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Summer time. Summer time. Sweet, sweet summer time. The days are long, hot, and sultry. It’s the perfect time for a swim in the soothing waters of the ocean.
Or is it?
I just finished watching the fantastic summer movie, “Jaws,” with my daughter. I have watched this movie a thousand times, and it’s high up on my list of best movies ever. It has a great hook: a monstrous shark terrorizes a small town. It masterfully mixes that with amazing character studies (the world-weary Martin Brody, who just wants to find peace away from the terrors of the city; the brilliant rich boy oceanographer, Matt Hooper; and the grizzled Quint, who survived the infamous USS Indianapolis disaster).
Released by Stephen Spielberg in 1975, the movie ushered in the era of summer blockbusters, even as it traumatized millions of people in the US and around the world; I for one, had years of being afraid to swim in the ocean because of the movie.
When “Jaws” came out, not many people knew about the Carcharodon carcharias, or in layman’s terms, the great white shark. After the monumental success of the movie (it became the first theatrical release to earn more than $100 million), people actually began going out and killing large sharks en masse. According to this 2015 BBC article, the director of Florida Program for Shark Research in Gainesville, George Burgess, “suggests the number of large sharks fell by 50% along the eastern seaboard of North America in the years following the release of Jaws.”
I could definitely understand the fear that drove those hunters. For me, the scene of the two drunk fishermen watching the pier they’re standing on be ripped out from under them, sail out to sea, and then slowly, and creakily, turn around to come back toward them scared me witless. That primal fear that the movie instilled in me was most certainly shared with the people that hunted these creatures down.
However, that same article notes that research has shown that great white sharks don’t actually target humans. And definitely not in the demonic and vengeful way that the shark does in the movie. The World Wildlife Fund shows that the status of the great white is listed as vulnerable, which is a status that the International Union for Conservation of Nature uses for animals with a high risk of going extinct in the wild.
Every summer, we seem to get news stories of ghastly shark attacks, making us all afraid to go into the ocean again. With TikTok videos documenting some of these, the fear factor rockets through the roof.
But this great Time article puts things into perspective. Even though the raw number of shark attacks seems to be rising, the total number is still pretty small, And that number in relation to the growing world population makes that number even smaller still. In 2022, there were 81 shark attacks globally, compared with a human population of around 8 billion, which is a miniscule percentage.
In fact, given that small number, I have a much larger chance of getting sick from fecal waste in Massachusetts waters than being attacked by a great white. Yes, you read that right. With all of the heavy rains that we’ve been having, more than 60 beaches in Massachusetts have been closed after “high levels of fecal bacteria were detected in the water.” Yuck!
Well, given the dirty dangers in the waters that are not sharks, I think I’ll stick to walking around the woods up in New Hampshire, and sitting in our cabin and reading good books.
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