REPLACING FEAR WITH FACTS: HOW JAWS INSPIRED ME TO EDUCATE PEOPLE ABOUT SHARKS
Peter Benchley’s Jaws is one of the most iconic and influential stories in the past 50 years that has permeated not only entertainment and pop culture, but science and policy. For me, it was something I was instantly drawn to…especially the Matt Hooper character.
His laid-back attitude and apparent expertise impressed little girl me. I knew that I wanted to do what he was doing - getting in the water with sharks, study them, teach others about them. Albeit his rhetoric about needing to “kill the animal or cut off the food supply” is hardly something a researcher would say, I still credit his character for the inspiration behind my work today.
Growing up on the coast of Southern California means that one can become intimately familiar with the ocean and its inhabitants. As far back as I can remember I’ve seen a plethora of marine mammals like dolphins and sea lions as well as elasmobranchs of all types. My father would take me fishing as a youngster and I clearly remember catching a ray or skate.
I was quite young so I can’t recall what kind, but it wasn’t what we were targeting. Other than fishing there has been swimming, surfing, diving, boating, and sailing that I’ve been fortunate to have easy access to partake in.
All of these years in the ocean - I’m turning 50 this year - and I’ve only seen ONE great white shark while I was surfing or swimming near the shore. Yes, one little juvenile young-of-the-year great white shark. Now, as far as research goes, I’ve seen many more. I just wanted to stress that in my recreational pursuits, which includes decades of surfing, I’ve only encountered ONE great white shark. Even with the area I live in, the Santa Monica Bay Area, being known as a young-of-the-year White shark hotspot.
Now, I have to qualify that there was a possible second encounter, but I cannot be certain. I was walking out into the surf at a local beach and in about waist high water. Something rammed into my right shin/calf area. I moved over and it bumped me again. This was likely a shark, testing to see if I was their next meal. The water was murky and I didn’t see the animal but due to the depth and what I could feel it seemed to be quite small, only a meter at most or so.
You go in the cage. Cage goes in the water. Sharks in the water.
This is all to stress just how rare encountering a great white, or other larger shark, is while surfing or wading along the shore it. Yes, it does happen and someone will likely have a personal experience that says it happens in the comments. But, this is extremely rare. That said, I don’t want to minimize the devastation that can happen with a shark bite.
Sharks kill less than 10 people per year and there are less than 100 encounters during any given year. If that was a shark that bumped my leg, that would be classified in the International Shark Attack File as an attack [1]. Not all that are classified as an attack are actually something that causes injury or damage. Sharks have gel-filled sacs in their noses called the ampullae of Lorenzini that allows them to detect electric fields from potential prey [2]. While their exact mechanism is still being researched, many who have been bitten by a shark do report that they felt a bump first and then were bitten. So, likely I was being either tested for fitness of a meal or just ran into by a wayward fish [3].
Out of the millions of people around the world that visit beaches to surf, boogie board, swim, or wade a very small fraction even see, much less encounter a larger, predatory shark. Close to 4,000 people die every day in auto accidents so it seems more dangerous to head to the beaches than go into the water. In the past, I’ve been challenged about these stats. The challenger came to me saying that there are more accidents in cars because there are more people traveling by cars than going into the ocean. Well, from 2000-2004 in Southern California alone there were 129 million visits to the beaches and 45% of those visits had contact with the water [4].
During that period there were only two shark encounters, neither of which fatal, in the same geographic area. In fact, since 1926 there have only been 43 unprovoked shark attacks along Southern California beaches (counties of Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego). Therefore, the statistics are not skewed and there is not a greater risk than what I have represented here. From 2000-2009, only 21 incidents in all of California happened to “surface recreationists”, which includes surfers. Your chance of being bitten by a shark while in the lineup are quite small and you have far better odds of drowning.
Surfers are in a position to be much-needed, effective shark advocates and citizen scientists. We are always asked if we are afraid of sharks when someone that doesn’t surf finds out that we get in the ocean on a board with frequency. This is always a perfect opportunity to replace fear with facts. We have about 75% fewer great white sharks on the planet today than when Jaws was released in 1975 [5].
This is a troubling statistic because removing a top predator from an ecosystem causes a ripple effect of damage. One only needs to refer to the example of removing the wolves from the America’s Yellowstone in the early 1900s. This caused elk populations to flourish - so much so that flora was decimated to a state where land became unstable. This is known as trophic downgrading, where either a system loses it’s primary producers (plants) or another species of primary producers moves in and changes the entire food web of the area.
Fortunately for us humans, we were able to reintroduce wolves to the Yellowstone ecosystem and it is now again thriving. That would not be the case for sharks in a given area. It isn’t like great whites or some of the larger species can survive in captivity and be reintroduced to an area where they were once abundant. A top predator like the great white does not survive in captivity due to a number of reasons such as space, depression, and susceptibility to injury.
Now is the time to act and conserve our sharks before it’s too late. There are very simple actions that everyone can take that will help save our sharks and oceans. The first is to not buy products that contain shark. Next, reduce your seafood consumption - I always tell people to at least try Meatless Mondays. That one day a week not only is good for the ocean, but also for your health and finances. Of course you can also write your legislators to let them know that you want protections for sharks and you don’t support finning. Learn as much as you can and become an advocate. The simplest thing that anyone can do is to simply stop having single-use straws in their drinks when they go out. That one single act not only saves sharks, but the entire marine and terrestrial ecosystem from unnecessary plastic waste.
#ReplaceFearWithFacts
Words by Apryl Boyle, President & Executive Director of El Porto Shark
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