When the famous mechanical shark of Steven Spielberg, Bruce, first appeared on the screen in the summer of 1975, Chris Lowe thought it seemed fake.
Dr. Lowe, who is now leading the Shark Lab in California State Long Beach, was 11 that year. He grew up at Martha’s Vineyard, the island in Massachusetts where “Jaws” was filmed. He had the crew of Mr. Spielberg see his hometown transform into ‘Amity Island’. Some of his schoolmates served as extras; He saw the mechanical shark personally.
But in particular one of the characters of the film caught his attention: the marine biologist Matt Hooper, portrayed by Richard Dreyfuss. Dr. Lowe has credited Hooper because he first called his curiosity about shark scientists. “Hooper has been a bit interested in this idea that there are scientists who are paid to study sharks,” he said.
Dr. Lowe was not the only one.
“Jaws,” The most profitable film of his time threw a long shade over the reputation of sharks. During the seventies and ’80s, these ocean predators were charged as vorarous monsters and were drastically overfished. The only good shark was a dead shark, thinking went.
But the film also led an era of curiosity, research and shark sciences. It produced a generation or more researchers fascinated by these beings who remain largely unknown.
“I call it a blessing and a curse,” said Dr. Lowe.
Before “Jaws” premiered in 1975, the most shark research was carried out by the American navy. Much of it included experimenting and testing immersions to prevent shark attacks on sailors. Very little was known about sharks, and the research tried to understand why they attacked people.
Dave Ebert, a Shark scientist at San Jose State University, saw the film for the first time in 1975 as a high school student in California. It fed a passion to study sharks. The next decade was “a bit like the wild west” for Shark Science, he said. There were countless open questions: how many types of sharks exist? How far travel sharks? Do they migrate? Where do they breed? How old do they get?
“If you could think of something, it would be if:” Oh, go and have a look, “said Dr. Ebert. His academic adviser would have been a consultant on the mechanical shark of the film.
For Dr. Ebert brought the film sharks from the shade, where they were relatively investigated and were in the public light. Dr. Ebert specializes in finding the “lost kind” – elusive and rare sharks. He has discovered more than 50 species around the world.
Nowadays, biologists have identified more than 500 shark species. But nobody has been studied as closely as the species in the film: The Great White Shark. Research has contributed to expeling his reputation as a man-eating machine. The animal, Carcharodon Carcharias, turned out to be much more complex than initially thought. It can live up to 70 years and is migrating, and some are very specialized to bring down marine mammals. Biologists usually simply call it a white shark, who drops the “large” that a misplaced differentation has shown.
Greg SComal, a 63-year-old shark biologist for Massachusetts Marine Fisheries, had wanted to study white sharks since he first became a marine biologist. In the early 2000s, the seal populations around Cape COD were restored after years of excessive hunting. As the seals returned, white sharks followed.
Dr. SCOMAL and his team studied white sharks in the Atlantic by tagging individuals and following their movements. The researchers discovered that the predators migrated along the east coast of the United States and that some even entered the open ocean.
In 2018 a man was killed by a white shark of Cape Cod, the first fatality there since 1936. Verwildered by the attack, Dr. Skcal that he immediately juggled with the damn study of white sharks and the negative connotations that accompany these animals. “Just like Matt Hooper,” he said.
Many mysteries still surround white sharks, including questions about their reproductive biology, a subject that Dr. Lowe called the ‘holy grail’. Where couples white sharks? Where do they give birth?
“We can tell you where they are going,” said Dr. SComal. “But it’s really hard for us to tell you what they actually do.”
In 2018, scientists confirmed the existence of a white shark nursery in the New York Bight, near Long Island, based on data from sharks that they had tagged years earlier. “Who thought you could go a few miles directly outside the port of New York and find baby white sharks?” said Tobey Curtis, a shark scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Dr. Curtis, who works with more than 40 shark species, has credited the white shark because he was an entrance gate to the Shark Science. When he and his team are at sea to study the species, they often call quotes from ‘Jaws’.
“So, every shark who comes up, swims by the boat, we just say:” That’s a 20-footer, “even if it’s three feet long,” he said.
The film inspired many scientists, and it could be inspired by the Shark Science pioneers who came earlier. Don Nelson, the predecessor of Dr. Lowe and founder of the Shark Lab, was a leader of Shark Science when the film was released. At the time, Dr. Nelson tracking technology to study sharks on California State Long Beach.
Dr. Nelson was asked to advise on a Shark Facts poster used in the film, according to Mr. Spielberg’s production company.
If nothing else, scientists have been inspired by ‘Jaws’ contributed to the shifting of the fame that these ocean being gathered after the film premiered. Fifty years later, the attitude of people towards sharks have also changed.
“People look differently based on all the things we have learned about them,” said Dr. Lowe. “I think people respect them more.”
- Advertisement -
