In July, professional surfer Mick Fanning encountered a large shark in the final of the J-Bay Open in South Africa. First, a large fin appeared behind Fanning, followed by splashing and a “holy shit” from one of the commentators. As a wave lurched before Fanning, every person watching assumed he had been killed on live webcast. Luckily, his leg rope snapped and he escaped on a jet ski. Four camera angles had just caught the most documented shark attack in history.
Fanning was an overnight celebrity. He became the most googled name in the world, generating more hits than Obama. The media blew up with articles about the impressive pro surfer who fought off a shark on live TV. This went on for weeks.
Underneath all the talk about the incident, a vocal minority expressed their dismay. For conservationists and shark enthusiasts alike, the media had, once again, got it all wrong. The reporting of the incident was typically sensationalised, perpetuating a negative stereotype of sharks. Experts have said that the shark didn’t display particularly aggressive behaviour. It appears that while looking at Fanning, it became tangled in his leg rope, panicked and attempted to swim away, snapping his leash in the process.
As media coverage of the event amplified the world’s fear of sharks, a more pressing issue sat quietly unaddressed: shark conservation. Every time you inhale, on average, humans kill six sharks. Every time you exhale, another six are killed. They are endangered, and their portrayal in the media does nothing to help the cause. Sharks are simultaneously the most feared and misrepresented animal in the world’s oceans.
Shark attacks didn’t seem to be of interest to the world until the twentieth century. In the early 1900s, many believed shark attacks were a myth. However, this all changed drastically in New Jersey, USA, in the summer of 1916. Five attacks resulting in four deaths saw the man-eater label placed upon sharks.
The attacks corresponded with a moral shift in journalistic values, which sought to find and report on “shock stories”. New Jersey newspapers ran headlines such as “Whole of Jersey Coast Infested with Man-Eating Monsters”. The fear-mongering by newspapers prompted government calls to exterminate sharks.
The second event that truly cemented the stereotype was the release of the 1975 Hollywood blockbuster, Jaws. This film thrust sharks back into the public gaze, demonising them in the process. They lurked to hunt, kill and eat human prey. Jaws created public anxiety about entering the ocean, and the 1975 summer saw a large decline in American beach attendance.
About four people die each year in shark attacks. You’re more likely to be killed by a defunct toaster, a coconut falling from a tree, a dog attack, a vending machine … The most bizarre death you can imagine is probably more likely than death at the jaws of a shark. However, sharks are still the most feared creature on earth.
Sharks are one of the last great apex predators that poses a threat to people. Their attacks are primal and savage, they are unseen and unexpected, and they play on our fear of the unknown. When we enter the ocean, we are biologically unequipped to remain at the top of the food chain. Combine this with the thought of being ripped apart by a large toothy fish — you have something utterly terrifying. Maybe if sharks didn’t have that evil-looking toothy grimace as their default face, they wouldn’t be so feared.
An old axiom of “bad news sells” triumphs in the media’s problematic reporting of human-predator interactions. The idea that we can still be prey is fascinating. Whether it’s lions, sharks or hippos, the idea of being eaten alive is dreadfully intriguing. The public morbidly loves to hear that humans can still get killed in the wild.
The weight given to an issue by the media often determines how its audience will respond. When the media reports on the fear of sharks, audiences react accordingly. People love to hear about shark attacks, and the media happily feeds them the bad news.
The moral panic evoked by a cluster of shark attacks in a small period of time places pressure on governments. Sharks and shark attacks are poorly understood. The media goes to scientists to explain natural hazards. But for shark attacks, this isn’t possible. Instead, scientists argue that sharks are important creatures to ecological systems and that while they occasionally bite humans, they would rather avoid us altogether. Stories in the media assign criminal intent to “savage, killing sharks”, which induces panic and presents sharks as a problem that needs to be solved. Such language communicates the unspoken message that “killers” shouldn’t be allowed to run loose in any society and, instead, should be brought to justice.
Voters regularly punish governments for acts of God, and governments often feel pushed to act when hostile issues emerge. In the face of scientific uncertainty, the media presents believable solutions to the public. Overreactions are often met by drastic measures and government policy, which is known as “action bias”. These policies aim to ease the public’s fear of low-probability, high-consequence events.
