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The Trouble with Sharks
The release of [the 1975 movie] Jaws contributed to people wanting to exterminate sharks. Sharks have much more cause to fear humans. Today sharks are decreasing in all oceans because of human activity.
—Alessandro De Maddalena, shark expert, in Sharks of New England, 2010
The 1975 film Jaws is one of the most famous American thrillers of all time. Directed by Steven Spielberg, it won three Academy Awards. In 2001 the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. All the same, many critics say the movie has created negative and unrealistic stereotypes of shark behavior that persist into the twenty-first century.
Peter Benchley was a lifelong swimmer and diver, well known as the author of the best-selling book Jaws, published in 1974. The novel was inspired by a newspaper story describing a massive 4,550-pound (2,064 kg) great white shark caught off Long Island, New York. Set in a beach community, Jaws features fictional characters: a gigantic, vicious shark; a marine biologist; and a local sheriff seeking to stop the shark’s human-killing spree. When the movie adaptation of Jaws was released the next year, it unleashed nightmares from the dungeons of the human mind all over the world. “People are, and always have been, both intrigued and terrified by sharks,” said Benchley, who died in 2006. “Sharks come from one part of the dark castle where our nightmares live—the deep water beyond our sight and understanding. So they stimulate our fears and our fantasies.”
Two hundred years earlier, in 1778, the East London Advertiser featured the eyewitness account of a vicious tiger shark attack on Brook Watson, a fourteen-year-old sailor swimming in the harbor at Havana, Cuba. In the first attack, the boy lost the flesh of his right leg from the calf down. In the second attack, the rogue shark bit off Brook’s foot. His shipmates were near him in a skiff (small boat). They used a boat hook to drive away the shark, which tried to attack the boy a third time. A surgeon saved his life, amputating the leg below the knee, and he lived the rest of his life with a wooden leg.
Case closed? Brook Watson did not exactly fade away into history. That year the account inspired artist John Singleton Copley of Boston, Massachusetts, to paint several versions of the shark attack. Three of them hang in major US art museums, including the National Gallery in Washington, DC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. The painting contributed to centuries of fear of sharks. It shows Brook, floundering belly-up, eyes rolled back in his head, before a horrifying shark so large it dwarfs his boat.
American artist John Singleton Copley (1738–1815) painted Watson and the Shark in 1778. With its realistic depiction of a grisly shark attack, the painting was a sensation. Copley became very wealthy selling engravings based on the work.
Summer Fiercer Than Others
Skip forward to the beginning of the twentieth century, when many Americans had more leisure time than in previous centuries. They began to take shore vacations in greater numbers than ever. A few shark bites on the New Jersey shore of the Atlantic Ocean got major press attention and caused a panic. During World War II (1939–1945), an enemy German U-boat sank the USS Indianapolis. Newspaper headlines about sharks hunting down survivors gripped the nation. In the early twenty-first century, Time magazine used a series of summer shark attacks in 2001 to lure readers. The magazine’s Summer of the Shark coverage ensured readership during a season with few hard-news events. The magazine focused on rare but frightening shark attacks. For example, on July 6, 2001, at dusk, a 7-foot (2.1 m) bull shark attacked eight-year-old Jesse Arbogast in shallow water off the coast of Pensacola, Florida. The boy’s uncle wrestled the shark to shore and, with the help of a park ranger, retrieved the boy’s severed arm from the shark’s mouth. The boy was rushed to a nearby hospital where surgeons reattached his arm. He survived.
Then, in September, on Labor Day weekend that year, a sandbar shark bit a ten-year-old boy on the leg while he was surfing off Virginia Beach, Virginia. The same weekend, another shark (likely a bull or tiger shark) attacked a young man and woman while they were wading in the ocean off Avon, North Carolina. Both later died.
And yet, even though the attacks in 2001 were horrifying, the number of shark attacks worldwide was actually down to seventy-six, eleven fewer than the eighty-five attacks the previous year. Globally, five people died from shark bites in 2001, while twelve had died the year before.
