Shark Trouble Read Online Free

shark encounters, and shark attacks disappeared from the news.

3
    Sharks
    How Little We Know
    There are a great many sharks, and a great many kinds of sharks, in the sea, and very few—an infinitesimal, insignificant number—will ever have contact with a human being, let alone bother one … let alone
eat
one. As a general rule, being attacked by a shark is not something you should worry about—unless you’re a person who worries about being struck by lightning, attacked by Africanized killer bees, or murdered, all of which are more likely to happen to you than a shark attack.
    Still, there are actions you can take to reduce the odds even further—besides staying out of the water altogether—and there are even one or two things you can do to protect yourself if, God forbid, you ever
are
set upon by a shark. More about both later.
    Each of the following statements about sharks has been printed, reprinted, graven in stone, and guaranteed to be the final, unarguable, absolute truth. Of the three, which one, would you say, is true?
    1.  Of the 380 species of sharks known to science, fewer than a dozen pose any threat whatever to human beings.
    2.  Of the more than 400 species of sharks in the world, only 11 have ever been known to attack a human being.
    3.  Of the 450 species of sharks on record, only 3 qualify as man-eaters.
    Don’t bother to guess, for it’s a trick question. The answer is: none of the above. To begin with, nobody knows for certain how many species of sharks there are. Scientists can’t agree on how many different species have been discovered and catalogued. Some sharks go by different names in different countries. Australia’s gray nurse shark, for example, bears no resemblance to the nurse sharks of the Atlantic and the Caribbean. In some countries, some subspecies are identified as separate species. Most scientists believe that the Zambezi shark and the Lake Nicaragua shark are both bull sharks; a few disagree. Some experts insist that
Carcharodon megalodon,
the fifty-foot monster that roamed the seas thirty million years ago, is a direct ancestor of today’s great white shark; others insist just as vehemently that today’s makos are the true descendants of
C. megalodon
.
    Another reason for the lack of precision about numbers of sharks is that new sharks—new to man, that is—are still being discovered. In 1976 a behemoth virtually unknown to science, nearly fifteen feet long and weighing three quarters of a ton, was caught accidentally by a U.S. Navy ship off Hawaii. A plankton feeder and possessed of a disproportionately large mouth, it was dubbed megamouth. A dozen other specimens have since turned up, everywhere from Japan to Brazil, and in 1990 one was filmed swimming free, after it had been released from the net that had caught it off California. For all its size and heft, megamouth is slow-moving, curious, and not at all aggressive.
    More new species of sharks will probably appear as, little by little, we and our miraculous technology turn our focus toward the sea. At least I hope we will, for our record so far has been nothing short of disgraceful.
    We have seen less than 5 percent of our oceans; humans have actually visited less than 5 percent of
that
5 percent.
    As a comparison, a terrestrial equivalent of the way in which we have gone about studying the ocean would be if we dragged a butterfly net behind an airplane over the Grand Canyon at night and, based on what we collected, developed theses, hypotheses, and generalizations about life on earth.
    Despite the facts that nearly three quarters of our home planet is covered by seawater (of an average depth of two miles), that there are mountain ranges in the ocean higher than the Himalayas, that there is enough gold suspended in seawater to supply every man, woman, and child on earth with a pound of the stuff, and that the mineral, nutritional, and medicinal resources