Last year’s Western Australia shark cull is an example of action bias, in which the government was prompted to act on the public’s fears. Following seven fatal shark attacks on the Western Australian coastline between 2010 and 2013, the government implemented the highly controversial “serious threat” shark policy and placed 72 baited drum lines around popular beaches. The scheme sought to catch and kill great white, bull and tiger sharks, the three species considered responsible for 86 percent of recorded human fatalities. All sharks measuring over three metres that were hooked but still alive were shot and disposed of at sea.
Despite backlash by conservationists, the policy was exempted from national environmental laws protecting great white sharks. Many surfers, who had friends who had been killed, supported the policy. The cull fostered a discourse of “better safe than sorry”, especially due to scientific uncertainty.
Colin Barnett, who led the state government on the cull, dismissed opposition as “extreme” and “ludicrous”. He denied that the government was culling sharks, insisting instead that it was using a “targeted, localized, hazard mitigation strategy”. Queensland shark control manager Jeff Krause also spoke out against public opposition to the cull: “I understand that people say it’s the shark’s domain, but I also understand the senseless waste of human life and we have the capability to reduce that risk.”
Christopher Neff from the University of Sydney has argued that the Western Australia government used analogies from Jaws to frame shark attacks and prejudice policymaking. Neff writes that “the search for answers [following clusters of shark bites] can lead governments down many paths, including fictional films”. In a recent paper, he proposes this idea as “the Jaws effect”. He has identified three common narratives in public statements and policy documents.
The first narrative is the idea of a “rogue shark” — a shark that has developed a taste for human flesh and will intentionally prey on and attack humans. The villain in Jaws is a giant great white that willfully hunts and devours humans. Neff notes that “in this portrayal of the shark as an intentional enemy, the outcome is severe and requires intervention”. During the Western Australia summer of 2000, sharks tragically killed three people. Shortly after, a response plan was established that granted fisheries officers the authority to immediately attempt to kill a shark. The Jaws narrative of a “rogue shark” was evident in politicians’ statements leading up to the policy, even though there was no proof of a rogue shark.
The second Jaws narrative is that shark attacks are always fatal. Jaws effectively overwhelms and displaces scientific evidence. Only 18.9 percent of shark attacks are fatal. Despite this, the Western Australia government regularly portrays shark attacks as threatening the livelihoods of coastal communities.
The final, and perhaps most frightening, narrative described by Neff is that the shark must be killed to end its threat. Shark hunts have taken place in Mexico, Russia and Reunion Island following clusters of attacks. This narrative was obvious in Western Australia’s 2014 serious threat shark policy. The government asserted that sharks close to the coast were a threat and the best way to mitigate this threat was to hunt and kill them. Anyone who understands basic ecology knows that the apex or top predator is extremely important to the food web. This particular narrative is profoundly concerning as Neff points out that “this entertainment narrative overwhelmed and displaced alternative scientific narratives about shark behavior that discount the theory”.
So are Jaws narratives still used to guide shark management policy in Western Australia? Maybe not. The shark cull finished at the end of 2014, following public outcry, which thrust shark science and scientific recommendations back into the public domain.
The number of shark attacks is increasing. Since 1999, there has been a 310 percent increase in attacks on surfers. However, this increase is strongly correlated to population growth and the popularity of surfing and other ocean sports, not some kind of increase in sharks’ aggressiveness. Their behaviour isn’t changing, ours is. Considering the billions of hours humans spend in the water, the average of four shark attack deaths each year is very low. If sharks wanted to prey on humans, the number of recorded attacks each year would be far higher. Observations by NSW fisheries have revealed that bull sharks regularly swim close to hundreds of swimmers in Sydney Harbour and ignore them all.
Before Peter Benchley, author of Jaws, died in 2006, he remarked that “the shark in an updated Jaws could not be the villain; it would have to be written as the victim, for, worldwide, sharks are much more the oppressed than the oppressors”. Fishing practices such as finning threaten the existence of sharks. As apex predators, sharks balance oceanic eco-systems. Our fisheries would be jeopardised without them. Many Pacific cultures based deities on sharks — they had upmost respect for them and understood their importance. The way we talk about and manage sharks needs to change. So let’s look after our old mate, Brucey.