A Change of Heart—and History
Peter Benchley, who made the shark-scare films Jaws, Beast, and The Deep along with documentaries about sharks, said Americans in the twentieth century perceived shark attacks to be occurring more frequently. However, the real explanation was that more people were living near the shore and swimming in the water. So their exposure to sharks and the risk of encounters were increasing. Improved communications also helped spread stories—and panic. Shark attacks leveled off in the 1990s to sixty to eighty attacks a year worldwide. A scuba diver and snorkeler, Benchley swam with sharks of all species all over the world. He was threatened, bumped, and shoved but never attacked or bitten. “I couldn’t possibly write the same story today,” Benchley said in his 2002 book Shark Life. “I know now that the mythic monster I created [the shark in Jaws] was largely a fiction. The genuine animal is just as—if not even more—fascinating.”
When Benchley wrote Shark Life, conservationists and the public weren’t advocating for sharks the way they were for other marine animals. Benchley said, “Whales and dolphins are easy to study and easier still to love.” He said this is because dolphins and whales are mammals, like humans. Like us, they breathe air, nurture their young, learn tricks, and are smart. They respond to humans and seem to like us. Sharks, on the other hand, are fish. They don’t share human traits and don’t seem very interested in us. And they don’t come up for air the way whales and dolphins do. So sharks are harder to see, track, and count.
Sharks also have the reputation of chomping people. “It’s hard to care deeply for something that might turn on you and eat you,” Benchley said. But just how often does that really happen?
Staying Out of the Shark’s Food Chain
Most sharks avoid contact with humans. Alison Kock is a marine biologist and shark expert with the Cape Research Centre (South African National Parks) in Cape Town, South Africa. According to Kock, the sharks that are most likely to attack humans are the great white, bull, and tiger sharks. Key to avoiding attack, she says, is to recognize that sharks don’t show up just anywhere. They follow predictable patterns of migration and hunt in areas where they are likely to find prey. Avoid those areas. Pay attention to any alert systems in place, such as signs and flags. And be aware that these big sharks are stealthy. Like lions, tigers, and other apex (top) predators, they sneak up on prey without warning.
Here are a few suggestions for protecting yourself from sharks:
- Recognize that you are entering shark territory when you go swimming in an ocean. Sharks don’t specifically target people, but people do resemble shark prey—especially seals. This is true whether you are swimming, surfing, or kayaking.
- Don’t swim alone. Stay near the shore. Don’t swim at dawn or dusk, when sharks are most likely to be hunting.
- When entering the water, look for cues—such as birds diving for fish or fishing boats hauling in their catch—that sharks might be in the water. If there’s food in the water, sharks may be hunting it, just as the birds and people are.
- If you are scuba diving and you see a shark, stay calm and pay attention to your oxygen tank. Fear and anxiety can cause you to breathe too quickly and use up vital oxygen.
- Know and look for the behaviors that indicate a shark is about to attack. It will usually circle nearer to its prey and then swim straight toward it. At the last instant, the nictitating membrane (inner eyelid) may cover the shark’s eye to protect it during the attack.
- Myths abound about how to repel a shark attack, but punching a shark in the nose or playing dead don’t actually work too well. (And it is hard to do either one underwater.) What may work is poking the shark in the eye, one of its vulnerable points.
- Above all, don’t be a jerk around sharks. Human behavior provokes more than half of all shark attacks. Even the most peaceable sharks, such as whale sharks and nurse sharks, may bite if someone grabs them by the tail. Don’t try to wrestle with or ride a shark. These types of thoughtless behaviors scare sharks and make them think their lives are at risk.
Basking sharks keep their mouths open while they swim. Through their many rows of tiny teeth, they filter plankton (small marine creatures) from the water to eat. The population of these sharks is declining. The animal’s survival is at risk, mostly due to overfishing and very slow rates of population recovery.
Who’s Attacking Whom?
George H. Burgess and Lindsay French of the Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida in Gainesville maintain the International Shark Attack File. This is a case-by-case study of interactions between humans and sharks. In 2016 they counted 150 human-shark interactions worldwide. Of these, 81 were unprovoked attacks, in which people weren’t fishing or doing anything else to put themselves at risk. Four people died from these attacks. Boris Worm, a marine research ecologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, points out that humans kill a “staggering” number of sharks—one hundred million—each year, possibly more than twice that number. By fall 2016, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) had listed seventeen shark species—including the silky, great white, whale, basking, and smooth hammerhead shark—on Appendix II. This document lists shark species that may not survive without efforts to control shark hunting.
