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2001

The Summer of Hype

After shark attacks—genuine attacks, not the kind staged from the safety of cages—had dominated the news in the summer of 2001, I contacted George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida, and requested, early in 2002, the latest figures for 2001.

Worldwide, the number of shark attacks recorded in 2001 was seventy-six, down from eighty-five the year before.

In the United States, fifty-five people were attacked by sharks in 2001, exactly one more than in 2000. As for fatalities, five people in the world died from shark bites in 2001, twelve in 2000.

In sum, then, said Mr. Burgess, “2001 was an average year by U.S. standards, and below average internationally. Most important, serious attacks were way down.”

Why, then, the shark hysteria of 2001? Because of a conjunction of disparate factors that came together all at once.

There was, first of all, the intangible but everlasting blend of fear and fascination with which human beings regard sharks. Harvard sociobiologist E. O. Wilson put it this way in a 1985 article in Discover magazine titled “In Praise of Sharks”:

“We’re not just afraid of predators,” he wrote, “we’re transfixed by them, prone to weave stories and fables and chatter on endlessly about them, because fascination creates preparedness, and preparedness, survival. In a deeply tribal sense, we love our monsters.”

That love accounts, I think, for the long life Jaws has enjoyed as a movie. Aside from the many and manifest merits of the Steven Spielberg film, the core story apparently touches the deep tribal nerve in a great many people.

Then there was the fact that for the first eight months and ten days of 2001, the United States and the world were in a relatively slow “news cycle.” Not much was going on that was newsworthy. The controversial presidential election of 2000 was finally over. The economy was slipping, but slowly, and after the Federal Reserve had cut the prime interest rate several times, even that became old news.

Then, at dusk on July 6, eight-year-old Jesse Arbogast was attacked by a bull shark in shallow water off Pensacola, Florida. The attack was particularly gruesome and sensational. Somehow, his uncle wrestled the seven-foot shark to shore and, with the aid of a park ranger, retrieved Jesse’s severed arm from the mouth of the shark and rushed it to a hospital, where it was reattached to Jesse. Miraculously, the boy survived.

After that incident, the antennae of the media and the public were set to receive reports of other shark attacks as soon as they happened. And happen they did—the normal encounters between bathers or surfers and sharks that occur, however infrequently, off beaches from New Jersey to Key West.

Each incident was treated as a new sensation, until, very soon, a trend was spotted, and from the trend grew what was seen as a pattern and, eventually, an epidemic. The world was gripped by shark fever.

The fever took hold with such ferocity because of another factor that has come into play over the past few years: the complete alteration in the way news is disseminated around the world.

With the advent of the Internet, cable television, cellular telephones, and satellites, everything that happens anywhere—everything that is said or rumored to have happened anywhere, anything that might possibly have happened anywhere—is ours for the plucking in raw, unedited, unanalyzed, unverified, and (often) unverifiable form.

We choose our news. We decide what’s news. We read and see whatever we want, and decide—each in his or her personal wisdom—what is and isn’t true.

And thus, no sooner was Jesse Arbogast removed to the hospital than rumors began to fly through the ether, rumors that answered questions no one had asked, rumors that defamed Jesse’s heroic uncle: he had been fishing for sharks; he had had this one on his line for an hour; the water was full of blood and chum; children had gathered round to see the shark as the uncle dragged it into shallow water; the uncle was so distraught that he had tried to commit suicide; the reason he was giving no interviews was that he was in the Federal Witness Protection Program … and so on.

Not one of the rumors was true.

On August 14 a school of sharks was sighted close to shore near St. Petersburg, Florida. No one knew how many sharks there were; first reports—by telephone and e-mail—described them as “a bunch.” Soon there were “dozens,” then “hundreds.” By the time a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times was assigned to cover the story, the number of sharks was “in the thousands.”

The suspicious reporter chartered a small plane and flew out over the scene. He didn’t know what to expect; surely, there would be too many sharks to count, but would they be moving toward the beaches or away? Were they chasing food or hunting for food? Was this mass gathering a breeding event … or a killing event?

