Most people who book a Galápagos liveaboard are chasing one animal: the scalloped hammerhead. But the archipelago's waters have, over nearly two centuries of naturalist records, turned up thirty-four distinct shark species, ranging from reef residents divers see on almost every dive to open-ocean wanderers logged only a handful of times.
A small cluster of species accounts for the vast majority of sightings. Silky sharks and blacktip sharks were both first documented in the region as far back as 1839. The tiger shark's presence goes back further still, to 1822, while the whale shark was first recorded in 1828 and the scalloped hammerhead in 1834. Whitetip reef sharks entered the record in 1837, the Galápagos bullhead shark in 1840, and the species now named for the islands themselves — the Galápagos shark, Carcharhinus galapagensis — wasn't formally documented until 1905, even though it's now one of the most frequently encountered sharks on local reefs.
Beyond that familiar set, twenty-six additional species have been recorded with far less regularity, some so rarely that a single confirmed sighting can stand for decades. The great white shark falls into an interesting middle category: it isn't a resident of Galápagos waters, but individuals are known to pass through the region on occasion, likely following the same current systems that draw in so much else.
What makes the numbers meaningful isn't just the count — it's the behavior clustered around a few key sites. The scalloped hammerheads that most divers come for don't scatter evenly across the archipelago; they aggregate in large schools specifically near Darwin and Wolf Islands, which is a large part of why those two sites carry the reputation they do among divers worldwide.
Source: adapted from Galápagos Shark Diving's own published article on the shark species recorded in Galápagos waters.