Bright White Shark

A Biography of the Fish That Scared the World
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-83736-021-5
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 3230 Seiten

An adult great white is a big shark - really big. It has been responsible for more shark bites and human deaths than any other species, according to the International Shark Attack File. This is probably because it sees us as aberrant marine mammals flailing about in the water and certainly worth an exploratory bite - but a gentle mouthing from a two-tonne white shark, its jaws filled with row upon row of razor-sharp teeth, could result in a severe mauling for any victim unlucky enough to have attracted its attention. Though its danger was well known to ancient mariners, it was not until the mid-1970s that it came to occupy its current place in the popular imagination, when Jaws was unleashed on an unsuspecting public. The great white shark's reputation hit rock bottom in the wake of the Spielberg classic. But during the fifty years since the film's first release, public interest in the species has sparked a renaissance in research, producing remarkable new insights into the life of this extraordinary animal. Telling the story of the great white shark from the perspectives of history, psychology and biology, White Shark is nothing less than the biography of the world's most fascinating fish.

Michael Bright has written more than 135 books, ranging from the international bestseller Africa: Eye to Eye with the Unknown to award-winning children's books North Pole/South Pole and Above, Below and Long Ago. He was an executive producer with the BBC's world-renowned Natural History Unit before turning to writing and ghostwriting full time.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bright, Michael

Leseproben

Introduction

I magine a fish that can be the length of a large automobile and weigh almost as much, that possesses jaws which have the strongest bite force of any living animal and are lined with row upon row of teeth that are, in effect, serrated knives and pin-sharp forks, and you will start to form a picture in your mind of the world’s largest macropredatory shark – the infamous great white shark. Precise dimensions for the biggest individuals are hard to come by. There’s always something wrong with the measuring technique and estimates are often wide of the mark. Even so, reliable figures from accurate measurements indicate the largest living individuals could be close to 6.5 metres (21 feet) long, that’s four times as long as the average person is tall, and it’s quite possible there are even bigger ones.

Scientists are able to work out the size of a shark even when it’s swum away. They measure the size of the bite marks it’s left behind, and they’ve come up with some astonishing results. Off southern Australia, for instance, bite marks on whale carcasses indicate white sharks in the region of 8 metres (26 feet) long, and off New Zealand a fisherman compared the length of a white shark he encountered with that of his boat and came up with an estimated figure of close to 9 metres (30 feet) – a real giant!

These monster white sharks are generally mature females, males being considerably shorter, and it’s quite possible that they have lived to a ripe old age, more than seventy years old by some estimations, so they are not only the biggest predatory sharks, but possibly also among the oldest and wisest, adapted to an extraordinary degree to the watery environment in which they live.

To many people, this species is the ultimate hunter-killer. At various stages in its life, it hunts and kills quite different prey, adding more species to its diet as it gets older, including, sadly, people. It has been responsible for more shark bite incidents and human deaths than any other species, according to the International Shark Attack File of the University of Florida, probably because it sees us as aberrant marine mammals flailing about in the water and certainly worth an exploratory bite; but a gentle mouthing from a 2-tonne white shark could result in a bad mauling and severe damage to any victim who attracted its attention. Even so, if you consider how many of us pursue recreational pastimes in the sea – wading, swimming, surfing, paddleboarding, kayaking – the number of incidents is surprisingly few. If the shark actually saw us as food, there would be far more attacks and many more deaths, but the mythology associated with white sharks and humans remains, which means that people want to believe that it’s a monster and man-eater.

The problem is that, down the years, the shark has gained an unsavoury reputation. Even though this notoriety was well known to ancient mariners, to whom the shark was known quite bluntly as ‘man-eater’ and ‘white death’, it was not until the mid-1970s that the wider public became aware of this now famous fish. On 20 June 1975, at 464 cinema screens across North America, the phenomenon that was Jaws was unleashed on an unsuspecting public. On 25 July, the total number increased to 675, in what was the first ‘wide release’ of a film. Usually, films are ‘slow released’, drip fed into a few cinemas in order to build up interest, but Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg, went for broke, and it paid off, breaking box office records. It was the original ‘summer blockbuster’, so called because queues of people went around the block outside cinemas; previously films had tended not to be released at this time of year, when people were on holiday.

