“Dun-dun.”
Reassessing the way humans view sharks — before and after Shark Week
“Dun-dun.”
We want to anthropomorphize sharks. Maybe, it makes them easier to understand. Maybe, it gives them a recognizable character beyond large, seal-eating cartilaginous fish.
And, we continue to do it in our movies and TV shows, our books and social media posts. The shows this Discovery Shark Week have names like “Sydney Harbor Shark Invasion,” “Great White Serial Killer: Sea of Blood,” “Deadliest Bite,” “Shark Attack Island,” and “Belly of the Beast: Bigger and Bloodier.” The shark from Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” is infamously violent. In the scene where members of the fictional town of Amity Island, New York, congregate to discuss felling their finned foe, the shark’s blood-thirsty tendencies are exaggerated. “Bad fish,” Quint, the retired shark hunter tells the enraptured crowd: “This shark, swallow you whole.” To get their attention, he had run his nails down a chalkboard. Someone had drawn a cartoonish version of a shark with a person in its mouth — after there had already been people killed.
Fictional sharks in the “Jaws” franchise and other blockbusters terrorized scientists in the Mariana Trench, a medical student and two sisters on vacation in Mexico, a group of friends on the California coast, and — this shark and Olympics season — Paris’ Seine River.
Obviously, there’s money to be made in horror and fear. Sharks are an easy target. They cannot stand up for themselves and people have been scared of sharks for a long time. “And, you always fear what you don’t understand,” mobster Carmine Falcone tells Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne in “Batman Begins.”
We fear the things we cannot comprehend, and many people are scared of the ocean for precisely this reason. Standing at the shore’s edge and looking out, the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans can seem endless. There’s a watery wall that separates humans from the organisms they might attempt to fry and eat for dinner.
The ocean’s depths, below where the light extends more than 3,200 feet down, are filled with all kinds of life. And, there are places, like the abyssal and hadalpelagic zones, where normal people just can’t reach. But, they could access it in their mind, if they took a scientific approach.
In fact, a scientist’s view of the ocean is much more expansive than most beachgoers. They approach the ocean with a curious mind, much unlike the fully grown adults I’ve witnessed banging their hands against aquarium tanks. Curiosity is how we learn and grow to process new concepts and ideas. It’s how we discover and identify new species. Scientists most recently found this weird, red walking fish and these stripey orange sardine-like creatures. Curiosity is also part of how we’ve learned about sharks and their behavior.
The shark in “Jaws” and other movies is often a great white shark: the best-studied shark in the world. These sharks are impressive specimens, weighing up to 4,500 pounds (ca. 2,041 kg), growing to as long as 21 feet (6.4 m), and living for 70 years or more. Great whites are found from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico and from Alaska to California. They prefer to swim in waters with temperature ranges of approximately 50 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit. As they age, they move farther away from shore.
But, while the ocean continues to warm, species distribution is shifting. This is true for sharks and for their prey. While juvenile white sharks mainly eat smaller sharks, rays, schooling fish, and squids, the larger ones hunt for seals, sea lions, and bite at dead whales. Researchers now believe warmer waters are bringing great whites farther north than normal.
Look no farther! Human beings are the culprits. Ocean heat content has increased markedly since the 1950s, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. We contribute to warming oceans by continuing to release greenhouse gases — largely carbon dioxide (CO₂) — that are warming Earth’s atmosphere. While the ocean is the Earth’s largest carbon sink and takes in 90% of excess heat generated by the gases, increasing emissions have disrupted the ocean’s ability to absorb the carbon and its heat content. Levels of dissolved carbon are making seawater more acidic, and altering marine life physiology. Warming also results in increased tropical storm development and other climate- and weather-related changes.
This year has seen record sea surface temperatures, sounding alarms as the global climate pattern shifts from El Niño to La Niña. The La Niña pattern can lead to more intense hurricane years. NOAA said that “exceptional warmth” in the Atlantic was a contributing factor to Hurricane Beryl: the earliest Category 5 hurricane observed on record in that ocean.
In addition to white sharks, the Atlantic is also home to tiger and bull sharks: two other apex predators. Tiger shark populations have also been reported moving farther north, with new migration patterns leaving them more vulnerable to fishing. Bull sharks can be found from New York to Brazil, but both species are found in the Gulf of Mexico.
