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November 8, 2007

Siding With The Shark: Fuming On A Fish's Behalf

As a long time resident of the Monterey Bay and a marine enthusiast, I got really excited when I saw that the TODAY Show was doing a piece on an incident with a great white shark in Monterey Bay. It's always interesting when our area makes the news, but I was hoping for a fresh perspective.

Not necessarily that they'd ask difficult questions like: Surfer, what were you thinking swimming where half the great white shark attacks in the world occur? Didn't you read the signs? Anyone who lives around the bay already knows the answers to these questions. We all know how far some will go for the perfect wave. I'm cool with Monterey Bay surfers doing what they do - just don't blame the sharks for taking a nibble when these wave-catchers in their neoprene seal costumes hit the beaches.

White shark occurrences happen pretty often here. The Red Triangle (north of San Francisco to the Farallon Islands to south of Monterey) has the highest concentration of the great white shark in the world – and it happens to be endangered and an apex predator.

They're here for the good eating: the Northern Elephant Seal rookeries like Año Nuevo, various seal and sea lion colonies, not to mention fish and whales. In point of fact, nearly all Monterey's beaches have signs that warn against swimming.

The TODAY Show story, which could have been an exciting tale of survival as well as informative about the area it happened, fell way short. The surfer, Todd Endris, was cool. He told his story, about how he was surfing, got attacked by a white shark (called a monster in the write-up but frankly, 12-15 feet long is average in these waters), fought his way free, and was rescued by a pod of dolphins and his surfer buddy. It was the TODAY Show interviewer,Natalie Morales, who pushed for gruesome details.

While the gorey details were revealed, what did the TODAY Show do? They showed stock footage of the Monterey Bay Aquarium great white shark on exhibit. That is a juvenile great white in the Outer Bay Exhibit and Monterey Bay Aquarium proudly boasts the ONLY great white sharks successfully held in captivity. They did not identify the footage as being from this amazing and unique exhibit, only as a backdrop to the gruesome details of the incident.

It would have been so easy to turn this news item into something a bit more informative and a bit less sensational without detracting from the amazing story of survival being told. But the TODAY show chose not to.

Shame on them. Shark PR is already bad enough. They need more support, not less. Even the late Peter Benchley, author of Jaws, regretted how his work influenced people's view on sharks.

If there's one thing that his research in Australia and off the coast of South Africa taught him, it's that he could not write "Jaws" today.

"I could not posit the situation now that I posited then - sort of a rogue shark that came around and wouldn't go away because it had found a steady diet of human beings," Benchley said in an inter-view over a seafood lunch (crab, not shark).

Scientists have learned that much of the shark behavior they used to ascribe to aggression is simply curiosity.

"I attributed to them a kind of marauding monsterism that became what 'Jaws' was," he said. "Now we know that sharks do not attack boats. The way they decide what to eat is by biting it."

More At: Peter Benchley: Jaws Today

Posted by sorsha at November 8, 2007 10:49 AM