Loved your JAWS piece — made me smile. At Boatshed, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” is on our shirts, our walls, everywhere. Ironic, of course. Thought you’d appreciate the overlap. Nice work!
I've dived with sharks many times, including diving at places where sharks are fed. I'm opposed to feeding the larger, more aggressive sharks, but I've watched reef sharks and grey nurses zoom in on fish-heads and that's no different from what they do when fishing-boats dump their by-catch. You can learn a lot from watching it up close.
Maybe Australians are used to lethal wildlife, but nationally we've had 186 reported incidents of shark attacks since 1990. Although there are around nine local species that attack unprovoked, only three are associated with fatal attacks here: bull sharks, tiger sharks, and great whites. Together they're responsible for nearly half all attacks, whether fatal or not. The global fatality rate from shark attack is around 16% and that's close to right for Australia too.
Australia has around 2.5 million recreational surfers, but only around 400,000 scuba-divers. Although attacks on surfers see most of the media reporting here, most reported attacks are actually on divers, including divers involved in spearfishing. [https://www.dhmjournal.com/index.php/journals?id=51]
That being so, I'm not even sure what 'accidental bite' means to a shark -- they'll bite opportunistically to see how it tastes and if they like it, they'll bite it some more. Since some species don't put people down after a single bite, we can assume that they're actively trying to eat you. There's some progressive language here toward calling an attack a 'negative encounter', but to me that looks like social management. Do mice have 'negative encounters' with cats, or are they just another prey species to an opportunistic hunter?
Perhaps we have a species blind spot here. We might be an apex predator *on* the water, but splashing around *in* or *under* it, not so much. Maybe that does our heads in.
Regarding the social impact of the movie Jaws in Australia, it resulted in a lot of bigger grey nurse sharks getting spearfished for trophies, and this promoted as a public safety service. And it resulted in adventure boats fishing for great whites just for the thrill of watching them biting. Stupid movie, stupid news media, stupid adventure industry.
But meanwhile, in an alternative reality, off the South Coast of New South Wales is an island called Montague/Barunguba Island where there are juvenile Australian fur-seals being raised by bachelors, there are little penguins in a rookery along with 15 other bird species, and in a trench off the island you can see dozens of grey nurse sharks resting during the day. You can dive or snorkel with any of these critters, and that happens most weekends.
I was going to say more, but Americans can be fragile sometimes and I try to avoid offending (especially when they're going Duty Free with their Bunker-Bustin' Bombs and me about to redo my roofing-tiles...)
But after your encouragement what I *also* wanted to say is...
I think we're kinda kidding ourselves about being some sort of Universal Apex Predator. We're more just tooled-up, wide-ranging omnivores, like Seagulls with Guns squabbling over fries, and deep down I think we know it.
*Real* apex predators are only apex within their chosen niche. Crocodiles are fearsome in rivers, but goats wouldn't be scared of one that got caught in a funicular railway and became stranded on a mountaintop. Lions are terrifying in the savanna, but if one were washing his mane in a river there'd be turtles coming out to have a look.
At sea, humans are only apex predators in their artificially-created niche of Bobbing Around in a Boat -- a niche that doesn't normally exist in nature because we invented it for ourselves ten thousand years ago. No other animal much respects it and why should they? With 100,000 commercial vessels globally and maybe ten million small boats, that couldn't be more than 300 square kilometres of total deck-space floating in 361 million square kilometres of ocean. Humans are the Apex Predators of a whole postage stamp in Lake Albert, Minnesota.
Meanwhile, nearly everything else happening in, on and under two-thirds of the planet's surface *isn't* happening while Bobbing Around in a Boat, so we have some selection bias here. Perhaps we've normalised it so much that it's confronting when Jaws author Peter Benchley tells us that actually, your six-figure marine-toy isn't really all that, and the fish are secretly laughing at you.
And maybe that's the real horror -- not the shark -- but how much we kid ourselves about our mastery of the ocean, and perhaps *Loose Cannon's* audience of cruising puffboat owners might realise this better than most.
"You're gonna need a bigger boat" said an awestruck Roy Schneider in Jaws. (Hear that, honey? It's not 'twofootitis' -- it's that damn *fish*.)
But... nope. Not even a four-foot bigger boat will help, Roy. Not even close.
