From gods to monsters: how did we come to worry the shark? | Australian books

The most haunting of our imagined monsters stay hidden as they stalk us, hanging after we least suspect it, whereas we’re stress-free, or at play. The now-extinct megalodon roams the ocean unseen and unseeable, besides in our imaginations. And it typically surfaces in our consciousness after we are at relaxation or play by the seaside. The explanation that the good shark holds such a chilling grip on us should be sought within the very lengthy historical past of the interplay of sharks with individuals. Is there something extra spine-chilling than the considered being eaten alive?

There’s a contentious principle that our species went by an aquatic section throughout its evolution, in keeping with which the lengthy intervals our ancestors spent within the sea foraging for marine life account for our hairlessness, our thick layer of subcutaneous fats, and our talents to swim and maintain our breath. If the speculation is true, then maybe this primeval foray into the water has one thing to do with our deep worry of submerged predators.

Extra sure is the concept a minimum of 50,000 years in the past, individuals had been making heroic oceanic voyages, for instance, to succeed in Australia. In these days, effectively earlier than the widespread despoliation of the oceans, these first intrepid mariners should have crossed waters that usually roiled with sharks and their prey. Maybe they even misplaced the odd companion to snapping cartilaginous jaws. Regardless of the case, as quickly as our ancestors started plunging into the ocean to journey or to use it for meals, they uncovered themselves to the danger of encountering sharks.

Archaeological excavations have supplied some convincing proof that sharks have preyed on people for a lot of millennia. In 2021 researchers introduced the unearthing of the skeleton of a shark-attack sufferer in a Japanese cemetery that was nearly 3,000 years previous. The unlucky individual was most definitely a fisherman and his bones bore nearly 800 marks made by serrated enamel – most definitely from a tiger shark or a fantastic white. The marks included deep incisions, punctures, striations and cuts, and by mapping them on a three-dimensional mannequin, researchers had been in a position to inform that the sufferer was alive when attacked. One in all his palms was cleanly sawn off, probably the results of a determined try to interrupt free from the predator. And each legs had been severed from the torso within the assault, certainly one of which had been positioned the other way up on the corpse previous to its burial.

As ugly because the discover is, we’re lucky certainly to have such proof of a prehistoric shark assault, first as a result of buried shark-attack victims should certainly be within the minority, because the our bodies of many victims are by no means recovered, and second as a result of it’s uncommon even for a buried physique to stay intact for 3,000 years.

Over time, many human communities have struck a stability between worry and respect for sharks, and in a few of the most oceangoing cultures of the world, each people and sharks thrived. As a result of sharks play important roles in marine ecosystems, this stay and let stay affiliation facilitates wholesome, steady meals chains, which carry actual advantages to people in addition to to the surroundings.

Most of the communities that keep a respectful relationship with sharks have included the creatures into creation myths as ancestors or gods. In Māori mythology, Parata is the shark god who lives within the depths of the ocean. With every breath, he controls the oscillation of the tides. The Fijian shark god Dakuwaqa is the protector of fishermen, shielding them from the jaws of sharks and securing their security at sea. Sharks may be interested in canoes and might even swim forward of them in ways in which make it seem that they’re guiding the people within the vessel, and naturally, sharks know the place the very best fishing grounds are, all of which can have influenced Fijian beliefs.

In Hawaii it was believed that the ancestors may manifest within the type of a shark and that sharks would information canoes and herd fish into nets. In Solomon Islands, sharks steer the transition from the dwelling to the spirit world. There, our bodies of the useless are laid on reefs at low tide, to be eaten by sharks, permitting the spirits of the deceased to hitch the ancestors. On Anaa Atoll within the Tuamotu archipelago, warriors take the title of the oceanic whitetip shark, and in massive areas of Polynesia sharks that stay within the open ocean (a few of that are identified man-eaters) are seen as taboo and can’t be killed or eaten.

