‘Jaws’ is often credited as an inspiration for generations of marine biologists fascinated by sharks. The movie returns to theaters Labor Day weekend.
Researchers aboard OceanX vessel capture oceanic whitetip shark courtship
Scientists aboard OceanX Alucia research vessel capture video of oceanic whitetip shark courtship
OceanX
To close out a summer of celebration around the 50th anniversary of the iconic “Jaws,” the movie returns to theaters on Labor Day weekend. Its tale of how a great white shark terrorized a beach community led box offices for weeks in the summer of 1975.
The first-ever summer blockbuster, it became a cultural phenomenon. It’s also widely credited with inspiring generations of shark scientists who revolutionized what we know about sharks, and they continue to uncover new information about these once mysterious and misunderstood creatures.
“It’s rare that you meet somebody that got involved in shark biology who was not inspired by the movie. It doesn’t matter what age or generation,” said John Mandelman, chief scientist and vice president of the New England Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life.
Even though sometimes maligned for heightening fears about one of the ocean’s mightiest predators, “the ‘Jaws’ phenomenon has been far more positive for the outlook on sharks in the grand scheme,” Mandelman said. “It did elevate their plight and inspire many people, myself included, to get into this field.”
While sharks often surface in summer conversations given the hordes who visit the beach and the Discovery Channel’s annual Shark Week, they’re not just a seasonal phenomenon for shark biologists. They fuel a year-round passion among researchers who are sometimes mystified others don’t feel the same way.
“If someone said there was a velociraptor in Tennessee, thousands of people would come from all over the world,” said Gavin Naylor, a geneticist and professor who studies sharks at the University of Florida. “We’ve got animals in the ocean that are much older than velociraptors and we see them every day. “They’re so ancient and old they’ve been around since before there were flowering plants.”
“If you’re curious and attentive, the more you look, the more interesting they are,” said Naylor, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research at UF’s Florida Museum of Natural History. “It’s kind of frustrating that 90% of the world thinks they’re dangerous and less than .001% of the world thinks they’re really, really cool and that’s the nerds.”
New shark facts discovered all the time
When the movie was released in 1975, there were a lot of unanswered questions about sharks. Sharks are hard to study, Naylor said. “It’s hard to find them. They’re particularly large, and you have to take steps not to get injured.”
But there have been huge advances in the five decades since moviegoers first heard Roy Scheider utter the ad-libbed: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
New things are being discovered all the time, such as new species, as well as information about their genetics and reproduction and their migration patterns.
Scientists have identified 570 or so species of sharks still in existence, Mandelman said. If you include their close relatives, the rays and skates, there are more than 1,000 species around the world, many of which are imperiled.
Studies have shown that white sharks wander great distances, but females return to their home waters to reproduce.
Naylor is fascinated by the information that sharks don’t have many babies, but live a very long time, he said. Although it might seem like an animal with those traits might tend toward extinction, instead, sharks have been through two major extinction events, including the Permian (period), “when 90% of all life forms on Earth died. And the sharks made it through.”
Scientists are interested in how the animals navigated such changes in their environment.
“We think they’re super flexible,” Naylor said. “Just like you put on a parka or a rain coat, internally they’ve got all these special tricks to modify how they’re responding to the environmental changes.”
“They’re very resilient and we’d like to understand the architecture of that resilience,” Naylor said. “My primary passion is to understand how these animals have lasted a long time. They’re really unusual.”
Naylor recently co-authored a study about white sharks. They had been reduced to a single population somewhere in the southern Indo-Pacific Ocean, then began to genetically diverge about 7,000 years ago. Researchers have identified three distinct white shark populations, the one in the northern Atlantic, one in the northern Pacific and one in the southern hemisphere around Australia and South Africa.
“There are probably about 20,000 individuals globally,” Naylor said. “There are more fruit flies in any given city than there are great white sharks in the entire world.”
About those shark bites
Naylor often talks with people about shark bites, and whether they’re provoked or unprovoked, thanks to duties that include overseeing the International Shark Attack File at UF’s Museum of Natural History. They maintain a database that keeps track of and classifies all reported shark bites and fatalities.
Bites plummeted in 2024. So far this year, shark bites have been “about average,” Naylor said, with no unusual spikes or dips in bites around the world.
They have seen a small dip this year along a stretch of Florida beach often dubbed the “shark bite capital of the world,” he said. Bites are a little lower this year than average along the beach in Volusia County, which includes New Smyrna Beach and Daytona Beach, possibly because of a dredging project underway. He said the county’s shoreline averages 12 to 15 bites or nibbles a year and had seen only four as of late July.
Still more to do
When people hear the word sharks, they often think of the 20 or so species of big sharks, Mandelman said. “There are many, many others that need our focus and they don’t really show up on Shark Week.”
“It’s our job as shark biologists to illuminate the plight of the ones that don’t get as much attention,” he said. “We’ve come a long way, but there’s still more to do.”
“We’ve done a good job at educating the public that sharks have a difficult plate,” Mandelman said. “They have more to fear than we do. They should fear us a lot more than we fear them.”
Studies have found sharks and other ocean predators face increasing dangers from the world’s warming oceans and other activities such as mining.
Globally, overfishing remains a challenge, Mandelman said. Demand remains high for fins, meat and other parts of the animal whether it’s for sustenance, medicinal purposes or cultural purposes, and with that comes threats to their populations.
“From a conservation perspective, I think we’ve done a great job in the States and in some other parts of the world,” he said. In the U.S., for example there are more catch and release tournaments and fewer catch and kill tournaments. “But we still have a pretty massive problem out there as far as how to safeguard them.”
Dinah Voyles Pulver covers climate change, wildlife and the environment for USA TODAY, and was an extra in the movie “Jaws 3.” Reach her at dpulver@usatoday.com or @dinahvp on Bluesky or X or dinahvp.77 on Signal.
