Shark characteristics and behavior

SHARK ATTACK: REALISTIC FEARS or HYSTERIA?

Under the stillness of even the calmest of seas an age-old drama plays out. Countless times, a creature designed for locating, stalking, chasing, and then tearing into living flesh closes in on its doomed prey. Its efficient design, mouth filled with teeth meant to sink into its prey and never let go, and its swimming speed, agility, and intelligence all but ensure hunting success. After a brief chase, a shark catches up to its prey, its jaws clamp down tightly, and it is all over: just in the same way that the bottle nosed dolphin that humans adore captures another helpless herring in its mouth.

Dolphins, sharks, and most other aquatic creatures either hunt other species for food, or they are hunted themselves. As often as not, animal species are both hunters and hunted. Human beings tend to view sharks very differently from other aquatic species, based more on the fact that we sometimes end up on their menu. The idea of being food for another creature, according to the human mind set, creates our distinction between animals that are predatory hunters and those that are not. To a herring, the common dolphin is a dreaded predatory killer; to us it is a playful intelligent mammal that deserves our protection. Would we feel the same way about dolphins if there was no difference in their personality or character but instead they were the size of a whale who sometimes possibly mistakes human beings for tuna? Chances are we would fear dolphin attacks as much as we fear shark attacks and our characterization of dolphins would incorporate vocabulary like "ruthless," "deadly," and "cold-blooded" despite its mammalian nature.

Like dolphins, tuna, swordfish, and many other large predatory aquatic species sharks must locate and consume other creatures to survive. To guarantee their survival they have evolved over time physiologically and behaviorally to adapt to their environment and master the art of hunting. Unlike the other aquatic species, we fear attack from sharks disproportionately to the actual risk, simply due to the fact that some of them are large enough to mistake us for their prey under the right circumstances. "Our characterization of sharks as ruthless killers intent on consuming us reflects our emotional response to the concept of being eaten alive than reality" (Ellis, 1989).

Perceptions about the danger of shark attack are extremely susceptible to media publicity and their resulting hysteria. The Summer of 2001 had actually been dubbed the summer of the shark" after several attacks, mainly as a result of the publicity associated with one or two victims. Time Magazine, for example, had published a cover story under that heading with a menacing cover picture of a Great White shark. Had the significance of the issue not been eclipsed immediately by the terrorist attack on the World Trade

Center that September, it is more likely than not that the focus on shark attacks would have continued and grown further despite the fact that most experts disputed the claim that the incidence of shark attacks on humans had increased at all (Broad, 2001).

Much of the increased attention on shark attacks was probably linked to circumstantial coincidence in relation to the Fourth of July and Labor Day holidays, when attacks in Florida and North Carolina (respectively) made holiday weekend news headlines. Those attacks ensured continued attention on shark attacks, especially after all the (understandable) extra attention and sympathy associated with the July attack in Florida on an eight-year-old Mississippi girl whose arm required surgical reattachment after a Bull shark bit it off while she was vacationing in Florida (Broad, 2007).

Despite the fact that the supposed increase in attacks on humans was not supported statistically, attention and growing fears about the "rise" in shark attacks continued until eclipsed by the events of September 11, 2001. According to one

University of Florida biologist who runs the International Shark Attack File of the Florida

Museum of Natural History, the global numbers of shark attacks were actually decreasing, and not increasing at the time. Statistics from that institution indicated that in September of 2001, only 52 shark attacks had been reported compared to previous years in which 84 had been reported in 2000, 58 in 1999, and 54 in 1998. Since the yearly average for the entire decade of the 1990s was 54 shark attacks per year, several other years (especially 2000) merited much more attention strictly based on statistics than the so-called "summer of the shark" in 2001. (Broad, 2007).