In any case, *most* other animal species are prey species and they seem to cope with knowing they're prey species just fine. And it's not like the African forests were especially kind to our ancestors. Leopards aren't known for their taste in tofu, and perhaps our primal rage in *not* being the natural apex predator dates back to the original insult to our simian intelligence of being chomped on by what we realised even then was just an overgrown designer house-pet. Certainly, when chimpanzees gang up to kill a leopard, they really go to town on its body -- smashing it with sticks, throwing it around and bellowing Make Our Forests Great Again, and maybe that's why.
Which leads me to the side-point I wanted to make last post, but chickened out.
With 2.5 million surfers in Australia, almost 400,000 scuba-divers, plus around two million snorkelers on nearly 36,000km of coast, a few shark-attacks per year doesn't seem like a lot of predation to me, given how helpless we are when we're doing anything in the water other than Bobbing Around in a Boat. I'm not saying their attacks are accidental, but I've seen sharks zero in on fish offal from up close, and all I can say is that they much prefer whiting guts to us.
So maybe the occasional shark attack is like when there's a bowl of stale corn-chips on the kitchen counter and you know you shouldn't, but you just grab one as you pass by?
And look at what else we put up with, never saying boo. Australia sees around 200 fatalities per year in motorcycle-riding alone, while an estimated 3-5% of motorcycle injuries result in amputations. [https://plattalaw.com/how-common-are-amputations-after-a-motorcycle-crash/] I don't want to compare traumas between a bike crash and having your leg bitten off by a shark, but is public outrage for the latter really warranted?
Perhaps if the world were more like Australia, where we're well-practiced at being prey species to land animals, it might be more normal to help the injured person as much as possible, sympathise but ultimately clap the poor chap on the back and say Good Luck to You, Peggy Sue. Many sharkbite-victims in Australia are reported as having that attitude and many go back into the water. Galeophobia or not, Peter Benchley doesn't get it all his own way out here.
So could Americans deal with thinking of themselves as a middle-order marine prey species, lower in Galeomorphic Cuisine Preference than baby seals and fish-guts, but definitely ahead of discarded car-tyres? Or is this a long-standing tectonic fracture in the Columbian Zeitgeist and did Benchley read it right, half a century ago?
Jaws aired on local TV on its anniversary two nights ago. Afterwards I asked my wife her most memorable takeaway. Donna said it was the girl swimming and becoming Jaws first victum in the first few minutes of the film. Mine was when in the salon over drinks Quint told of his experience in the water after the Indianopolis was sunk. That scene was very impressionable.
Jaws aired on local TV on its anniversary two nights ago. Afterwards I asked my wife her most memorable takeaway. Donna was the girl swimming and getting bit in the first few minutes of the film. Mine was when Quint told of his experience in the water after the Indianopolis was sunk. That scene was very impressionable.
I think the same effect has been noted on the West Coast, where the surfers on a board look very much like a seal on the surface. And the great whites have come back.
But there is evidently a predator that the GW fear, which is coming back. The orcas, which bite the liver out of the GW. And they also like to chew on sailboat rudders, too. Maybe they will follow the GW, and learn how to gnaw on the rudders of Hobies, and shake loose the tasty bits on top...
The return of seals to Martha's Vineyard is noticeable compared to 15 or 20 years ago. And while I never worried much about sharks when swimming off of south beach in those days, the ready supply of seals in the water now induces a kind of whispery fear, a resurrected galeophobia first implanted in the summer of '75.
In the summer of 1975, I was a lifeguard in a State Park on a small lake in Vermont. As I sat in the chair, I observed that people were very reluctant to get above their ankles in the water.
They’d come up to me and ask me about sharks in the lake. Those asking could not be convinced by me that they were safe from sharks.
So on a beautiful sunny day I made a sign on a rectangle of cardboard, “Beach closed, Shark,” and placed it on the back of the lifeguard chair. No one asked any questions and NO ONE went in the water!
This ended when the Park Manager found us playing cribbage in the bathhouse. He told us to take down the sign and get back in the chair.
I never did go to see
“Jaws” that summer, despite the fact the mechanical shark was named Bruce.
Jaws aired on local TV on its anniversary two nights ago. Afterwards I asked my wife her most memorable takeaway. Donna said it was the girl swimming and becoming Jaws first victum in the first few minutes of the film. Mine was when in the salon over drinks Quint told of his experience in the water after the Indianopolis was sunk. That scene was very impressionable.
Hey Peter,
Loved your JAWS piece — made me smile. At Boatshed, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” is on our shirts, our walls, everywhere. Ironic, of course. Thought you’d appreciate the overlap. Nice work!
Neil
Thanks for covering this, Peter.
