close together.

“I would totally agree, it’s very unusual,” he said. “I haven’t heard of this kind of situation with attacks back-to-back, let alone on the same day within an area that arguably the shark could have transitioned to.”

That’s a reference to speculation that it could have been the same shark, but Powers said there’s no way to know and it’s more likely that “the conditions were just similar for feeding between the two areas.”

“It is extremely, extremely rare that this event happened and obviously it’s rare that shark attacks happen at all,” he said.

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Powers said the University of Florida maintains an international shark attack database that he uses as a resource.

And the fact is, “Alabama, Florida Panhandle, the Gulf, has a very rich shark and stingray population.”

But most of those sharks are small, he said. They’re less than four feet long and are rarely more than a nuisance for fishermen.

Sometimes larger sharks do venture in close to the beaches favored by people. That’s often because of the presence of prey.

“This time of year, that end-of-April to kind of mid-June period, we have a lot of bait close to the beach,” he said. “They’re just chasing the bait.”

“Florida is, right now, the capital of shark attacks,” he said. “But it’s interesting. It’s not the Panhandle, it’s the Daytona Beach area.”

Indeed, Florida racked up 16 confirmed bites (none fatal) in 2023, more by far than any other state, and eight of those were in Volusia County, Fla., which lies along the East Coast of Florida north of Orlando.

The big-picture view is this, Powers said: The long-term pattern is that every year there tend to be somewhere around 65 documented shark attacks worldwide that are classed as “unprovoked.”

The Florida Museum’s International Shark Attack File defines “unprovoked” as “incidents in which a bite on a live human occurs in the shark’s natural habitat with no human provocation of the shark.”

“When you consider that we’re actively trying to rebuild shark populations, the federal and state governments are trying to rebuild them after decades of overfishing, and there’s more and more people coming to the beach, it’s surprising in some ways it hasn’t increased proportionally,” Powers said.

“The rate has stayed, just creeping up just a little bit, even though we have more and more sharks and more and more people in the ocean.”

For some, he said, that will beg the question: Why are governments trying to rebuild shark populations?

For one thing, he said, “When the big sharks are gone, stingray populations explode …. Cownose rays feed on oysters, shrimp, clams. Plus stingrays themselves are dangerous. So we don’t want an exploding stingray population, and think about it, what else is gonna eat a big stingray besides a shark? They have a role, the apex predator role, it’s an important one. If you asked people, what do you want? A bunch of stingrays and less oysters or would you put up with some sharks? Most would say they would put up with some sharks.”

“And most of these big sharks, the other thing they do besides stingrays is, they eat other sharks,” he added.

Historically, Powers said, sharks were heavily fished by international fleets, driven mainly by demand for shark fins as a food item in some Asian countries.

But the Federal Magnuson–Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976, and its later updates, helped push international longline fishing vessels out of waters defined as the United States’ Economic Exclusion Zone.

That did much to help Gulf shark populations, Powers said.

Bull shark and tiger shark populations are “very healthy,” he said. Great Hammerheads haven’t fully recovered, he said, and there are some offshore species such as silky and dusky sharks that are “still in pretty bad shape.”

“Those were the ones that really had big fins and really were the target for the international long liners,” he said. “Same thing with great hammerheads.”

Bulls, tigers and great whites are responsible for the most shark attacks, and great whites are extremely rare in coastal Gulf waters, Powers said. “More than likely, from what I’ve read and the severity of the injuries to these ladies, more than likely it was probably bull sharks,” he said.

Powers said he’s well aware that saying shark attacks are rare does little to comfort victims.

But the attacks are so rare, and so random, that if people want to swim at beaches there’s not much they can do to reduce the risk further.

Powers said it may help to stay in shallow water, to watch for official warnings and not to swim past coastal sandbars. But solid warnings are rare, and the Alabama teens injured in Florida reportedly were in water that was only waist-deep.

“I’m not dismissing what happened to these ladies,” he said. “It’s a horrible, life-changing event for them.”