Fame and Infamy
Nonetheless, shark attacks, both real and imagined, have led humans to exact vengeance over the centuries on the large fish. Many people didn’t care much what happened to sharks and took actions that reflected their own shuddering horror. For example, the government of Western Australia began shark culls in 2014. In these outings, people use baited lines or nets to capture and kill sharks that are near beaches or that have bitten people. University of Sydney (Australia) public policy researcher Christopher Neff described the hunters’ assumption. They believe that sharks mean to bite humans, that a shark bite is always fatal, and that once a shark has bitten a person, it must be killed to stop it from killing again. None of these beliefs is true. In the United States, attitudes supported by scary shark stories in the news and entertainment have sparked shark-hunting tournaments that reflect a human wish for good (humans) to conquer evil (sharks).
Sharks may seem bad, horrible, and terrifying. Yet they are truly fascinating, with a major role to play in worldwide food chains, and they spend their lives doing that. If they harm people, it is usually by accident, not with evil intent. In the mid-twentieth century, Eugenie Clark helped shift the way people think of sharks. Clark was a pioneer as a woman scientist and as an ichthyologist (a shark scientist). Her 1953 international best seller, Lady with a Spear, tells of her graduate work studying sharks in Indonesia. Clark founded a shark laboratory in Sarasota, Florida, that would became the Mote Marine Laboratory, still an important center of shark research. She discovered a natural shark repellent—a secretion from flatfish that sharks avoid. She also studied shark intelligence. Clark’s work became the subject of intriguing articles in National Geographic, and in the 1960s, she found an ally. Jacques Cousteau, a French oceanographer who was about to become a big TV star, joined her as another committed force working for sharks.
World-renowned ichthyologist Eugenie Clark (1922–2015) became interested in fish when she was a little girl in New York City. When visiting the New York Aquarium, she would think about what it would be like to be inside the shark tank swimming with the animals. From there, she went on to be a pioneer in marine conservation, scuba diving for research purposes, and shark behavior. She wrote two popular books, Lady with a Spear (1953) and The Lady and the Sharks (1969).
In 1968 the first episode of a television show called The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau captured the public’s imagination. Cousteau, a diver and underwater photographer, and his team placed tracking tags on sharks and then tailed them with cameras to trace their migration paths. For the first time, the public got a glimpse of what sharks did. And they got a look at the scientists in their sleek wet suits, flippers, and scuba gear as they studied the marine animals. As viewers got a clearer look at the sea and its sharks (which did not make meals of the Cousteau team), another vision of sharks began to emerge.
French marine explorer Jacques Cousteau, and his vessel the Calypso, became famous in the United States for his popular television show The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. The show ran for several seasons, from 1968 until 1976. Narrated by famous screenwriter Rod Sterling, the documentary show focused on the diversity of aquatic life, from sharks and whales to sea otters and penguins.
Blockbusters with Bite
Gradually people began to gain another perspective on the shark story: peaceable sharks going about their business. In 1988 the brand-new Discovery Channel launched Shark Week, an education program, scheduled during the dog days of summer. The producers had noticed that the channel’s ratings bumped up sharply whenever they aired a show about sharks. So why not a whole week of programs about sharks? Shark Week proved to be so popular that it still airs every summer. High-definition video cameras now allow audiences to get to know individual sharks. Storytelling from shark experts also reveals a more realistic, less horror-driven shark tale. Partly because of Shark Week and scientists such as Clark and Cousteau, public attitudes have changed toward a more humane and realistic understanding of sharks.
Bad News for Sharks
One of the most vital pieces of the shark puzzle is population. How many sharks live in the ocean? Another key piece is distribution. Where do they live? In 2003 Julia Baum, Ransom Myers, and other biologists at Dalhousie University published a headline-making study. It revealed shocking reductions in the population of sharks in the northwestern Atlantic Ocean. Their study showed that the main cause for fewer sharks is fishing. Since the 1960s, commercial fishing has relied on longlining—baiting hooks on lines that are miles long (some more than 40 miles, or 64 km). Fishing boats with long lines can go far out in the open ocean to catch tuna, swordfish, and other food fish. Bycatch (accidental hooking) is a risk for sharks, however, and longliners keep track of it. In some areas of the ocean, 90 percent of all longline captures are sharks. Drift gill nets, designed to entangle fish, also snare sharks. And millions of sharks die when they are tangled in other fishing gear. Others die through more direct, irresponsible fishing practices when fishers target the animals for just one body part, usually their fins.
