Are Sharks Really Out to Get You?

Photo: Aquavision

(Nat Geo Wild) Audiences cringed in terror as they watched the 1975 movie thriller Jaws, which depicted shark hunters’ desperate struggle to survive an encounter with a monstrous aquatic serial killer that was powerful enough to turn their fishing cruiser into splinters, and was relentless in its frenzied lust for human flesh.

The great white shark in the film wasn’t real—director Steven Spielberg utilized three different mechanical sharks to play the role—and at 25 feet in length and 2.7 tons, the fictitious man-eater dwarfed the biggest documented great whites ever caught. (The current unofficial record is held by a 17.9-foot-long, two-ton shark that was caught and released in 2009 by researchers at the Marine Conservation Science Institute.) Leonard Compagno, a South African-based shark researcher consulted by the filmmakers, later noted that the creature’s maniacal compulsion to stalk and kill humans was complete fiction. In reality, as Compagno told Smithsonian magazine in 2008, great whites “rarely bother people, and even more rarely attack them.” And while great whites have on occasion attacked fishing boats—here’s a video of a January 2011 incident in Australia, in which a 15-foot great white apparently chomps down on an outboard motor—there don’t seem to be any reports of one systematically ramming and demolishing a craft the size of the one depicted in the film. Read More...