These sharks are known as the “Big Three” when discussing shark “attacks,” the Florida Museum’s International Shark Attack File (ISAF) says. They are large sharks that can cause serious injuries. Their teeth are designed to cut skin off, rather than hold onto their prey. While the accurate identification of sharks implicated in unprovoked attacks is often tricky due to the chaotic nature of these events (and the ISAF list is skewed to “readily identified species”), the number of those confirmed by the ISAF from the year 1580 onward include 93 bull sharks, 103 tiger sharks, and 292 white sharks.
Shark attacks are rare. The odds of one happening the next time you decide to enter the ocean are one in 3.7 million. But, that doesn’t mean they don’t.
Last year, the ISAF recorded 69 unprovoked bites on humans, in line with its most recent five-year average. The number of fatalities was more than double the global average (usually six) within the same period — a fact that ISAF Director Gavin Naylor admitted was “a bit unnerving.” “The 2023 uptick in fatalities due to white sharks may reflect stochastic year-to-year variation, but it might also be the consequence of the increasing number of white sharks seen at aggregation sites near beaches that are popular with surfers (particularly in Australia),” the ISAF said on its Yearly Worldwide Shark Attack Summary, also noting that “variability in oceanographic conditions influences the local abundance of sharks in the water, while weather patterns and economic conditions impact human activities along coastlines.” The U.S. recorded the highest number of unprovoked bites, at 36.
Sharks can bite humans for any number of reasons. But, once again, this assumes we are inside the minds of these sharks. Sharks have been around for 400 million years. People are not a part of the shark diet and just around a dozen of the more than 500 shark species have been involved in attacks on humans. Still, sharks have attacked humans when they are confused or inquisitive. Some confuse humans on surfboards for seals and sea lions, scientists posit.
The motivation behind recent July 4 attacks at South Padre Island, Texas, and Volusia County, Florida, remains a mystery. But, sharks and beaches there have been busy, and bait swim close to shores.
On Thursday, a 14-year-old Missouri boy was bitten off Daytona Beach Shores, marking the fourth such attack in a week. A shark bit his left foot, according to The Tampa Bay Times, sending him to the hospital with injuries that were not considered to be life-threatening. The outlet said another 14-year-old boy was bitten just two days earlier when the junior lifeguard camp trainee, unfortunately, jumped on top of a shark. Volusia County has been unofficially known as the shark bite capital of the world for years.
The South Padre Island attacks were different. A shark attack hadn’t been reported in the area in five years, according to The Associated Press. Videos of those attacks went viral on X, with victims sustaining severe injuries. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department noted that encounters of “this nature” are not common in the area and are usually a “case of mistaken identity by sharks looking for food.” Game Warden Captain Chris Dowdy said, according to the news agency, that authorities think a six-foot-long shark was responsible. However, the types of sharks that are responsible for these attacks are also unknown. And, identifying the type of shark and knowing something regarding its typical behavior is critical to studying unprovoked bites and the locations where they occur.
The species of “shark attack” sharks are rarely reported. Big news organizations — especially networks — often get it wrong. Identification happens later, often after the story is no longer clicking. It’s the same every summer.
Of course, I, too, once fed the beast. “Shark attack” stories generate clicks. Our editors want splashy headlines, firsthand accounts, and gory photographs. They want gruesome, up-close encounters. They want exclusive content. But, it is incredibly difficult to disrupt the lives of people and families attempting to heal after going through such a traumatic experience. Those who are kind enough to share their stories with you often have a long road ahead. Whether the sharks mean it or not, these bites change lives. And, people on the receiving end will not be getting an apology or an explanation from the sharks involved.
But, villainizing these sharks will not ensure beachgoers are well-informed or could recognize the sharks that live offshore any better. News outlets should strive to do better than present fictional depictions of sharks in their headlines, despite the gnawing temptation to add the catchy John Williams score to every segment. To that end, some scientists have asked to change the language used when talking about shark attacks to “unprovoked incidents” or “unprovoked bites.” Others have told me it largely makes no difference, and two scientists I interviewed last year credited “Jaws” for the start of their careers studying sharks. Perhaps if we better educate the American public on the kinds of sharks that swim around us, they’ll inspire more than just fear.
What humans really should fear not knowing this Shark Week is our impact on our pelagic pals. In addition to climate change-related havoc on our oceans and the ecosystems sharks help regulate, they are hunted. Researchers say shark kills have risen to more than 100 million deaths each year, even with challenges in estimation (they are, after all, underwater). We kill them for their meat, organs, skin, and fins. We make shark-fin soup, and fermented shark. We take away their prey, and overfish. A study published in March in the journal Science found that overfishing threatened one in seven species of deepwater sharks and rays.
But, who is going to tune in for that Shark Week show?
