New Smyrna Beach water temperature
New Smyrna Beach shark attacks
94
unprovoked bites on record in Volusia County between 2012 and 2021
None of them were fatal.
The International Shark Attack File lists 94 unprovoked bites in Volusia County between 2012 and 2021 — the county New Smyrna Beach sits in.
Unprovoked bites are extremely rare. The International Shark Attack File confirmed 65 of them worldwide in 2025, in line with the 2020–2024 average of about 61 a year — that is every coast on earth, for a whole year.
The file puts the lifetime odds of dying in a shark-related incident in the United States at 1 in 4,332,817. For a lightning strike it puts them at 1 in 79,746. Its own odds table.
What the number counts
The number counts unprovoked bites: in the file's words, a bite on a live human in the shark's natural habitat with no human provocation. Bites that happen while somebody is handling a shark, or unhooking one, are counted separately as provoked and are not in this number.
The file publishes Florida's totals by county, not by beach, so this is the whole of Volusia County — every mile of its coast, over all those years — and not New Smyrna Beach on its own.
The file keeps a separate ten-year table for this county, and it is the longest readable run it publishes for anywhere in Florida: 94 bites across 2012 to 2021, not one of them fatal. The busiest of those years was 2021 with 17; the quietest was 2018 with four.
How the record is kept
A published total is not a census. The file is a compilation built from the reports that reached it — its own director notes that a significant fraction of incidents likely go unreported — and it is still documenting cases from decades past, so the early years are thinner than the recent ones.
Read from the International Shark Attack File, Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, on August 20, 2026.
What this page is not
None of this says anything about today. A count reaching back more than a century is a record, not a reading of the water in front of you.
Warm water says nothing about surf, rip currents, or bacteria — check local lifeguard flags and advisories.
Looking for the water instead? New Smyrna Beach water temperature.