Following the adoption of Christianity in Oceania within the early 1800s, most of the beliefs defending sharks broke down and a few beforehand protected species had been intensively fished to the purpose that they vanished from the as soon as well-frequented waters. Solely in probably the most distant and uninhabited of locations, akin to Caroline Island in Kiribati, or the privately owned Clipperton Island, can the complete glory of sharks earlier than human looking decimated them now be appreciated. In a spectacle paying homage to the Pacific earlier than human exploitation, a whole lot of blacktipped reef sharks may be seen within the lagoon shallows there, whereas quite a few bigger sharks patrol offshore. All are so unafraid that they’ll chunk on the paddles of rowers making for the shore and even nip at their toes as they wade on to the seashore.

The oceanic whitetip is a deepwater species of shark that has been severely affected by the breakdown of pre-Christian taboos that protected it. It’s a slow-moving, slow-growing species with a low reproductive charge and because it was killed in growing numbers by newly minted Christians, it went into swift decline.

One favoured technique was to journey far out to sea and to make use of a goat as a lure. When the oceanic whitetips approached, the fishermen would lasso the sharks by the tail, one after the other, as they approached the bait.

As Europeans embarked upon the age of sail, voyaging to evermore distant elements of the globe, they encountered predatory sharks, in lots of circumstances for the primary time. Early English voyagers referred to them as sea-dogs, however finally the time period shark, derived from the Dutch phrase for scoundrel, was adopted. The spectacle of each a shark assault and a heroic rescue is eerily but superbly conveyed in a 1778 portray by John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark, held within the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork in Washington. It depicts a ghastly occasion that occurred within the 1740s, when 14-year-old orphan Brook Watson imprudently dived off a small boat he was engaged on within the Havana harbour, Cuba.

Inside view of a number of horrified onlookers, a panicked Watson was dragged underwater by an enormous shark that had latched on to his leg. He resurfaced as soon as, solely to be pulled below once more by the shark. A crew member lastly chased the shark away with a pole topped with a big hook. The creature left bearing Watson’s proper foot and onlookers had been in a position to rescue the lad. Amazingly, Watson lived to inform the story.

Australia is world-renowned for its shark assaults and whereas a variety of attention-grabbing assaults by nice whites have occurred lately, information of encounters with varied shark species return to the very first European explorations of the continent. Shark Bay in Western Australia is famend for its huge tiger sharks. Their highly effective jaws are in a position to crack the shell of a sea turtle with ease and the creatures have a fearsome status for consuming something they will get their jaws round, together with probably the most indigestible of rubbish. Their ferocity was made plain by François Péron, the zoologist on the Baudin expedition, who in 1801 wrote:

The jap facet of Fauré Island [in Shark Bay] is infested with sharks exceptional for his or her dimension and voracity. One in all these monsters nearly devoured Lefevre.

Such brazen assaults are extraordinarily uncommon at present, but they abound within the annals of early Australian exploration. It’s laborious to keep away from the conclusion that both massive sharks have turn into a lot rarer or extra cautious over time.

An period swiftly passing?

Sharks are far slower to breed than many bony fish.

Having few younger, they’re unable to replenish their populations as rapidly as people can decimate them. Tragically, the height of trophy looking that adopted within the subsequent century couldn’t have come at a worse time, coinciding with a dramatic discount in meals sources for the good white shark. Populations of seals and whales had crashed attributable to industrial-scale human looking and by the Seventies many beforehand plentiful seal and cetacean species had been on the point of extinction.

The psychology of trophy hunters displays the ethos of an period that’s, I hope, swiftly passing, one wherein people are seen as pitted towards nature, slightly than being a part of it. Maybe western society was misguidedly trying to find a motive to beat the scary beast, to take again the facility that sharks appear to have over us, a minimum of after we enter their realm. As an alternative of preserving carcasses in formaldehyde, the pressing want is to protect the final of the good dwelling predators, in order that stability and productiveness may be introduced again to ecosystems.