Summer 1975 was a glorious time to be young on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard. “We had the beaches to ourselves – nobody else wanted to go in the water, not even a lot of people who’d lived there all their lives,” recalls Chris Lowe. “I was 12, and my friends and I thought it was awesome.”
Why were these shores so empty? Because they’d just suffered a series of lethal attacks by a great white shark – albeit not a real one. On 20th June, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, in which the idyllic island body-doubled for the fictional Amity, had opened in American cinemas – and savaged sharks’ public image.
Jaws was a monster hit. Based on Peter Benchley’s 1974 bestseller, it was the first film to gross more than $100 million at the box office, spawning the summer blockbuster. Three sequels followed, as well as numerous knock-offs – in fact, a 2023 study of 638 ‘creature features’ found sharks were the most common antagonists.
The film’s impacts went far beyond moviemaking trends, though. As Lowe discovered, its ‘villain’ petrified audiences for decades, many heeding the tagline: “Don’t go in the water.”
“Jaws has had a pervasive and enduring influence on perceptions of sharks, especially great whites,” says Brianna Le Busque of the University of South Australia, a specialist in conservation psychology. By the standards of modern horror flicks, Jaws’ body count is relatively restrained: five (plus one dog). But there was another victim: the shark. Let’s call him Bruce – the unofficial monicker bestowed on the animatronic model by the film crew, in homage to Spielberg’s lawyer.
The legacy of Jaws
“The hunting of sharks increased significantly after Jaws, both formally and informally,” says Gabriella Hancock, associate professor at the Department of Psychology at California State University (CSU). “Amateur anglers purposefully targeted sharks, taking psychological comfort in killing them with the justification that the animals were ‘man-killers’.
“The number of shark-fishing and shark-killing tournaments also increased dramatically, especially on the US east coast.” It’s been estimated that the number of large sharks in the waters east of North America subsequently plummeted by half.
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Debunking shark behaviour
True, Bruce was a menace, to the production, at least. The mechanical model repeatedly malfunctioned, forcing Spielberg to rely on clever shark’s-eye-view shots to create the film’s potent sense of looming threat. Today, you can encounter the huge model at Los Angeles’ Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Bruce is well over 7m long – more than a metre bigger than any white shark reliably recorded. That, of course, is far from the only inaccuracy in the film.
Crucially, another is the idea of a ‘rogue shark’, dating back to a series of bites – four of which were fatal – in New Jersey in 1916, which scientists from the American Museum of Natural History attributed to one fish.
“That is simply not how sharks behave,” says David Shiffman, interdisciplinary marine conservation biologist and author of Why Sharks Matter. “They don’t stalk humans, and the idea of ‘rogue sharks’ that develop a taste for humans is pseudoscientific nonsense.”
Even Peter Benchley recognised that “there is no such thing as a rogue shark”, as his widow Wendy recalls (since Peter’s death in 2006, she has continued the marine conservation work they undertook together). “Peter had a library of research books about sharks,” she says. “Of course, there wasn’t much information about them in the 60s and 70s but, even so, he wrote the book understanding that the ‘rogue shark’ theory was not validated by science. After Jaws, we worked hard to get people to understand that this was fiction – not a documentary.”
On average, 63 people are bitten by sharks worldwide annually, of whom five or six die. “More people are bitten by other people in New York City each year than are bitten by sharks in the whole world,” says Shiffman. “Every once in a while a person is hurt by a shark, and I don’t want to downplay that. But it’s extremely rare that someone is killed.”
Jaws thrust these predators into public consciousness. Before then, “A few historical newspaper articles described sharks as ‘monsters’ and ‘man-eaters’,” says Le Busque. “But it seems most people either didn’t think about sharks at all or were indifferent.”
“I think a key to Jaws’ success was that we knew so little about white sharks,” adds Chris Lowe, now director of the Shark Lab at California State University. “Not least because their populations had been vastly reduced – through fishing but also from loss of prey due to the hunting of marine mammals.”
The ‘Jaws effect’
Rates of ‘galeophobia’ – a fear of sharks – soared, and remain high. A 2017 survey by Bite-Back Shark & Marine Conservation found that 64 per cent of British people would prefer sharks simply didn’t exist. Similarly, a 2015 study revealed that more than half of Americans are terrified of sharks, with 38 per cent scared to swim in the ocean as a result.
Of course, making people frightened of dangerous creatures is nothing new. “Back in prehistoric days, when hunters experienced a new predator, they would come back and tell stories about it around the fire,” says Lowe. “They were relaying information – and the scarier they made it, the better people listened. That’s why people love horror films. Neurologically, it has a purpose: your brain gives you a little shot of dopamine when you hear a scary story, because we’re one of the few animals that can learn about a threat by hearing about it from someone else.”