Deep-sea fishing fleets that rely on long, hooked lines to catch fish at sea often accidentally hook sharks. Millions of bycatch sharks die every year because once hooked (or caught in nets), they can no longer swim. Swimming is necessary for oxygen to move into the animal’s body, and the animals therefore suffocate. Many sharks die even after they are released. Some longliners are shifting away from wire lines to a monofilament that sharks can bite through to escape if hooked.
The Dalhousie team wrote, “We estimate that all recorded shark species, with the exception of makos, have declined by more than 50% in the past 8 to 15 years.” For some species, the statistics were far worse. From 1985 to 2000, hammerhead shark stocks declined by 89 percent, white sharks by 79 percent, tiger sharks by 75 percent, and threshers by 70 percent. The study reflected a global trend. In 2003 CITES for the first time placed four shark species—basking sharks, whale sharks, great white sharks, and sawfish—on its Appendix II.
Besides fishing, pollution harms sharks. Plastic pollution gets into their systems as water passes through their gills. Microplastics in the water—microscopic or hard-to-see pellets and pieces of plastic bottles, bags, and other trash—are left behind in sharks’ guts. Plastic is persistent. It breaks down extremely slowly and is almost impossible to eradicate. So are certain persistent organic pollutants (POPs), such as pesticides and industrial chemicals. Animals at the top of the food chain, like sharks, accumulate high concentrations of POPs over a lifetime of eating smaller fish that also have the pollutants in their bodies. Other invisible pollution hurts too. Noise from ocean-based industries and construction travels at the low frequencies to which sharks are sensitive. Scientists are working to assess the effect noise pollution has on sharks of different species and habitats.
And the ocean has natural substances that may suddenly strike down particular animals. These substances include bacteria and parasites that have caused infections at an epidemic level among sharks. In recent years, leopard sharks have washed up, stranded, on beaches in San Francisco Bay. California Department of Fish and Wildlife fish pathologist Mark Okihiro examined the bodies. He found infections, likely caused by a fungus, in the sharks’ brains. California State University shark biologist Chris Lowe says that without more funding for research, the infection could go global.
Fins as Food
The commercial trade in shark fins, meat, cartilage, skin, oil, and other shark products have further reduced the ocean’s shark population. Shark fin soup is a delicacy in China and other Asian nations. A shark’s fin is made of long, narrow fibers called ceratotrichia. Fins have no taste, but the fibers give them a silky, chewy texture that makes the soup desirable. One bowl of shark fin soup may sell for as much as $100. What’s more, shark fins keep well (dry or frozen) for a long time. Every year commercial fishers strip seventy-three million sharks of their fins and throw the animals back into the water, often alive, for the sake of this soup. Sharks cannot regrow their fins, and without them, the animals will die by bleeding, drowning, or attack from killer whales and other predators.
Shark fins are a specialty item in many Asian cuisines. Commercial fishing fleets usually haul the sharks on board, where they cut off the fins while the animal is still alive. Then they throw the sharks back into the ocean, where they bleed to death, suffocate, or are eaten by other sea animals. Processors remove the denticles from the fins, bleach the fins, and then dry, freeze, or cook them for sale.
According to the US Shark Conservation Act of 2010, all sharks caught in US waters must be brought to shore intact (with all their fins). Other countries are working to regulate shark finning as well. However, shark fin soup is a tradition in China, where hosts serve the soup to show guests respect or to demonstrate their own prestige, and change is slow.
From Asia and East Africa to western Europe and the United States, people have eaten shark meat for centuries. In some parts of the world, people use the meat and skin as medicine. Shark meat may be eaten and stored fresh, chilled, frozen, or salted and smoked or dried. Those with a taste for shark say the best meat comes from shortfin mako, porbeagle, and common thresher sharks.
Commercial fishing is devastating shark populations, however. Depending on the shark species, the animal’s reproduction cycle is long. Sharks don’t reach mating age until they are at least seven years old, some not until fifteen. Shark gestation periods (pregnancies) last two to three years. Some females give birth to small litters of only two young, while others may have up to eighty young. Recreational fishers put sharks at risk too. They catch and kill large sharks such as porbeagle, shortfin mako, and thresher for sport. Changes to their habitats due to pollution, warming waters from climate change, and disruption from commercial shipping and industries such as gas exploration also affect sharks.
Twenty-first-century shark seekers are using social media, smartphones, and good storytelling to improve the planet for this animal. The lead characters in the stories are only occasionally threatening. They are always awe-inspiring.