Are Great White Sharks Scary?

I’d be a fool to say no. When the movie Jaws came out in the 1970’s, people started killing great white sharks because they were so scared of them. Never-mind the fact that all sharks are a natural part of the food web, and we need them for the health of our oceans.

So let’s talk a few shark attack facts: white sharks are human ‘biters’ not ‘eaters.’ They probably don’t like the way we taste, but they do love to eat seals and sea lions.

Let’s imagine we’re a surfer waiting for that wave of the day to come our way. We’re wearing a black wetsuit and laying on our surfboard in murky waters, having no idea something the size of half a school bus is hunting us from below—ok, this sounds terrifying—so let’s switch it up and pretend that we’re the shark instead.

We know what our favorite food can outmaneuver us, and so our best chance is a surprise surface attack! We swim below, scanning the surface for a delicious, chubby seal to eat. We see a big one just chilling on the surface. It’s our lucky day. We prepare for a vertical stun attack, picking up speed as we hit the surface, knocking our seal into the air and biting its leg as fast as we can, only to realize that instead of blubber, we have rubber in our jaws. Too late, we’ve already bitten the surfer’s leg. When we realize our mistake, we don’t eat the surfer, we swim away in search of a real seal.

Hopefully our surfer can get rescued before losing too much blood, but the damage was done. Keep in mind that we have a better chance of being struck by lightning or winning the lottery than getting attacked by a shark. And when you see drone footage of great white sharks in Malibu, California, they’re most likely as chill as the swimmers around them.

Now that we’ve had the chance to be a shark, are we attacking someone or are we really just hunting? When humans kill animals for food, we say we’re hunting. So if we look at a shark ‘attack’ in the same way, is it really even considered an attack or are they just hunting and bit a swimming land mammal by mistake?

What is the point of this blog? To keep us from swimming in the ocean? Definitely not! It’s to say that fear can evolve into a healthy respect. I think it’s an incredibly humbling fact to understand that in nature, we aren’t always at the top of the food web. It’s also important to point out that we’ve done a lot of evolving in our understanding of sharks since the days of the movie Jaws. I’m proud that we humans are doing a much better job respecting these creatures and our oceans. When a shark hunts, it’s no one’s fault.

With that said, sharks are great characters to have in adventure books because they are scary in real life. But it’s also good to know the real life facts about them so when we read how Laura Bentacour loves Goldie the Great White Shark because her rough scales shine with bits of gold as she bursts from the surface of the ocean to eat greedy sailors in her giant jaws, we know that in real life, this story idea is probably half-true at best.