It’s a theme explored by sociobiologist EO Wilson. “We are not afraid of predators, we’re transfixed by them, prone to weave stories and chatter endlessly about them,” he said, “because fascination creates preparedness, and preparedness, survival. In a deeply tribal way, we love our monsters.”
However, this can have negative impacts for nature. “People often make important decisions about shark conservation based on perceived rather than actual risk,” says Hancock. “And that is often based on fictional accounts of sharks and/or biased media coverage, because reports are disproportionately about negative occurrences such as shark-bite events.”
“Discussing what he dubbed the ‘Jaws effect’, social scientist Chris Pepin-Neff reported that animal species that are feared, disliked or deemed disgusting receive less conservation support,” adds Le Busque. And they need conserving.
Sharks under threat
Sharks are intensively fished for meat and other products around the world – for example, for shark-fin soup, served as an expensive delicacy, particularly in China, Taiwan and parts of south-east Asia. Since 2012, Bite-Back campaigning has led to 40 UK restaurants taking the controversial dish off menus and a UK ban on the import of shark fins, but threats remain. These include bycatch in bottom-trawling and purse-seine netting, and by ‘ghost nets’ and lines.
A 2012 study estimated annual shark mortality at around 100 million, while research published in Nature found that the global abundance of oceanic sharks and rays has declined by 71 per cent since 1970. More than a third of shark and ray species are now threatened with extinction.
As for white sharks, estimating the global population of such a wide-ranging pelagic species is challenging. The IUCN classes white sharks as Vulnerable, with numbers falling. By some estimates, fewer than 3,500 survive worldwide, though numbers are increasing in some waters, such as the western Atlantic and north-eastern Pacific.
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Why does this matter? Well, sharks have patrolled the oceans for at least 400 million years, helping maintain ecosystems, recycling and redistributing nutrients and even helping moderate climate change. “Sharks help keep the food web in balance in oceans and coasts – a food web on which billions of humans rely for food and jobs,” observes Shiffman. “When you lose top predators, the whole food web can unravel in ways that are very difficult to predict but are often quite bad.”
Rise of shark study
Jaws did have some positive outcomes. “One of the wonderful things that happened right after Jaws was that thousands of letters came in from people all over the world, telling us how fascinated they were with sharks and how much Jaws made them want to be [oceanographer] Matt Hooper,” says Wendy Benchley.
“Jaws was the first time a scientist was the lead hero in a movie, and the first time that a marine biologist was on the big screen at all,” says Shiffman. “Many scientists cite Hooper as the reason why they wanted to go into this field.”
Their research is revealing new insights into these species – in part because of fears of white sharks. “Over the past 20 years, technology available to shark researchers has just exploded,” says Lowe. “But it’s expensive, so we’re always fighting to get money. White sharks are among the best-studied species: people want to learn about them because they can cause injury.”
Sharks in the headlines
Unfortunately, sharks continue to suffer from an image problem. “Of all films depicting sharks across various genres, 96 per cent overtly portrayed shark-human interactions as threatening,” says Le Busque. And other media depictions often reflect these attitudes. “Language used when discussing sharks is noticeably different from that used when referring to other species. In news coverage of shark bites, these animals are often described as monsters, and wording suggests that they intentionally hurt people, whereas reports of other animal ‘attacks’ often paint them as accidents.”
“If, for example, a newspaper publishes a drone photograph of a paddleboarder with a basking shark cruising nearby, the headline will likely read, ‘Enormous shark prowls, terrifies or encircles paddler,’” says Graham Buckingham, founder of Bite-Back, which has produced guidelines for media covering sharks.
Is there hope for Bruce?
How can we remedy this bias? A study by Shark Lab and CSU researchers found that encountering a shark in the wild significantly increases tolerance and support for conservation.
“I wish everybody could enjoy the thrill of being in a cage as a couple of female great whites swim by,” says Wendy Benchley. “I’d hope that the experience of seeing them up close would then transfer to the general population, and that they would understand the ecological importance of this apex predator. Because we need hundreds of millions more sharks in order to ensure the long-term health and proper balance of our global oceans.”
Rehabilitating Bruce is far from impossible. Just look at the reputational turnaround of other large marine creatures. “If you asked people in a coastal town in the UK or New England 150 years ago about whales, they’d call them demonic animals that kill people,” says Lowe. “The reason they were feared was because nobody saw them there – they were already hunted out from inshore waters. Those who went out to sea to hunt them, often on small boats, would sometimes die as the whales tried to defend themselves. So sailors would tell horrible stories.
“By the 1970s, whale populations had plummeted and only factory ships were used, so nobody died hunting them. Then people learned that these are intelligent animals, with language and family structures. Suddenly whales had a total PR makeover, and attitudes turned upside-down. The same could happen for sharks.”
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Main image: Roy Schneider (as Brody) in Jaws. Credit: Getty