The great white shark is the ocean’s number one predator. But it really doesn’t like to eat people….
When the movie Jaws came out in 1975 it did two things: it made a lot of money and it sparked a nationwide fear of sharks. The film portrays the great white shark as a monstrous killer who snaps innocent swimmers from the surface of the sea for lunch. While it may be true that these sharks are expert hunters it is in fact extremely rare for them to attack a human. Statistically if you swim in the ocean the chances of a shark attacking you is a one in 11 million. Still, today people hunt the sharks out of fear and also for their fins which can be made into shark fin soup, a pricey delicacy in some Asian countries.
A Little Biology
The Great White Shark is an amazing looking animal. Its ferocious looking teeth, of which it has hundreds, and its enormous strength are meant for hunting seals, fish, and occasionally other sharks. It’s interesting to note that off of the coast of Gaansbai, South Africa, the site of the world’s largest year-round White Shark population, sharks frequently jump out of the water in an act known as “breaching,” propelling themselves up to ten feet into the air in pursuit of a seal, their favorite food. It’s an amazing and powerful thing to witness, especially when viewed up close in a boat.
White Sharks have been known to grow up to 22 feet in length with female sharks averaging slightly larger than males. They are generally solitary animals, preferring to travel alone rather than in a group like dolphins, and travel they do! White sharks routinely swim across entire oceans at profound depths and migrate down the coasts of whole continents. They can thrive in most waters, and are therefore found along almost all of the world’s coasts. Although we are not sure of why sharks migrate so much, it is thought that sharks meet in popular mating grounds, such as the Guadeloupe Islands off the coast of Mexico, to spawn semi-annually, and then travel to other places to hunt the rest of the year.
In Hollywood, the great white Shark is usually portrayed as a mindless killing machine. In fact, sharks are actually very smart and can distinguish between people and prey. On the rare occasions that a human being is attacked by a shark, the victim is usually a surfer. Some say this is simply a case where the surfboard has been mistaken by the shark for a seal; yet recent research suggests this is untrue. Scientists have recently suggested when sharks attack surfers it is more like a ‘taste test’ and once they get a bite they generally swim away as humans are simply not tasty to them. Either way the great majority of shark attacks are not fatal and sometimes do not create much more than a puncture room. In recent years the average number of fatalities due to sharks is about four. Compare that to the mosquito, which kills about a million people a year, and you get an idea of just how much people overestimate the danger of the great white shark.
A Magic Sense
Something that distinguishes sharks from other sea creatures is their “sixth sense”- receptors in their noses that can detect the electrical signals that prey give off in the water. This helps them to hunt in murky water and to locate their prey even when they can’t see it with their eyes. This area of the nose where the receptors are located is very sensitive, and urban myth has it that if you are attacked you should hit this area and the shark will back away.
Sharks also possess a quirk known as tonic immobility, which means that if they are flipped onto their backs, they will become docile, as if they were asleep or unconscious. There is one known instance of an orca whale flipping a white shark onto its back, inducing tonic immobility so that the shark could not fight back, and then eating it. This also signifies the single known instance of a white shark being predated by another marine animal and in fact the orca is the great white’s only natural predator. That said, thousands of sharks become prey every year to the second most dangerous animal in the world (right behind the mosquito)- the human being. We kill multitudes of sharks every year, either for their fins or for sport, or they are accidentally ensnared in our fishing nets and hooks. Sometimes they simply eat our ocean trash (of which there is a lot) and die.
The great white shark is not a monster but a beautiful giant of the sea. Sadly today, due to hunting, the animal is quite rare and is considered endangered. Conservation groups around the world need to work toward an international ban on the trade of shark fins and fishermen should reform their methods of fishing to exclude long-lining, the most perilous of fishing techniques to the shark. We cannot afford to lose this creature from the earth. Rather than hunted by man, it should to be protected by him.