Sharks: Friends or Foe

Individual Project 5

Marie Yuille

Eng. 126-39

Prof. Vanderlinde

September 19, 2011

Individual Project 5

It is a warm summer night at the beach. A group of teenagers enjoy a party and a bonfire. A boy meets a girl and she teases him into a moonlight swim. She strips off her clothes and heads into the dark water of the Atlantic Ocean. She waits for him. She feels a tug and realizes she is not alone. Queue the scary music. In 1975 Jaws changed American cinema. It was the first summer blockbuster. It made its director Steven Spielberg and it’s author Peter Benchley household names. This movie brought the great white shark into everyone’s living room. Too bad it also brought man to the great white shark.

In 1975 very little was known about great white sharks. People really didn’t think of them much at all. That all changed after the release of Jaws. Suddenly the great white shark was a monster and man eater to be feared. Hunting great whites became the answer. Today Jaws’ author Peter Benchley is an activist for great white sharks. Although it made him famous he regrets what Jaws did to the white shark. "I know now that the mythic monster I created was largely a fiction.”- Peter Benchley (Quotes and Poems.com, 2003-2011). Today we know the great white is more than a mindless man-eater. Great White sharks play an essential role in keeping the ocean's ecosystem balanced and healthy. The global community should enact policies to protect this apex marine predator.

The great white shark is widely distributed throughout temperate and sub-tropical regions in the northern and southern hemisphere. It is most frequently found off the coast of Southern Australia, South Africa, Northern California and the north eastern United States (Praxmayer, 2011). Great White sharks are large, rare and warm blooded apex marine predators. Globally, there has been a reported decline of between 60-95% in the last fifty years (Australian Government Department of the Environment,...