Demon Fish (10 page)

The film does point out that sharks don’t intentionally hunt people, though it also portrays great whites as lethal predators. Richard Dreyfuss, playing Hooper, manages to both pay tribute to sharks and freak viewers out as he explains how they operate. In an argument with the mayor over whether to close the beach in light of the recent attacks, Hooper explains, “What we are dealing with here is a perfect engine, an eating machine. It’s really a miracle of evolution. All this machine does is swim, and eat, and make little sharks.”

The film also exaggerates the size of great whites swimming off the New England coast, saying the shark is twenty-five feet long. When the gigantic shark emerges from the water for the first time, Brody turns to Quint, the boat’s captain, and deadpans, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

In writing
Jaws
, Benchley tapped into humans’ natural terror of sharks. In their essay, “When Humans and Sharks Meet,” Erich Ritter, Kai Lutz, and Marie Levine argue there are a number of reasons we are inclined to be afraid of sharks, something they characterize as “the ubiquitous selachophobia” that permeates modern society. Even though the number of strikes against humans is relatively small in comparison to sharks’ abundance, they are still visibly threatening predators. Just as important, the authors argue, they play into humans’ fear of the dark. All of this taps into our “biologically prepared fear acquisition,” triggering a less-than-rational reaction.
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Every new report of a shark attack—the random, vicious strike from below, out of nowhere—reinforces this fear.

But by making the attack as vivid as it did—and bringing this message to such a broad audience—Benchley’s work had a disproportionate effect on the public psyche. It was as if by bringing a nightmare to life, Benchley gave it a credibility, a sense of concreteness, it had never had before. As a result, we became convinced that sharks were a far graver threat to us than they actually are.

One of the oddest things about our view of sharks is that we’re convinced they are everywhere. Several years ago Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, a Democrat, was having lunch in the Members’ Dining Room when the talk turned to sharks. Nowadays, lobbyists who have served in Congress are prohibited from snacking in this exclusive establishment, but for years it was a huge draw, which is why Blumenauer found himself sitting with South Carolina’s Robert “Robin” Tallon, a former House Democrat turned lobbyist. After discussing news of a shark attack, Tallon speculated that sharks must cover the seas, outnumbering humans. Blumenauer—an environmentally minded lawmaker who represents Portland and founded not just the Congressional Bike Caucus but the Livable Communities Task Force to boot—would have none of it. The ocean’s food chain couldn’t sustain that many top predators, he reasoned.

“This fellow thought I was crazy,” the congressman recalls, sitting in his office. “You know how banter can escalate, even without alcohol.” The two bet $100 on the question. (“I wanted to up the ante, I was so confident,” Blumenauer says now.)

It seemed like a simple question at the time of the bet, but Blumenauer soon discovered it was almost impossible to pin down. For years, the long-standing wager amounted to an unofficial research project for Blumenauer’s office. Summer interns would make inquiries; sometimes even full-time staffers delved into the question. No one could find the answer. One night, at a Washington dinner party, I learned about the bet. The next day, I endeavored to figure it out.

I called the Dalhousie University marine biologist Boris Worm, who has spent his career seeking to quantify how many fish are in the sea, in Halifax. “Well,” he offered, “there are nearly seven billion people on earth now, right? There are five hundred species of sharks, so in order to have more sharks than people, you’d have to have ten to twenty million per population. That seems like a lot. My guess would be there are more people than sharks in the world, but it’s hard to say because there are some shark populations we don’t know anything about, like deepwater sharks.

“Humans are now the most abundant large vertebrate on earth, by far,” he continued. “Once you take out cattle and sheep, which come in roughly second and third, since we raise them, the next most abundant large vertebrate may be the crabeater seal in the Antarctic, which numbers somewhere between ten and fifty million. The worldwide wolf population, to put it in context, numbers only about 150,000. Brown bears are maybe half that.”

