Philly and sharks go together like fish and … bicycles.
The water sources that run through and along the city are freshwater rivers—which sharks that frequent the East Coast are not usually keen to swim in. Any freshwater sharks that might like our freshwater sources are halfway across the globe in Asia and Australia.
It may come as a surprise, then, that there is at least one shark that has been known to prowl the Delaware River, once spotted as far upstream as North Philadelphia.
Meet the bull shark: a large, hardy fish that can survive in both salt and freshwater environments. They’re named for their aggression and for their preferred hunting technique, the “bump-and-bite.” With poor vision, they compensate by ramming their prey before attacking it. The largest bull sharks can grow to be 13 feet long from nose to tail.
Bull sharks are unique in their adaptability to new environments. They are known to travel from the ocean far upstream into rivers to reproduce and hunt. One bull shark was spotted in the Amazon River about 2,300 miles upstream from a saltwater source. This habit of swimming upstream — and their frequency in warmer waters, especially along the coast — puts them closer to humans more often than other kinds of sharks.
The few times they made it to our area were in 1922 — when a 12-foot-long shark in the Delaware River was shot and killed outside of Tacony — and in 1960, when a large shark was spotted in the Delaware River just south of Wilmington.
The good news? Despite their status as having the third highest number of confirmed unprovoked attacks on humans of all shark types — responsible for a total of 119 confirmed unprovoked attacks around the world since the year 1580, after the great white shark (351 attacks) and the tiger shark (142 attacks) — there has never been a reported shark attack in the Delaware River.
So don’t let the wall-to-wall programming during Shark Week spook you. Even with climate change, a run-in with a bull shark remains almost impossible in this area. It turns out that the closest that a real live shark has gotten to Philly in a century is the Adventure Aquarium in Camden!
