A shark! There’s a shark!!
No, not the yellow Baby Shark, doo doo doo doo.
This one is a 3.5-meter bronze whaler shark, doo doo doo doo.
Around 9 a.m. on September 18, 2026, a passerby spotted a large, live shark in the artificial waterway of Bukhang Waterfront Park in Dong-gu, Busan, and reported it to the Korea Coast Guard. Based on its appearance and an on-site survey, the National Institute of Fisheries Science (NIFS) identified it as a bronze whaler (Carcharhinus brachyurus).
1. How did the shark get into Busan’s North Port, and why can’t it get out?
The shark turned up in an artificial waterway, inside Bukhang Waterfront Park, inside Busan’s North Port.
No one knows exactly how it got there. Experts suspect that because the park’s waterway is connected to the sea, the shark chased its prey close to the North Port shoreline and then followed this channel into the waterway.
So why can’t it get out?
The waterway is not a straight, open channel; it curves inward. Experts said this curved layout likely made the exit hard to find. NIFS believes the shark isn’t stuck because it is too weak to swim out, but because the shape of the waterway keeps it from finding the way. Others point out that mullet and other prey live in the waterway, so the shark has little reason to leave in a hurry.
At first, the Coast Guard sent in patrol boats to steer the shark back to sea. But NIFS warned that pushing too hard could make the shark aggressive, so after about six hours, the Coast Guard stopped and decided to wait for the shark to leave on its own.
One day became two, and before long, a week had passed.
2. A shark became a local celebrity—and even got a nickname
The shark had the whole city buzzing.
A shark showing up in the middle of a city was enough to turn heads on its own. Then a nickname, “Bukangi,” spread through social media and the news, and people began to see the shark as a character. The name comes from Bukhang, the Korean name for the North Port. Add the friendly Korean suffix “-i,” and “Bukhang-i” is pronounced “Bukangi”: the North Port shark.
On top of that, it was Chuseok, Korea’s harvest holiday. Families home for the holiday stopped by the North Port, close to Busan Station, and Bukangi quickly became Busan’s newest attraction.
About 480,000 people visited during the Chuseok holiday alone, from September 24 to 27. By September 29, the total number of visitors had reached about 639,000.
Local businesses got a boost, too. With crowds pouring in to see Bukangi, sales at convenience stores near the park rose 48.6 to 77 percent from the week before. Cafés cashed in as well; orders piled up so fast that some menu items sold out early. The fun part is that the “shark sighting” buzz gave a clear lift to anything shark-related.
Jaws Bar (a shark-shaped ice pop): sales at nearby stores up 28.4% to as much as 3 times.
Gorae-bap (whale-shaped snack crackers): sales at nearby stores up 21.6% to as much as 3 times.
Baby Shark character goods: sales at nearby stores up 33.3% to 45.6%.
One media outlet estimated that, counting direct spending, ripple effects on production, and publicity for the park, Bukangi created about 30 billion won in economic value. In just two weeks, one shark trapped in a waterway turned the North Port into the hottest spot in Korea. No wonder people call it a “sharkfluencer” (shark + influencer).
3. Is Bukangi a sign of climate change?
From January to June 2026, 46 sightings of large sharks were confirmed off Korea’s east coast, a sharp rise from 12 in the same period a year earlier.
Of course, Bukangi’s appearance alone can’t be called a result of climate change. Bronze whalers are coastal sharks by nature, and they can reach the waters around Busan anyway. Shark sightings along the coast have been rising with climate change, but some see this as an unusual case: a single shark that happened to lose its way.
On the other hand, NIFS suggested that rising sea temperatures have brought more warm-water fish, and that the shark may have followed its prey into the North Port waterway. Choi Yoon, professor emeritus of marine biology at Kunsan National University, likewise said that bronze whalers are common along Korea’s southern coast and around Jeju Island, and that this one made its way up to Busan as the sea warmed.
Bukangi swimming into the park may have been pure chance. But the growing likelihood of sharks appearing off Busan is closely tied to climate change, and the numbers back this up. In the first half of this year, the average sea surface temperature around Korea was 17.17°C, 1.17°C higher than last year and 0.52°C above the previous record set in 2020. As a result, warm-water fish such as yellowtail are moving north, making it more likely that the sharks chasing them will show up close to shore.
The sea off Busan has already changed. In a NIFS survey off the coast of Gijang, Busan, 151 of the 212 species caught, or 71 percent, were subtropical. In a 2007–2009 survey, that share was 56 percent; in just 15 years, it has passed 70 percent.
So the more important question may not be “Why did one shark come to Busan?” but “Why are sharks being spotted so often in Korean waters?”
4. Will Bukangi finally find its way home?
At first, the plan was to wait.
Bukangi wasn’t sent out right away because it seemed to be in fairly stable condition, there was food in the waterway, and a forced capture could cause the shark stress or injury.
But as the days went by, things changed. The hope that “it will leave if we wait” turned into worry that “it might stay trapped.” Officials concluded that, in the long run, the shark could not feed or move normally in a confined artificial waterway.
1) Out to sea! (September 29, first guiding operation)
To keep direct stress on the shark to a minimum, the city of Busan adopted a “non-physical guiding” method modeled on a great white shark rescue in Massachusetts. Five vessels, including Coast Guard boats and a fire department rescue boat, were deployed along with water pumps.
The Coast Guard shot streams of water from the inner end of the waterway toward the sea, creating bubbles, noise, and vibration to coax Bukangi out toward open water. But Bukangi was clever. It hugged the edge of the waterway to avoid the spray, slipped behind the boats when they came close, and then swam back inside, dodging the water this way and that.
The plan looked simple: push the shark toward the sea. Bukangi, however, had other plans. When Bukangi showed no sign of heading out, officials called off the operation after about five hours, out of concern for the shark’s fatigue and stress.
Experts warn that colder weather and falling water temperatures could become a problem. One expert explained that because the North Port waterway is shallow, its temperature changes quickly, and as it drops, Bukangi may become less active and feed less.
2) Plan B (October 2, second guiding operation)
To make up for the first attempt, the second operation brought in a large net, 50 meters long and 6.8 meters high, made to fit the width of the waterway. The net was stretched across the waterway to keep Bukangi from turning back, then moved little by little toward the open sea. It worked better than the first attempt: pushed along by the net, Bukangi moved to about 70 meters from the exit over two hours.
The problem was the bottom of the waterway. Closer to the sea, natural rocks appeared on the bottom, unlike the rest of the artificial channel. The net snagged on the bottom and stopped moving. Pulling it any harder could have torn or damaged the net. Bukangi could then slip back inside, and worse, it could get caught in the torn net or be injured. Officials stopped pulling and called off the operation around 5:40 p.m. Instead, they secured the net in place and decided to watch whether Bukangi would make its own way out to sea.
70 meters to the sea.
Bukangi, you’re almost there.
Time to go home.