I've dived with sharks many times, including diving at places where sharks are fed. I'm opposed to feeding the larger, more aggressive sharks, but I've watched reef sharks and grey nurses zoom in on fish-heads and that's no different from what they do when fishing-boats dump their by-catch. You can learn a lot from watching it up close.
Maybe Australians are used to lethal wildlife, but nationally we've had 186 reported incidents of shark attacks since 1990. Although there are around nine local species that attack unprovoked, only three are associated with fatal attacks here: bull sharks, tiger sharks, and great whites. Together they're responsible for nearly half all attacks, whether fatal or not. The global fatality rate from shark attack is around 16% and that's close to right for Australia too.
Australia has around 2.5 million recreational surfers, but only around 400,000 scuba-divers. Although attacks on surfers see most of the media reporting here, most reported attacks are actually on divers, including divers involved in spearfishing. [https://www.dhmjournal.com/index.php/journals?id=51]
That being so, I'm not even sure what 'accidental bite' means to a shark -- they'll bite opportunistically to see how it tastes and if they like it, they'll bite it some more. Since some species don't put people down after a single bite, we can assume that they're actively trying to eat you. There's some progressive language here toward calling an attack a 'negative encounter', but to me that looks like social management. Do mice have 'negative encounters' with cats, or are they just another prey species to an opportunistic hunter?
Perhaps we have a species blind spot here. We might be an apex predator *on* the water, but splashing around *in* or *under* it, not so much. Maybe that does our heads in.
Regarding the social impact of the movie Jaws in Australia, it resulted in a lot of bigger grey nurse sharks getting spearfished for trophies, and this promoted as a public safety service. And it resulted in adventure boats fishing for great whites just for the thrill of watching them biting. Stupid movie, stupid news media, stupid adventure industry.
But meanwhile, in an alternative reality, off the South Coast of New South Wales is an island called Montague/Barunguba Island where there are juvenile Australian fur-seals being raised by bachelors, there are little penguins in a rookery along with 15 other bird species, and in a trench off the island you can see dozens of grey nurse sharks resting during the day. You can dive or snorkel with any of these critters, and that happens most weekends.
There are vast amounts for ordinary people to learn from watching these animals co-exist and I'm glad that they're all around. We can do much better than reducing our marine understanding to pop sensationalism. [https://www.visitnsw.com/destinations/south-coast/batemans-bay-and-eurobodalla/montague-island]
As usual, the comment is just as interesting as the story, if not more so.
Thanks Peter.
I was going to say more, but Americans can be fragile sometimes and I try to avoid offending (especially when they're going Duty Free with their Bunker-Bustin' Bombs and me about to redo my roofing-tiles...)
But after your encouragement what I *also* wanted to say is...
I think we're kinda kidding ourselves about being some sort of Universal Apex Predator. We're more just tooled-up, wide-ranging omnivores, like Seagulls with Guns squabbling over fries, and deep down I think we know it.
*Real* apex predators are only apex within their chosen niche. Crocodiles are fearsome in rivers, but goats wouldn't be scared of one that got caught in a funicular railway and became stranded on a mountaintop. Lions are terrifying in the savanna, but if one were washing his mane in a river there'd be turtles coming out to have a look.
At sea, humans are only apex predators in their artificially-created niche of Bobbing Around in a Boat -- a niche that doesn't normally exist in nature because we invented it for ourselves ten thousand years ago. No other animal much respects it and why should they? With 100,000 commercial vessels globally and maybe ten million small boats, that couldn't be more than 300 square kilometres of total deck-space floating in 361 million square kilometres of ocean. Humans are the Apex Predators of a whole postage stamp in Lake Albert, Minnesota.
Meanwhile, nearly everything else happening in, on and under two-thirds of the planet's surface *isn't* happening while Bobbing Around in a Boat, so we have some selection bias here. Perhaps we've normalised it so much that it's confronting when Jaws author Peter Benchley tells us that actually, your six-figure marine-toy isn't really all that, and the fish are secretly laughing at you.
And maybe that's the real horror -- not the shark -- but how much we kid ourselves about our mastery of the ocean, and perhaps *Loose Cannon's* audience of cruising puffboat owners might realise this better than most.
"You're gonna need a bigger boat" said an awestruck Roy Schneider in Jaws. (Hear that, honey? It's not 'twofootitis' -- it's that damn *fish*.)
But... nope. Not even a four-foot bigger boat will help, Roy. Not even close.
