The blog holds 56 posts in four categories: 27 under cool shark facts, 20 under questions answered, six on shark conservation and three general posts. This page is the index; each category page below lists its posts in full with the most recent first.
The posts are separate from the reference sections of the site. A species profile or a country guide is a record; a blog post takes one question — what eats a shark, which species are slowest to anger, what happens if sharks disappear — and argues it out.
- Posts in total56, across four categories
- Largest categoryCool shark facts, 27 posts
- Oldest posts date fromFebruary 2015
On this page
How the blog is organised
Every post sits in exactly one of four categories, and the category decides where it appears in the navigation. Cool shark facts is much the biggest at 27 posts and holds the ranked lists, the comparisons and the biology pieces. Questions answered has 20 posts, each built around a single question people actually type. Shark conservation has six, and the general category has three that belong to none of the others.
The split is old — the site has been publishing since 2014 — and it has held up, because the four groups genuinely do different jobs. A ranked list is written to be browsed. A question post is written to be answered in the first paragraph and then justified. A conservation post has to carry numbers about fishing pressure and population trend, and those numbers date faster than anything else on the site, so those six get revisited most often.
What none of them are is species profiles. Those live in the reference library under types of sharks, and a blog post will link to a profile rather than repeat it.
Cool shark facts, 27 posts
This is where the ranked lists are. The 10 least dangerous sharks works through the species with essentially no record against them, and the companion pieces cover the ten smallest species, the three fastest, the seven cutest and the five that unsettle people purely on appearance. Fifty amazing shark facts is the longest of them and the one most often used as a starting point.
Alongside the lists sit the explanatory posts: the eight orders of sharks, an introduction to shark taxonomy, the four ways sharks reproduce, how filter feeding works, what shark fins are actually for, and where sharks live. Three regional pieces cover the Australian coast, the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic, which is the group people are most surprised to learn has sharks in it at all.
Then the oddities. The 14 weirdest things found inside sharks, the five coolest prehistoric species, the mating habits, how to find shark teeth on a beach, and the thought experiment of what would follow if every shark disappeared. The full list, newest first, is on the category page.
Questions answered, 20 posts
These are the posts built around one question. The anatomical ones ask whether sharks have bones, whether they have tongues, whether they make noise, how they breathe, how long they live, how much they weigh and how many teeth they have — a count that depends entirely on whether you mean the working row or every tooth in the jaw at once.
The sensory ones are where most of the correcting happens. How far sharks can smell blood is the standing example: the figure everyone repeats is three miles, and the physics of dilution does not support it. The same post series covers whether sharks are blind, whether they can detect period blood, and what a shark brain is actually doing with all that input.
The rest are miscellaneous and useful: what eats sharks, what a group of sharks is called, are sharks older than trees, how many sharks are in the world, how to survive an encounter, and two that drifted in from the wider marine subject — what crabs eat and the rarest seashells.
Conservation and the general posts
Six posts deal with what is happening to shark populations. Why are sharks endangered is the overview; the others take a single pressure each. One covers the danger commercial fishing presents, two deal with the fin trade and what the soup actually is, one sets out ten practical things a reader can do, and one looks at sharks held in captivity and why most large species do badly there.
These are the posts that change. A Red List assessment is revised, a fishery closes or a finning ban comes into force, and the figures in the older copy stop being true. They are checked more often than anything else on the blog for that reason.
The three general posts are the outliers: ten everyday objects that injure more people than sharks do, a guide to getting a job working with sharks, and a profile of Eugenie Clark, who did more than anyone to replace the monster with an animal. None of them fit the other three categories, which is what the general category is for.
Where to start
If you have no particular question, start with the three fastest sharks in the world, which is short and settles an argument people have regularly, or with the fifty facts post if you want breadth. If you came here worried about swimming somewhere, the least dangerous list is the honest counterweight to the headlines, and the reference section on incidents has the actual counts.
For background rather than blog reading, the four reference hubs are the better route: species profiles, anatomy, the history of the group, and shark facts for the general material. The blog assumes that background rather than repeating it.
Greenland shark 
Lemon shark 
Caribbean reef shark
Frequently asked questions
How many posts are on the SharkSider blog?
Fifty-six, divided into four categories: 27 under cool shark facts, 20 under questions answered, six under shark conservation and three in the general category. The oldest was published in February 2015 and the archive is still being rewritten, so individual posts change even when the total does not.
How many types of sharks are there?
More than 500 species have been formally described, and the number keeps rising as deep-water sharks are collected and named. The older copy on this site said about 400, which was out of date. SharkSider currently carries 268 full species profiles in its reference library.
Are all sharks dangerous to humans?
No. The great majority have no record of injuring anyone. Whale sharks and basking sharks are filter feeders with no interest in large prey, and most described species are small, deep-water animals a person will never encounter. The blog post on the ten least dangerous sharks works through the clearest cases.
What is the largest shark species?
The whale shark, which is also the largest fish alive. It feeds by filtering plankton and small fish from the water rather than hunting, and swimmers share the water with it routinely. The basking shark is the second largest and feeds the same way, on a colder and narrower range.
Which blog category should I read first?
Cool shark facts if you are browsing, because it holds the ranked lists and the comparisons. Questions answered if you arrived with something specific in mind, since each post there is built around a single question. The conservation category is the one to read if you want the current state of shark populations.
How often are the blog posts updated?
The conservation posts are revisited most often, because population figures and fishery rules date quickly. The rest are rewritten in turn as part of a full review of the site, with every number rechecked against published sources and the project's own incident records rather than carried over from the old copy.
References
A small team focused on researching sharks and making marine biology easy to understand. Every page is reviewed against current species records and the SharkSider attack database, and updated when new incidents or research appear.
Published December 1, 2014 · Last updated September 23, 2026 · Part of the Shark Facts section.
