In all shark movies there is one kind of shark. Forty feet long, rows upon rows of teeth sticking out, a scary, mean looking smile on its face, usually with bloody jaws. The great white shark is the most feared kind of shark in the world, but it doesn’t live in most of the world’s oceans. They are mainly found in the Pacific Ocean. Although everyone knows of these “evil” sharks, very little is known about their lives. So what really makes these sharks stand out so much, and why are they so widely feared?
Great white sharks are portrayed a very specific way in movies, and a large amount of the fear around them comes from this depiction. Firstly, these sharks at the largest can be around 20 feet long and weigh up to 2,000 pounds, which is huge but not the fishing boat sized monster that movies make them out to be.
In order to learn more about these sharks, scientists have to be able to get close. While it may seem scary, great white sharks aren’t that aggressive. Professionals go shark diving with them safely all the time. For great white sharks there are three main signs that they are getting frustrated. The first is that they arch their back, so instead of being streamline and bullet shaped the part of their bodies where their dorsal fin is looks higher, and the tail and just before the snout are lower. The next is a raised snout. Great white sharks’ mouths are naturally shaped so when they are normally swimming along a bit of their teeth are showing. However, when they get aggravated this is way more pronounced, almost like when a dog pulls back its jaws to growl. Lastly, when they are seen repeatedly opening and closing their mouths. This last sign is called repetitive aerial, and is possibly the easiest one to see.
The last big way great white shark stories create so much fear is from cage diving. During cage dives they are almost always showing the aggressive signs above. Really though, this has nothing to do with the cage or the human inside. When the cage is lowered, chum is dropped into the water. Chum is the remnants of fish that are used as bait. This attracts the sharks as it smells like fish to them but really there is nothing solid there. However, the shark doesn’t know that, and to them the obvious place to expect the smell to be coming from is the cage. When they cannot get into the cage it aggravates them and they get more and more aggressive. Though cage diving can be a cool experience for people, it’s bad for the sharks involved. Attacking a metal structure over and over can often cause them injuries, as well as making them use the intense bursts of energy that help them catch food, when in the end they aren’t getting anything out of it. The energy used can be essential to them being able to survive, as hunting and attacking prey uses a ton of it, and wasting it, especially when they are attacking for a long time, can have extreme consequences in the long run.
Even though great white sharks are feared, they really aren’t that different from any other shark. They are thought of as the ultimate predator, but in reality, they are no stronger, scarier, or “meaner” than other sharks.