On Sunday, Tamayo Perry, a 49-year-old lifeguard, surfer and actor, was killed in a shark attack in waters off Oahu’s North Shore, shocking community members and people around the world.  

It was the first fatality from a shark attack in Oahu waters since 1995, when the Department of Land and Natural Resources Division of Aquatic Resources started keeping a record of shark incidents.

However, the shark incident list includes eight fatalities from shark attacks in waters near Maui.

A research paper, published in Nature in 2018, studied the movements of tiger sharks around the Hawaiian Islands to determine why there are more shark bites seen around Maui than other Hawaiian Islands.

“Over the past 20 years, the island of Maui has experienced twice as many shark bite incidents as Oahu despite the fact that the human population of Oahu is six times larger than that of Maui,” the authors of the paper wrote in the introduction. 

After electronically tagging 96 tiger sharks and tracking them for up to six years, the researchers found the extensive insular shelf surrounding Maui supports a large resident population of tiger sharks and also attracts visiting tiger sharks from elsewhere in Hawaii. 

According to the study, the Maui Nui insular shelf provides a great habitat for tiger sharks, with an abundant food supply, other tiger sharks for mating, and pupping habitats. This lures tiger sharks to the area, which may be why there are more shark bites in Maui’s waters than around other Hawaiian Islands.

The study found the tiger sharks tagged around Maui stayed in the area more than those tagged around other Hawaiian Islands. 

“Tiger sharks routinely visited shallow ocean recreation sites around Maui and were detected on more days overall at ocean recreation sites around Maui (62–80%) than Oahu (<6%),” according to the paper. 

The researchers wrote that these statistics suggest a daily presence of large tiger sharks in waters adjacent to ocean recreation sites in Maui, especially around Southwest Maui. 

“Despite the natural presence of large sharks in waters around Maui, the risk of shark bite remains relatively low and variable between years,” the authors wrote in the study. “The relatively rarity of shark bites despite near-daily visits by large tiger sharks to high use recreation sites, suggests tiger sharks are mostly disinterested in, or even actively avoiding, people.”

Michelle Broder Van Dyke covers the Hawaiian Islands for Spectrum News Hawaii. Email her at michelle.brodervandyke@charter.com.