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The
Truth About Sharks  Watching
this year's 20th anniversary of Shark Week on the Discovery Channel,
world-renowned marine biologist and shark researcher Samuel Gruber
was shocked to see every myth about the shark's violent nature
come to life on screen. Pandering the lowest common denominator,
the Discovery Channel's coverage of the majestic shark has failed
to educate the public on the shark's true nature and fallen prey
to the public's need to paint the sleek species as blood-thirsty,
brainless killers, he says. Here, he tells us way he fell in love
with sharks - and why we should, too.
"In this, the 20th anniversary of Discovery's Shark Week, I was asked to comment on the amazing changes I have witnessed in shark biology and natural history since I was a young graduate student in 1960 - and to highlight Discovery's role in those changes. So what you may ask have I seen? First and foremost, I have seen the "death-fish-from-hell" image of the shark magically transformed essentially by television documentaries to a crucial element in the fragile marine ecosystem - at once an aquatic "Crown of Creation" and ancient "Lord of Time." The latter is perhaps a more appropriate moniker for these magnificent animals but in the 1930s, great ichthyologists called them "Chinless Cowards" and even offered monetary rewards for anyone who could prove that a shark ever actually killed any human being! So our opinion is colored by an abundance of ridiculous myths from devil to angel and everything in between. There is a dichotomy of beliefs about sharks, depending on one's cultural background. It seems English-speaking or westernized cultures hate sharks. They have a natural tendency towards revulsion because of hundreds of years of negative propaganda, more recently emphasized by movies like Jaws, which portray sharks as horrible creatures that hold a grudge and would eat a human anytime one came into view. On the opposite side are the peoples of Oceania; Melanesians, Polynesians, Hawaiian Islanders and New Zealanders, like the Maori, who venerate the power and majesty of sharks. Perhaps the loveliest myth is that of the Polynesians who know and revere sharks as Aumakua or spirit master. According to anthropologists Margret Beckwith, the shark is considered by Hawaiians to be a powerful Aumakua, having the ability to ensure that its family is always well fed and will never drown. In stark contrast, the celebrated fish scientists JLB Smith - discoverer in 1938 of the most famous of all fish oddities, the Coelacanth, a true living fossil - proposed in the 1950s that maritime nations band together and wipe out all sharks. It seems that one of his South African acquaintances had gotten on the wrong side of Jaws and paid the price. Smith, highly influential in the world of fishes was looking for world-class revenge. When I read his proclamation a decade later, I thought how silly -- sharks are as numerous as grains of sand on a beach and could never be fished out. How wrong I was! Well, sharks aren't gods and they're not devils. As I said, I consider them true lords of time. They've survived multiple extinction episodes where most animals have disappeared. They've had the strength and adaptation to come back time and time again, and they've been around probably longer than most animals with backbones: half a billion years -- real survivors! But now the super-predator, man, threatens to undo the half billion-year reign of sharks. And the sad fact is that we're just killing them off to make soup out of their fins! As noted, "the only good shark is a dead shark" was the prevailing western view when I became obsessed with sharks in 1958 after a close encounter with a huge hammerhead while spear fishing off Miami's Fowey Rocks. Today, half a century later we see a view so completely different that one wonders how such shark myths became so fixed in our psyche. But I am getting ahead of myself. When I was a kid in Miami in the late 40s, I was what we called a water baby! I used to go down to the docks and look at every fish that was brought in. While the other kids were playing baseball, I was out there looking for sharks, fishes and walking the beaches for miles collecting sea shells. I taught myself SCUBA diving at age 12, and when I was a teenager, we used to sail out to the reefs on an 80' schooner and spend the weekend on the reef, feasting on the fish we speared. It was on one of these trips that I was menaced by a huge Hammerhead shark. This was the biggest shark I'd ever seen, and since I was spearing fish, there was blood in the water, which would suggest that I was in great danger. So I dove back into the cave with my speared grouper, as the shark swam by - but the experience instantly changed my career from pre-med to marine biology. In hindsight, I don't think the shark thought anything about it. I first got into researching sharks through fear and wonder from this experience, but the more I studied sharks, the more I realized how amazing these creatures were. For example, I showed during my doctoral studies that a lemon shark can learn a simple conditioned response much quicker than a cat or rabbit - and they can remember such tasks for over a year. Incredibly, they also had personalities and different "IQs;" some were left-handed and some were right-handed. Turns out that there are all kinds of advanced features about sharks that one just wouldn't expect. But if you looked at Discovery Channel's Shark Week today, you'd think they were just horrible death fish - killer fish that merely eat and breed. However, Discovery did not always pander to the lowest common denominator. When Shark Week first started up in 1986, we shark researchers thought this could be our salvation: We could get this man killer-thing turned around. Over the years Discovery has certainly produced gorgeous, educational and high quality films! In the 1990s they spent more time educating the public than frightening them. But these days, they seem to be hell-bent on returning to the bad old days of the only good shark is a dead shark. Shark Week is just making a mess by engendering the stupid and erroneous myths about sharks. I always tell my students that we need sharks more than they need us. Fishers say sharks compete with us by eating the same species we do. But in reality, what sharks actually keep the commercial fish stocks healthy and under control. What we do is indiscriminately kill them all, driving many species to the brink of extinction. The negative result of killing off hundreds of millions of sharks is no longer idle speculation. Ecosystems are not just a bunch of individual animals or species swimming around. There is tremendous interaction - almost like a weaving or tapestry in which everything is interconnected. Holding this ecological tapestry together are the top predators, controlling and modulating the animal communities below them. If you cut that "thread" of top predators, the whole system can simply unravel. It turns out that sharks do a good job of keeping things in order, so when you kill off those sharks, things become disorderly. This is not idle speculation: We already know that in certain places where sharks were killed off, the coral reefs have begun to deteriorate because for example the reef-eating parrot fish are not being controlled. A recent article in the prestigious journal Science demonstrated a direct connection between sharks and the disappearance of bay scallops. Other such studies are beginning to prove the importance of top predators, especially sharks in controlling marine ecosystems. Today, a much more enlightened view of sharks prevails as sharks have come under government protection. The negative image of Jaws has given way to protection for the feared great white, poster child for shark conservation; and an industry worth millions of dollars to just swim with this shark. Considering
the plight of sharks, it is this story that Discovery and Shark
Week should be focusing on not the worthless and uninformed
myths of the past. One can only hope that Discovery will return
to their role educating not titillating the viewing public." To
all of my friends and acquaintances!
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