The launch built on the ‘monster’ nature of its principal non-human co-star. Billboards on the front of cinemas read ‘The Terrifying No. 1 Bestseller – Now a Terrifying Motion Picture’. The bestseller was Peter Benchley’s book of the same name published the year before, with 5.5 million copies sold in the USA alone by the time the film was released. White sharks didn’t stand a chance.

The white shark’s reputation after the Jaws phenomenon, of course, went to rock bottom, and the species suffered as a consequence. In California, for example, the film led to vendetta killings and great white shark tournaments (see also Chapter 12), and together with a commercial fishery, these almost completely wiped out the population of white sharks along the west coast of North America. A set of mounted white shark jaws became the ultimate shark angler’s trophy, selling for up to $50,000 apiece, and hundreds of white sharks died as a consequence; but during the past fifty years, since the film’s first release, the public interest in the shark, and even the fear of it, has sparked a renaissance in great white shark research. The film may have terrorised people, but it also galvanised a new generation of shark researchers. In recent years, the great white is the shark species that has probably received the most scientific attention of any, leading almost to a softening of its character. Scientists even give tagged individuals affectionate names, all the result of the remarkable things that are being revealed about its life.

In fact, down the centuries, the white shark has had many names. ‘Great white shark’ or ‘great white’, probably on account of its size and a pure white belly, are the most popular monikers among an English-speaking general public today, while just plain ‘white shark’ seems to be the preferred English common name used by shark scientists. In Australia, it is known as the ‘white pointer’ (see below). Elsewhere in the world people have their own names in their own languages: in Spain it is gran tiburón blanco or jaquetón blanco meaning ‘white jacket’; and in the Afrikaans language of South Africa it is called witdoodhai meaning ‘white death shark’. The shark also has its own unique scientific name, and it too has a history.

The discipline of taxonomy – the science of naming, describing and classifying living things – made a great leap forward when the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus introduced the binomial system of naming a species, for example Homo sapiens for modern humans. It was designed to enable scientists from all over the world to be able to talk about the same plant, animal or microbe and understand each other, rather than in the haphazard way it was done before using mainly common names that only locals understood.

In the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae, published in 1758, he described and classified the white shark, but it was not without its howlers. For starters, he grouped the shark with ‘amphibians’ and assigned it the scientific name Squalus carcharias, Squalus being the genus in which he placed all sharks, and carcharias used generally by the Greeks to describe either a ‘point’ or a ‘type of shark’. The word ‘point’ in translation led to the white shark’s common name in Australia being ‘white pointer’. As it happened, ‘carcharias’ became established as a favoured specific epithet, but the universally accepted binomial species name came much later.

Indeed, the white shark gained many scientific names down the years as scientists failed to agree – Squalus caninus (1765), Carcharias lamia (1810) and Carcharias vulgaris (1836) to name just a few; in fact, it wasn’t until 1838 that Sir Andrew Smith coined the genus name Carcharodon, from the Greek karcharodon, meaning ‘sharp and odious teeth’, a reference to the white shark’s rows of serrated, triangular teeth, and so eventually the white shark’s full species name became Carcharodon carcharias, the scientific name it possesses to this very day.

Although it’s the sole representative of its genus, the white shark is one of the mackerel sharks in the family Lamnidae, from the Greek word lamna, meaning ‘fish of prey’. Its closest living relatives are three others in the family – the longfin and shortfin mako sharks, the latter being the fastest shark in the ocean, along with the salmon shark and the porbeagle, two sharks that closely resemble each other and are superficially white shark lookalikes. These two live in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans respectively.

All these mackerel shark characters have a fusiform shape, rounded and tapering at both ends, and are powerfully built, hydrodynamically very efficient and very fast, the ocean’s apex predators. The caudal (tail) fin has the upper and lower lobes almost the same size, giving these sharks a crescent-shaped tail for high-speed swimming. One diagnostic feature is the keel or keels on the caudal peduncle, the narrow bit that joins the tail to the body. There is a single keel on either side of the caudal peduncle of the white shark, a feature that it shares with mako sharks, and which distinguishes...