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Sharks

How Little We Know

There are a great many sharks, and a great many kinds of sharks, in the sea, and very few—an infinitesimal, insignificant number—will ever have contact with a human being, let alone bother one … let alone eat one. As a general rule, being attacked by a shark is not something you should worry about—unless you’re a person who worries about being struck by lightning, attacked by Africanized killer bees, or murdered, all of which are more likely to happen to you than a shark attack.

Still, there are actions you can take to reduce the odds even further—besides staying out of the water altogether—and there are even one or two things you can do to protect yourself if, God forbid, you ever are set upon by a shark. More about both later.

Each of the following statements about sharks has been printed, reprinted, graven in stone, and guaranteed to be the final, unarguable, absolute truth. Of the three, which one, would you say, is true?

1.  Of the 380 species of sharks known to science, fewer than a dozen pose any threat whatever to human beings.

2.  Of the more than 400 species of sharks in the world, only 11 have ever been known to attack a human being.

3.  Of the 450 species of sharks on record, only 3 qualify as man-eaters.

Don’t bother to guess, for it’s a trick question. The answer is: none of the above. To begin with, nobody knows for certain how many species of sharks there are. Scientists can’t agree on how many different species have been discovered and catalogued. Some sharks go by different names in different countries. Australia’s gray nurse shark, for example, bears no resemblance to the nurse sharks of the Atlantic and the Caribbean. In some countries, some subspecies are identified as separate species. Most scientists believe that the Zambezi shark and the Lake Nicaragua shark are both bull sharks; a few disagree. Some experts insist that Carcharodon megalodon, the fifty-foot monster that roamed the seas thirty million years ago, is a direct ancestor of today’s great white shark; others insist just as vehemently that today’s makos are the true descendants of C. megalodon.

Another reason for the lack of precision about numbers of sharks is that new sharks—new to man, that is—are still being discovered. In 1976 a behemoth virtually unknown to science, nearly fifteen feet long and weighing three quarters of a ton, was caught accidentally by a U.S. Navy ship off Hawaii. A plankton feeder and possessed of a disproportionately large mouth, it was dubbed megamouth. A dozen other specimens have since turned up, everywhere from Japan to Brazil, and in 1990 one was filmed swimming free, after it had been released from the net that had caught it off California. For all its size and heft, megamouth is slow-moving, curious, and not at all aggressive.

More new species of sharks will probably appear as, little by little, we and our miraculous technology turn our focus toward the sea. At least I hope we will, for our record so far has been nothing short of disgraceful.

We have seen less than 5 percent of our oceans; humans have actually visited less than 5 percent of that 5 percent.

As a comparison, a terrestrial equivalent of the way in which we have gone about studying the ocean would be if we dragged a butterfly net behind an airplane over the Grand Canyon at night and, based on what we collected, developed theses, hypotheses, and generalizations about life on earth.

Despite the facts that nearly three quarters of our home planet is covered by seawater (of an average depth of two miles), that there are mountain ranges in the ocean higher than the Himalayas, that there is enough gold suspended in seawater to supply every man, woman, and child on earth with a pound of the stuff, and that the mineral, nutritional, and medicinal resources available in the sea are incalculably valuable, for the past half century we have devoted much of our national treasure to reaching and studying a moon that we know to be barren, while spending, relatively, pennies on exploring the rich body of our own earth. Forty years ago John F. Kennedy was already lamenting that we knew more, even then, about the far side of the moon than we did about the bottom of the sea.

We know, really, almost nothing about the ocean, so it’s not surprising that we know so little about sharks.

Until recently, there’s been no pressure to learn about sharks, for sharks have never had a constituency among the public. Whales, on the other hand, have an enormous constituency. The save-the-whales movement is more than thirty years old, and dolphins, of course, have long had their own legions of devoted humans. (Remember Flipper?)

It’s true that whales and dolphins are easy to study and easier still to love. They’re mammals. They breathe air. They nurse their young and guard them ferociously. They click and talk to one another. They do tricks. They’re smart. We can anthropomorphize them, projecting human characteristics onto them. We give them names, and convince ourselves that they respond to—and even love—people they come to know.

Not sharks. Sharks are hard to study and harder still to love. Because they’re fish, not mammals, they don’t have to come up for air, so they’re difficult to keep track of and impossible to count.

And they do have the unfortunate reputation of occasionally—very, very occasionally—attacking a human being and—even more occasionally—eating one.

It’s hard to care deeply for something that might turn on you and eat you.

Traditionally, shark scientists, like scientists in many other disciplines, have been highly educated in the library and the laboratory and under-experienced in the field. But there have been—and are still—a handful of outstanding, dedicated shark scientists who are rich in talent, widely experienced in the field, and who have the admirable capacity to, when faced with a particularly perplexing problem, utter the words: “I don’t know.”

In the United States, Eugenie Clark, John McCosker, Samuel Gruber, and Peter Klimley are heroes to us shark fanatics. Up-and-coming youngsters like Rocky Strong, with whom I worked in South Africa, are devoting their professional lives to the study of great white sharks. And Barry Bruce, with whom I once spent several hours wallowing around inside the corpse of a gigantic great white, is one of the leading shark experts in South Australia.

Of all the benefits that Jaws—as both book and movie—has brought me, none do I value more than the opportunity to do television shows and magazine stories with, and learn from, the scientists, sailors, fishermen, and divers who make the sea their home. The new knowledge we’ve gained since the mid-1970s has convinced me that while almost all of the great-white-shark behaviors I described in Jaws do, in fact, happen in real life, almost none of them happen for the reasons I described.

For example, what I and many others at the time perceived as attacks by great whites on boats were, in fact, explorations and samplings. In 1999, in the waters off Gansbaai, South Africa, I witnessed great-white behavior that would have been unimaginable even a few years ago. Large adult great whites approached our tiny outboard-motorboats and permitted a “shark wrangler” named Andre Hartman to cup his hand over their snouts—a risky business he had first attempted in order to guide a shark away from biting a motor and breaking its teeth—at which they rose out of the water, gaped for several seconds as if hypnotized, then slipped backward, down and away, in what I can only describe as a swoon.

Furthermore, the numerous reports I interpreted as intentional, targeted attacks on human beings were, for the most part, cases of mistaken identity. Sharks had been condemned as man-eaters for millennia, and it would be several more years before that core belief would be effectively challenged.

We knew so little back then, and have learned so much since, that I couldn’t possibly write the same story today. I know now that the mythic monster I created was largely a fiction.

I also know now, however, that the genuine animal is just as—if not even more—fascinating.

Most shark behaviors, it turns out, are explainable in logical, natural terms.

Sharks are critically important to the health of the oceans and the balance of nature in the sea. Later I’ll go into detail about what I perceive to be the value of sharks and why I believe we should appreciate, respect, and protect them, rather than fear them.

First, though, back to Australia in 1974 … my first personal year of living dangerously.