A decent answer, but not definitive enough. So I e-mailed Sarah Fowler, who co-chairs the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Shark Specialist Group, in England. She responded with a more precise guesstimate, along the following lines. About half of the known shark species live in one bioregion of the world, such as tropical Africa and Indo-Malaysia. A significant proportion of them live in restricted areas, so Fowler posited that of these 150 species, they wouldn’t number more than 150 million total. “However, the most fecund and abundant small coastal and shelf shark species that are more widely distributed in a single ocean or region (e.g., regional species of smooth hounds and cat sharks) could number in the tens of millions,” she wrote. “Let’s say about 7 million each on average for ~250 species that are moderately widely distributed. That brings the running total up to 2 billion individuals of ~400 species. Five billion individuals and 100 species to go.”

Many of those remaining species, she explained, have a more global distribution, while others are rare. She assumed that about thirty are relatively rare or patchily distributed, boasting between 5 and 10 million individuals. Another fifty more common species might have about 40 million individuals, adding 2.2 billion to the total.

The last twenty species on the list are widespread and abundant. Fowler decided to give these species an average of 100 million each, adding another 2 billion. And then she noted the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates the spiny dogfish, despite its substantial depletion through fishing, has a global population of 1 billion.

“OK, I cheated quite a bit to get to a figure very close to 7 billion,” she wrote. “Total is highly dependent upon a few of the most abundant species, regardless of quality of estimates for the rarities and endemics.”

In other words, there is no precise way at this moment to calculate whether sharks outnumber humans, or vice versa. It will take research for years to come.

But details like that don’t bother Blumenauer, who considers Fowler’s answer a “stamp of approval” for his position: “I think there is a super shark specialist who acknowledges reality, and I’m running with it.” Sharks are the subjects of such intense myth, he reasons, it only makes sense that we’ve inflated their numbers out of proportion.

While it might not provide much comfort, sharks almost always attack humans by accident, rather than on purpose. The classic shark attack follows a pattern of “bite and spit”: the fish will take a bite out of a person to determine if it’s suitable prey, and more often than not it will then spit it out after the shark realizes human flesh is not its snack of choice. What bite it takes is critical, since sometimes a shark can deliver a devastating blow by severing an artery, while other times it may inflict a manageable flesh wound. When Deborah Franzman was swimming in the midst of sea lions off central California’s Avila Beach Pier in 2003, a shark bit into her leg and severed the femoral artery: while it released her after pulling her briefly below the water’s surface, she had bled to death by the time lifeguards reached her minutes later.

As any shark expert will tell you, seals and sea lions make far more attractive shark bait. The fat that seals contain in their outer coat accounts for half their body weight and has twice as many calories as muscle. Peter Klimley, who has studied sharks for three decades, says there’s a reason great whites bite into humans and abandon them.

“Sharks don’t eat humans. Humans are not nutritious enough. They are not worth the effort,” explains the UC Davis researcher. “Seals and sea lions, not people, are the Power Bars for the white shark.”
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In fact, great whites engage in a visible form of communication if two of them are targeting the same marine mammal, which Klimley has dubbed “the tail slap.” In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Klimley and his colleagues examined a series of predatory attacks off the Farallon Islands near San Francisco, which boast large numbers of juvenile elephant seals vulnerable to attack between September and November. In more than two dozen cases, one white shark lifted its caudal fin out of the water and then slammed it down, splashing water in the direction of another white: in most cases, the shark with the most aggressive tail slap ended up consuming the elephant seal. While some of Klimley’s peers mocked him at a 1993 scientific conference for offering this “tail slap” account of whites’ feeding behavior (some even made a drawing of two white sharks high-fiving each other), his hypothesis offers the best explanation for how great whites compete for food when they home in on the same object.
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Three species of shark are responsible for nearly two-thirds of shark attacks worldwide: bull, great white, and tiger sharks. Several factors help explain this: bull sharks have the highest level of testosterone of any animal on earth, and white sharks seek out marine mammals, prey that can be confused with a human on a surfboard when seen from underwater. While great whites only need to eat occasionally, they tend to do their hunting during the day because their retinas have a higher proportion of cone receptors, which are used for daytime vision, than rod segments, which are used at night.
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All three species seek out larger rather than smaller prey.

