CHARLES WOOLEY
Shark horror stories have hit the front pages just in time for summer. But who are the real apex predators?
L ast week, national daily newspaper The Australian celebrated summer’s arrival with a front-page shark story. ‘Town at breaking point over shark fears’. Yes, it’s that time of year again. Beneath the headline was a bloke in a seal-coloured wetsuit standing in the foaming surf.
He had a surfboard under his arm and a mullet (the haircut, not the fish). He was looking landward, as if in doubt about the wisdom of venturing into the water. With good reason, perhaps, as Mitch was in the shallows of the Southern Ocean near Esperance, WA, at the very spot where a 17-year-old girl was killed in a shark attack in full view of her horrified parents and family in April. “Someone else is going to die,” Mitch warned. “Maybe a little kid or a pregnant lady.”
It would be callous, though 100-per-cent accurate, to observe that those hypothetical deaths might occur only if people go in the sea. A shark won’t get them on the golf course, the tennis court or even on the beach. In that sense, being killed by a white pointer is as much a lifestyle choice as falling off a mountain or perishing on a remote wilderness trail. But the facts suggest that going in the water doesn’t greatly increase your chances of being killed by a shark any more than buying a TattsLotto ticket much increases your chance of becoming rich.
Among the millions of Australians who will immerse themselves in the sea this summer, on average a shark will get only three of us. Meanwhile, about 270 people will drown, about 180 of them in the ocean. But all of this pales against the dangers of driving to the beach. Last year, 1300 Australians were killed in cars. Then there are the adverse reactions to bee stings, which kill more Australians than sharks, snakes and crocodiles combined, and most bee stings are incurred without even leaving home.
I could go on and alarm you about the number of people who choke to death in restaurants or who die falling off their own roof, but the point to be made is that life has its hazards and the poor old shark is about the least of them. That’s a view I might revise if a shark grabbed me by the leg, but that’s not going to happen unless sharks come ashore or move into Bronte Lagoon. Would I still wade waist deep in pursuit of trout in Tasmanian lakes inhabited by man-eating predators? Probably, but not being the apex predator would certainly concentrate the mind.
Not every country keeps statistics as assiduously as Australia so global figures must be a guesstimate. But scientists generally agree that while sharks might not kill more than 10 humans a year, humans are killing 20 million to 30 million sharks every year. So the argument that we should pursue and punish the local population of sharks every time a human is attacked has always seemed to me a bit flaky (if I might use that term here).
I’ve done my share of shark yarns and never met an expert who thought that a shark attack on a human was anything other than a mistake. A surfer in a wetsuit might easily be mistaken for a seal and, when lying on a board with flapping arms and legs, might also be mistaken for a turtle. Seals and turtles are, after all, what sharks eat, not human beings.
Sharks have always sold newspapers and lifted television ratings. Editors have always loved a shark yarn. The tabloid animal is up there with the funnel-web spider and the crocodile, and no amount of statistics or actuarial calculations is going to dilute our morbid fascination.
No one in the modern era did more to enshrine the shark as the ultimate marine terrorist than Peter Benchley, who wrote the 1974 novel Jaws. It was about a malevolent man-eating great white shark terrorising an American seaside town. The following year, an unknown 27-year-old Steven Spielberg directed the movie of the same name, and it’s fair to say we have never recovered from it. Nor has the shark.
In 1974, sharks killed only three Americans. Clearly Jaws was just an imagined novel, a rattling good yarn, but in the 400-million-year evolution of the shark, it was the darkest chapter because human beings now ruled the roost and, after Jaws, the shark was as popular as small pox, and less defendable.
Benchley recanted and later in life became an environmental advocate for the shark’s place in the ecology of the sea. He came to wish he had never written the book. “The shark in an updated version could not be the villain,” he wrote. “Knowing what I now know, I could never write that book today.
“Sharks don’t target human beings and they certainly don’t hold grudges.”
The shark’s brain is not hardwired to hold grudges. What a pity we can’t say that about the human brain.