I spoke to him on the phone after he returned.

“The water was murky,” he said, “but I could still count the sharks ’cause it was calm and they were all on or near the surface. There were forty sharks. Exactly forty. Even I could see what they were—blacktips—and they were following a school of baitfish, which happens every day. There were more fishing boats out there than sharks, all intent on killing the ‘killers.’ It was ridiculous.”

By the end of July 2001, shark attacks were being reported almost daily—in Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, all up and down the coast. Most of the “attacks” were, in fact, incidents that, in a normal year, would not have merited coverage beyond the local press. But this was not a normal year. The season had been proclaimed “Summer of the Shark” by Time on the cover of its July 30 issue, which reached newsstands and most subscribers on July 23.

Though the actual number of incidents was not abnormal, though there had not, as yet, been a single shark-attack fatality in U.S. waters, it seemed to the public that the times were out of joint and the world (or at least the ocean) had gone askew.

And once the public had accepted that 2001 was a particularly shark-plagued summer, experts—often self-anointed—popped up everywhere to offer theories and explanations.

The supposed reasons given for the nonexistent rise in shark attacks included the following:

•  The general, overall decline in fish stocks had left sharks desperate for food; consequently, they were attacking humans. There’s no evidence, statistical or otherwise, to support this theory.

•  Restrictions imposed, since 1993, by the federal government on shark fishing had created an overabundance of sharks, which were now preying on helpless swimmers. The theory ignores all the accepted evidence of a drastic decline in the numbers of nearly every accessible species of shark.

•  By targeting certain species and ignoring others, commercial fishermen had inadvertently encouraged a population explosion among bull sharks, which were the villains in several serious attacks. There is no evidence of an increase in the bull-shark population. For a complex combination of dubious reasons, it is possible that bull-shark populations have suffered slightly less than species more highly prized by commercial fishermen, but even that has by no means been proven.

•  Shark-feeding enterprises, which abound in Florida, the Bahamas, and elsewhere as tourist attractions, had conditioned sharks to associate the presence of humans with the promise of food. When those sharks encounter people who don’t feed them—for example, swimmers and surfers—they go after the people instead. Not only is this theory unsupported by reliable data or credible anecdotes, it also sparked a squabble in the summer of 2001 between the few scientists who espoused it and the many who dismissed it.

Of all the stories, theories, analyses, and speculations, however, none summed up the lunacy of the summer so perfectly as the cover headline of the September 4, 2001, issue of the Weekly World News: CUBA LAUNCHES SHARK ATTACK ON U.S.!

Inside, on pages 2 and 3, beside photographs of Fidel Castro and an openmouthed great white shark, a banner headline shouted, CASTRO TRAINED KILLER SHARKS TO ATTACK U.S.

Datelined “Miami,” the story exposed the monstrous plan:

“A cruel plot by depraved dictator Fidel Castro to spread panic and discourage refugees from fleeing Communist Cuba is responsible for the shocking wave of deadly shark attacks along America’s Atlantic and Gulf Coasts.”

After considering and rejecting other plans, such as releasing poisonous sea snakes along U.S. bathing beaches, Castro, the story said, “came up with the scheme to breed especially ferocious species of sharks and unleash them on the American public—and on Cuban rafters.”

The “shark summer” of 2001, which had begun on July 6 with the attack on Jesse Arbogast, ended on Labor Day weekend with two fatal attacks—the only two of the summer in the United States.

On Saturday, September 1, ten-year-old David Peltier bled to death after being bitten on the leg while surfing in the waters off Virginia Beach. Two days later, on Monday, Sergei Zaloukaev, twenty-seven, was killed by a shark while he and his wife, Natalia, were wading in the surf off Avon, North Carolina. Natalia was bitten, too, and lost a foot, but she survived.

The summer ended. Then came the horror of the World Trade Center disaster of September 11, and shark sightings, shark encounters, and shark attacks disappeared from the news.