50 Years Ago, 'Jaws' Portrayed Sharks as Monsters, But It Also Inspired a Generation of Scientists • Kansas Reflector

Fear of sharks is deeply ingrained in humans. Ancient writings and artworks refer to sharks preying on sailors as early as the 8th century BC.

Stories of shark encounters have been amplified and amplified. In addition to the fact that from time to time, and very rarely, sharks bite humans, people have been accustomed for centuries to imagining terrifying situations at sea.

In 1974, Peter Benchley’s best-selling novel Jaws stoked this fear and spread around the world. The book sold more than 5 million copies in the United States within a year and was quickly followed by Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film, which became the highest-grossing film in history at the time. Virtually all audiences embraced the idea, vividly illustrated in the film and its sequels, that sharks are malicious, vindictive creatures that prowl coastal waters in search of food for unsuspecting swimmers.

But “Jaws” also sparked widespread interest in better understanding sharks.

Until now, shark research has been largely the esoteric domain of a handful of academic specialists. Thanks to the interest sparked by “Jaws,” we now know that there are many more species of sharks than scientists realized in 1974, and that sharks do more interesting things than researchers ever imagined. Benchley himself has become a vocal advocate for shark protection and marine conservation.

Over my 30-year career studying sharks and their close relatives, rays, I’ve seen attitudes evolve and interest in understanding sharks grow dramatically. Here’s how things have changed.

Swimming in the spotlight

Before the mid-1970s, much of what was known about sharks came from people who had been to sea. In 1958, the U.S. Navy created the International Shark Attack File—the world’s only scientifically documented and comprehensive database of all known shark attacks—to reduce wartime risks to sailors stranded at sea when their ships sank.

Today, the file is managed by the Florida Museum of Natural History and the American Elasmobranch Society, a professional organization of shark researchers that works to educate the public about shark-human interactions and how to reduce the risk of shark bites.

In 1962, Jack Casey, a pioneer of modern shark research, launched the Cooperative Shark Tagging Program. This initiative, still in operation today, relied on Atlantic commercial fishermen to report and return tags they found on sharks, so government scientists could calculate how far the sharks traveled after being tagged.

After Jaws, shark research quickly became widespread. The American Elasmobranch Society was founded in 1982. Graduate students went online to study shark behavior, and the number of published shark studies increased dramatically.

Field research on sharks has grown alongside the growing interest in extreme outdoor sports such as surfing, parasailing and scuba diving. Electronic tags have allowed researchers to monitor shark movements in real time. DNA sequencing technologies have provided cost-effective ways to determine how different species are related, what they eat and how populations are structured.

There was also a sensational side to this interest, epitomized by the Discovery Channel’s launch of Shark Week in 1988. The annual program, ostensibly designed to educate the public about shark biology and counter negative publicity about them, was a commercial enterprise that exploited the tension between people’s deep-seated fear of sharks and their desire to understand what makes these animals tick.

Shark Week featured television programs centered around fictional scientific research projects. The show was a phenomenal success and continues to be so today, despite criticism from some researchers who consider it a major source of misinformation about sharks and shark science.

Physical, social and genetic information

Contrary to the popular belief that sharks are mindless killers, they exhibit a wide variety of traits and behaviors. For example, the velvet-bellied lantern shark communicates through flashes of light emitted from organs on the sides of its body. Female hammerhead sharks can clone perfect replicas of themselves without male sperm.

Sharks have the most sensitive electrical sensors ever discovered in nature: networks of pores and nerves in their heads called ampullae of Lorenzini, named after the Italian scientist Stefano Lorenzini, who first described these features in the 17th century. Sharks use these networks to navigate the open ocean, using the Earth’s magnetic field to orient themselves.

Another intriguing finding is that some shark species, including mako sharks and blue sharks, are distinguished by sex and size. Among these species, cohorts of males and females of different sizes are often found in separate groups. This finding suggests that some sharks may have social hierarchies, like those seen in some primates and hoofed mammals.

Genetic studies have helped researchers understand why some sharks have hammer- or shovel-shaped heads. They also show that sharks have the lowest mutation rate of any vertebrate animal. This is remarkable because mutations are the raw material of evolution: the higher the mutation rate, the more a species can adapt to environmental changes.

Yet sharks have been around for 400 million years and have experienced some of the most extreme environmental changes on the planet. It’s still unclear how they’ve been able to survive so successfully with such a low mutation rate.

The flagship species

Great white sharks, the flagship species of “Jaws,” have attracted considerable public interest, although much is still unknown about them. They can live up to 70 years and regularly swim thousands of miles each year. Those in the Northwest Atlantic tend to move north and south between Canada and the Gulf of Mexico; great white sharks on the west coast of the United States move east and west between California and the central Pacific.

We now know that young white sharks feed almost exclusively on fish and stingrays, and do not begin to incorporate seals and other marine mammals into their diet until they are adolescents and about 12 feet long. Most white shark bites on humans appear to come from animals between 12 and 15 feet long. This supports the theory that almost all white shark bites on humans are cases of mistaken identity, where the humans resemble the seals that the sharks prey on.

Still in the water

Although “Jaws” had a huge cultural impact, it didn’t stop surfers and swimmers from enjoying the ocean.

Data from the International Shark Attack File, which covers confirmed unprovoked white shark bites from the 1960s to the present, show a continued increase, although the number of annual incidents is quite low. This trend is consistent with the increasing number of people enjoying recreational activities on the coast.

Since 1960, there have been 363 confirmed unprovoked white shark bites worldwide. Of these, 73 have been fatal. The World Health Organization estimates that 236,000 people die from drowning each year, which translates to about 15 million drowning deaths over the same period.

In other words, people are about 200,000 times more likely to drown than to die from a great white shark bite. Indeed, surfers are more likely to die in a car accident on the way to the beach than they are to be bitten by a shark.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Gavin Naylor, formerly of the Medical University of South Carolina and the College of Charleston, joined the Florida Museum of Natural History in May 2017 to lead its shark research efforts. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector strives to amplify the voices of those affected by public policy or excluded from public debate. Find information here, including how to submit your own commentary.