In any case, *most* other animal species are prey species and they seem to cope with knowing they're prey species just fine. And it's not like the African forests were especially kind to our ancestors. Leopards aren't known for their taste in tofu, and perhaps our primal rage in *not* being the natural apex predator dates back to the original insult to our simian intelligence of being chomped on by what we realised even then was just an overgrown designer house-pet. Certainly, when chimpanzees gang up to kill a leopard, they really go to town on its body -- smashing it with sticks, throwing it around and bellowing Make Our Forests Great Again, and maybe that's why.
Which leads me to the side-point I wanted to make last post, but chickened out.
With 2.5 million surfers in Australia, almost 400,000 scuba-divers, plus around two million snorkelers on nearly 36,000km of coast, a few shark-attacks per year doesn't seem like a lot of predation to me, given how helpless we are when we're doing anything in the water other than Bobbing Around in a Boat. I'm not saying their attacks are accidental, but I've seen sharks zero in on fish offal from up close, and all I can say is that they much prefer whiting guts to us.
So maybe the occasional shark attack is like when there's a bowl of stale corn-chips on the kitchen counter and you know you shouldn't, but you just grab one as you pass by?
And look at what else we put up with, never saying boo. Australia sees around 200 fatalities per year in motorcycle-riding alone, while an estimated 3-5% of motorcycle injuries result in amputations. [https://plattalaw.com/how-common-are-amputations-after-a-motorcycle-crash/] I don't want to compare traumas between a bike crash and having your leg bitten off by a shark, but is public outrage for the latter really warranted?
Perhaps if the world were more like Australia, where we're well-practiced at being prey species to land animals, it might be more normal to help the injured person as much as possible, sympathise but ultimately clap the poor chap on the back and say Good Luck to You, Peggy Sue. Many sharkbite-victims in Australia are reported as having that attitude and many go back into the water. Galeophobia or not, Peter Benchley doesn't get it all his own way out here.
So could Americans deal with thinking of themselves as a middle-order marine prey species, lower in Galeomorphic Cuisine Preference than baby seals and fish-guts, but definitely ahead of discarded car-tyres? Or is this a long-standing tectonic fracture in the Columbian Zeitgeist and did Benchley read it right, half a century ago?
Jaws aired on local TV on its anniversary two nights ago. Afterwards I asked my wife her most memorable takeaway. Donna said it was the girl swimming and becoming Jaws first victum in the first few minutes of the film. Mine was when in the salon over drinks Quint told of his experience in the water after the Indianopolis was sunk. That scene was very impressionable.
Good job Pete.
Jaws aired on local TV on its anniversary two nights ago. Afterwards I asked my wife her most memorable takeaway. Donna was the girl swimming and getting bit in the first few minutes of the film. Mine was when Quint told of his experience in the water after the Indianopolis was sunk. That scene was very impressionable.
Good job Pete.
I think the same effect has been noted on the West Coast, where the surfers on a board look very much like a seal on the surface. And the great whites have come back.
But there is evidently a predator that the GW fear, which is coming back. The orcas, which bite the liver out of the GW. And they also like to chew on sailboat rudders, too. Maybe they will follow the GW, and learn how to gnaw on the rudders of Hobies, and shake loose the tasty bits on top...
The return of seals to Martha's Vineyard is noticeable compared to 15 or 20 years ago. And while I never worried much about sharks when swimming off of south beach in those days, the ready supply of seals in the water now induces a kind of whispery fear, a resurrected galeophobia first implanted in the summer of '75.
In the summer of 1975, I was a lifeguard in a State Park on a small lake in Vermont. As I sat in the chair, I observed that people were very reluctant to get above their ankles in the water.
They’d come up to me and ask me about sharks in the lake. Those asking could not be convinced by me that they were safe from sharks.
So on a beautiful sunny day I made a sign on a rectangle of cardboard, “Beach closed, Shark,” and placed it on the back of the lifeguard chair. No one asked any questions and NO ONE went in the water!
This ended when the Park Manager found us playing cribbage in the bathhouse. He told us to take down the sign and get back in the chair.
I never did go to see
“Jaws” that summer, despite the fact the mechanical shark was named Bruce.
Jaws aired on local TV on its anniversary two nights ago. Afterwards I asked my wife her most memorable takeaway. Donna said it was the girl swimming and becoming Jaws first victum in the first few minutes of the film. Mine was when in the salon over drinks Quint told of his experience in the water after the Indianopolis was sunk. That scene was very impressionable.
Good job Pete.
I lived this tale from the Wareham/ Buzzard's Bay area in the '70s to the coast of Maine.