There are other factors that seem to heighten a swimmer’s chances of luring a shark, according to the International Shark Attack File compiled by George Burgess, who directs the Florida Program for Shark Research at the Florida Museum of Natural History: the vast majority of attacks involve people wearing black or blue swimwear, even though many divers refer to yellow fins as “yum-yum yellow” for their tendency to attract sharks. Swimming with dogs may also lure sharks to the scene, since the rapid beating of a dog’s heart, coupled with its quick movements, can mimic the signals of a fish in distress.

Certain parts of the world pose a greater risk of shark attacks than others, giving swimmers ample incentive to avoid them. While surfers tend to flock to Volusia County, Florida, for the great waves off New Smyrna Beach, they do so at their own peril, since the county has ranked number one in the world in shark bites for years. While the precise number varies from year to year, the sheer number of incidents—seventeen in 2007, and twenty-two in 2008—drives the overall trend in shark strikes worldwide. But since many of these amount to minor scrapes—blacktip and spinner sharks congregate in the area, and usually leave their victims with lacerations rather than major wounds—the surfers remain undeterred. “It’s far from being the most dangerous place in the water,” Burgess insists. For that you need white sharks congregating, whether it’s off California, South Africa, or Australia. Historically, half of all reported attacks take place in U.S. waters, with Australia and South Africa jockeying for second place.

As more people head to the beach and spend more time in the water, the total number of unprovoked shark attacks has increased. The 1990s were the worst decade in the twentieth century for such strikes, according to records, with a total of 470 attacks and 61 fatalities worldwide, and the first decade of the twenty-first century broke that record with 646 incidents and 47 fatalities. While the annual number of attacks dipped after reaching an all-time high of 79 in 2000, the sheer fact that the global population continued to increase and more people flocked to the water helped sustain an overall rise in clashes between humans and sharks. Still, fatal shark attacks worldwide dipped to their lowest level in twenty years in 2007, when just one swimmer in the South Pacific died from a heart attack. By contrast, four people died worldwide from shark bites in both 2005 and 2006, and seven suffered the same fate in 2004.

While
Time
magazine declared the “Summer of the Shark” in 2001, its pronouncement stemmed more from the shocking nature of the attacks than their actual human death toll. On July 6 that year an eight-year-old named Jessie Arbogast had his right arm and part of his right leg torn off by a bull shark while wading the shallow waters of Florida’s Gulf Islands National Seashore, prompting a flurry of media coverage. During Labor Day weekend two Americans lost their lives to sharks—Sergei Zaloukaev, who was attacked along with his companion Natalia Slobodskaya off Avon, North Carolina, and ten-year-old David Peltier, who was killed off Virginia Beach, Virginia. But the number of unprovoked shark attacks worldwide actually declined that year compared with the year before.

Put in a broader context, shark attacks fail to represent a serious threat to humans. Of all known shark species, only 6 percent are known to attack humans.
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According to Burgess, sharks kill between four and five people a year worldwide. To put that in context, you are more likely to die from lightning, a bee sting, or an elephant attack than from a shark’s bite. On average, more than forty times as many Americans seek hospital treatment for accidents involving Christmas tree ornaments than incidents involving sharks. Moreover, with recent medical advances, the chances of surviving an attack have risen dramatically, to 90 percent.

By contrast, the growing demand for shark fins—the most touted element in shark’s fin soup—has driven such intense shark hunting that even some of the people who have suffered from shark strikes are now lobbying for heightened shark conservation measures. Researchers estimate 73 million sharks are being caught and killed worldwide each year to supply the fin trade, and the act of finning—cutting off a shark’s fins and tossing the fish’s mutilated body back into the water—has sparked opposition worldwide. For years the United States required sharks brought ashore from the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico—but not the Pacific—have their fins attached, deferring to regional fishery management councils. But environmentalists (including those who have experienced shark attacks firsthand) launched an intense lobbying campaign to change the law. As one of its final acts, the 111th Congress required all sharks landed in U.S. waters (with the exception of small dogfish, a concession to win one senator’s vote) to have their fins attached.