“Are there sharks here, Dad?” My son, cautious 12-year-old that he is, asks that question every time we visit an ocean. My answer is passed on from the family elders who passed it on to me: “If you see a fin, get out of the water. You’re in the shark’s house. This isn’t your house.”
He understands. After all, if the shark came into our house, our impulse–other than sheer amazement–would be to dine on the shark. We should expect nothing less from the shark when we invite ourselves into the shark’s house.
These days the shark is a media star again. Not since the movie “Jaws” became a national sensation in 1975 have we been so fascinated and frightened of the toothy creatures.
The media feeding frenzy began with an amazing Florida attack two days after the 4th of July in which a shark bit off an 8-year-old boy’s arm, which later was reattached by surgeons.
“Summer of the shark,” said a tooth-filled July 30 Time magazine cover. But worse shark news was yet to come. During the Labor Day weekend a shark killed a 10-year-old boy in Virginia Beach, Va. Another killed a young man off North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
What’s going on? Theories tend to fall into two distinct camps:
1. Shark attacks have not increased as much as the media frenzy has.
Statistics from the International Shark Attack File of the Florida Museum of Natural History, based at the University of Florida, indicate that your chances of getting bitten by a shark are less than those of being hit by lightning, injured with a power tool or bitten by an alligator.
George H. Burgess, a leading shark biologist there, insists this has not been “an exceptionally sharky year.” Shark attacks have increased, he reports, but the 52 shark attacks reported so far this year from around the world are far short of the record 84 reported last year or the 58 reported the year before that and, so far, ties the 54 reported for 1998.
Shark attacks have increased not because the sharks are more aggressive, but because there are more people in the vicinity of what actually has been a dwindling number of sharks.
2. Shark attacks have increased in the areas where people are most likely to recreate and it is Bill Clinton’s fault. Well, OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.
In a July article in the conservative National Review Online, researcher Sean Paige argues that government regulations in the early 1990s encouraged more sharks in recreational areas, particularly in Florida and the East Coast.
Paige, a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, notes that attacks rose sharply after the government began mandating deep reductions in the number of sharks that could be caught for sport or profit.
He argues, reasonably enough, that government should think twice before encouraging more sharks to live in areas where humans are enjoying themselves.
On the other side, experts like Sonja V. Fordham at the Ocean Conservancy, a not-for-profit Washington group that lobbied in favor of that legislation, notes, among other points, that sharks do not reproduce fast enough to back up Paige’s theory.
“Most of the sharks born in 1993 have not reproduced yet,” she said. One extreme example she offered, a people-eater called the dusky shark, doesn’t reproduce until it is 21 years old and may not have babies but once every three years. As a result, the highly sought dusky is a candidate for the endangered species list.
Who’s right? Talking to experts like Paige and Fordham reminds me of how much we have yet to learn about sharks. Nevertheless, we do have something to fear from our human tendency to act out of emotion in the absence of facts. Take, for example, Florida’s moves to ban the practice of commercial “shark feeding.”
In the glare of the summer’s anti-shark publicity, Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission banned operators of “interactive” shark dives from using bait to lure fish so tourists can swim around with them. The absence of any injuries reported by the four firms that offer the attraction has not been enough to stop critics. They charge that the practice might cause sharks to become too friendly toward people and draw them closer to shore. After the summer of the shark, it seems, no one wants to take any chances.
The summer of the shark is causing politicians across the country to take a new look at shark-protection measures. Before we roll back regulations that try to save sharks from extinction, we should go slowly. Judgments should be based on good science, not emotions. Peter Benchley, author of “Jaws,” tried to tell us in the 1970s that we didn’t know enough about those creatures. We still don’t. The ocean is still the shark’s house, not ours.
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