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Jaws Reconsidered
‘Oh, the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear
And it shows them pearly white…
You know when that shark bites, with his teeth, babe
Scarlet billows start to spread…’
– Bobby Darin, ‘Mack the Knife’
One of the funniest satires I’ve ever read was a verbal interplay in ‘The News Huddlines’, a humour book by BBC radio host Roy Hudd. Written while Margaret ‘The Iron Lady’ Thatcher was steering Cool Britannia through the Cold War, the story centered on Thatcher’s declining popularity. In desperation, her spin doctors turn to an advertising agency (Saatchi & Saatchi, I think) for help in marketing the premier. The ad agency decides to put out a series of TV ‘spots’ with a look-alike acting as Thatcher and doing such things as swimming in a bikini. After exhaustive searching, a scout tells an executive that he finally found a dead ringer for the Iron Lady and shows him a video clip. ‘Get a load of that sinuous creature bobbing through the surf!’ exclaims the delighted exec. ‘The eyes, the teeth…It looks just like her…We’ll use it!’ The scout says that he’s relived because he had to go all the way to the Caribbean to find the look-alike and when he’s asked why, he says: ‘It’s the only place you’ll find that breed of shark.’
The shark has somehow earned itself a bad reputation among humans, as exemplified by such phrases as ‘loan shark’ and movies like ‘Without A Paddle’, ‘Thunderball’, ‘License to Kill’ and, of course, ‘Jaws’. But, Your Honour, I fear that my client, poor sharkie, is being misrepresented in the mass media. There may be a need to revise our opinion, to reconsider ‘Jaws’. But first, a brief history:
430 million years ago, you wouldn’t have recognized the earth if it bit you. Mammals, birds and reptiles were yet to appear. Even the now-extinct dinosaurs were yet to make their debut! There was no grass and the sun was far stronger than it is today.
It was the Age of Fishes.
Among these pre-historic ‘fishes’ was a sickle-mouthed predator that silently powered through the oceans (more turbulent than today’s), lakes and even some rivers. This was the shark. Hey, maybe we should ask old sharkie what the dinosaurs really looked like (colours and all). On second thoughts, I don’t think the sharks will be willing to talk about the dinosaurs – the fewer competitors the better. They were probably glad to see them go and, after what we have done to the planet, I doubt that they’d miss us if we disappeared. (The wasps, ants, spiders and dragonflies also saw the dinosaurs first-hand but they don’t sting-and-tell!)
So what have the sharks been doing all this time? Why haven’t they invented the computer? – Actually, they HAVE invented their own computers. Instead of the usual five senses (sight, smell, taste, hearing, touch), sharks have an additional sixth sense: electro-perception. This means that they can detect even minute electrical discharges given off by organisms in the water. If there are many swimmers, they can tell which ones are moving faster than others (You hear that, Hollywood scriptwriters? You don’t need to have a plume of blood oozing from your body to be “smelled” by the shark – if you move about, it’ll know). They also detect magnetic fields, which they use for navigation.
There are over 250 different species of shark and they differ greatly in shape, diet, size, color, fins, teeth, habitat, personality, method of reproduction, and other factors. According to ‘Great White Sharks’ by Richard Ellis and John E. McCosker, “There are angel sharks, goblin sharks, crocodile sharks, bramble sharks, monk sharks, carpet sharks, swell sharks, nurse sharks, silky sharks, cow sharks, bull sharks, basking sharks, frilled sharks, cat sharks, leopard sharks, dogfish, hammerheads, porbeagles, and wobbegongs, but the species that comes to mind when we think of attacks on us is the great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias.”
Some are small enough to add to your aquarium but others are larger than buses. The Great White Shark, the Tiger Shark and the Bull Shark are the most feared but it’s the rather rare Great White (star of the movie ‘Jaws’) that’s the most sensational. The Great White (the name on its passport would be “Carcharodon carcharias”) averages 12-16 feet in length, but can be much longer, and weighs in at 5,000 pounds. The largest on record weighed 3.2 tons (7,000 pounds) and measured 23 feet (a basketball hoop is 10 feet high). It has about 3,000 teeth at any given time and has many more waiting in line in case some should come loose or be damaged. A shark can grow and use 20,000 teeth in its lifetime.
The Great White is sometimes referred to as “the African Shark” although I don’t know why because they’ve been spotted all over the world – from the coastlines of California to those of China and southern Russia.
The Great White is perhaps best known for its unusual tendency to ‘breach’ (leap out of the water). This is highly unusual for sharks and is only observed in particular places, such as Seal Island, just off Cape Town. Tourists have been flooding there to see these ‘flying jaws’ for themselves. It could be that, after spotting seals on the surface of the water, these fast-moving predators come up so quickly that they end up out of the relatively shallow water. For the most part, however, Mr.Carcharodon carcharias cuts silently through ‘the deep’, like a torpedo, and covering phenomenal distances because he’s never been seen to stop for a rest. (Some shark species do ‘land’ on the ocean bed.)
There’s no reason to fear or hate sharks. Truth is that you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than eaten by a shark. They have no taste for human flesh and even the few ‘shark attacks’ that have headlined ‘Readers Digest’ and other magazines are believed to have been mis-identifications, a swimmer on his surfboard being mistaken for a seal or sea lion. A case in point is a (French?) photographer featured on ‘Ripleys’ Believe it or Not!’ who gets Great Whites to ‘pose’ for him by cutting up surfboards to slightly resemble seals and then throwing them into the water. Sooner or later, a 2-ton white missile emerges the water, leaving a parabola of teeth marks on the surfboard. This particular photographer probably has the world’s greatest pictures of breaching sharks. I downloaded quite a collection myself while researching this article but I’m now wondering what to do with them. Sure, I could use them to design a nice greeting card and send it to my only surviving grandmother but I don’t want to shock her into an early grave. As a poet, I could, I suppose, write a love poem and print it out with old sharkie in the background before sending it to my girlfriend but I suspect that something that resembles the publicity poster for ‘Jaws – The Revenge’ would hardly be deemed romantic.
In South Africa, only one ‘fatality’ has ever been recorded. (But you could have fooled the seals – THEY record very many ‘fatalities’). The worldwide estimate is about 10 human deaths per year.
If anything, it’s the sharks that have just cause for fear when humans are around. I watched with displeasure as a team of scientists studying breaching sharks decided do steer their yacht between a runaway seal that had survived the breach and was now being pursued by the shark’s triangular dorsal fin. After fishing out the panicked seal, the scientists said that they realized that the sharks also need to eat but when you see ‘a small guy’ being chased by a big one, you naturally root for the former. Yeah, yeah, yeah – we hear you – but on earth, life springs from death. I mean, how would you like a Hindu to drive his yacht between you and your hamburger because HE believes that cows are sacred? And besides, the seal already had a red crater on its side and would die anyway. The thing with shark teeth is that they’re so many and so sharp that even if the first bite doesn’t deliver the “coup de grace”, scarlet billows have to spread.
Unlike dolphins, Great Whites don’t flourish in captivity. They become disoriented and unhappy and eventually die by refusing to eat. Only one Great White is currently being raised in a tank and the researchers are watching it very closely for signs of depression. Maybe we should just live them alone. Maybe we should just live all wild animals alone.
About the Author
Alexander Nderitu is a Kenyan-born novelist, scriptwriter and Internet guru. He has also expressed interest in fashion design, music production and sports entertainment.
Jaws #3
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