Scared of sharks

[ScubaTwo]

Michelle,

I realize that some of the folks are having a little good natured tease about the subject.

I would like to complement you on (1) recognizing the problem, and (2) dealing with it in an adult manner.

Sharks are to be respected. They are animals in the wild, and we are out there with them.

By the same token, if sharks acted as Hollywood depicts them, I and many others would not be writing to you.

I have been in the Galapagos, with a top cover of Hammerheads swirling around so thick they blocked much of the light at times. This while being down on the rocks with Galapagos (Bull) sharks swirling around us. I am not exaggerating in the slightest.

The Hammerheads paid us no attention at all, and the Galapagos sharks came in to investigate, found that we were not very interesting, and went about their business.

Another time, I was diving in Belize with a friend, and we were snorkelling beside the boat in the shallows while off-gassing between dives. The boat crew was feeding the sting-rays, and we were watching them eat.

Suddenly, I realized that it was indeed possible to shout clearly through a snorkel. An eight-foot Gray Reef shark had cruised by her, gently nosed the stingrays out of the way, and was snacking on the bait. She said, very loudly and clearly: "Holy (bad word)!"

We continued to watch as the shark and the rays had a great lunch! It was indeed a great experience!

I do not mean to make light of the subject. Again, they are to be respected. But they are beautiful creatures, and I hope that some day you will find an appreciation for them.

Sincerely,

Rob Davie

Thank you for taking the original post serious and trying to help. I also have an unwarrented fear of sharks. It causes some anxiety on dives so its nice to hear of your experiences. I have never thought of sharks as being "mean". But it is their world we visit. It would seem Im much more afraid of them when Im on land. All the hype and stuff. Once underwater I dont think about it. I dunno. Mabe you have some good sites on sharks and shark behavior you could share with us scardy cats? To help us understand.

 

[BigJetDriver]

Thank you for taking the original post serious and trying to help. I also have an unwarrented fear of sharks. It causes some anxiety on dives so its nice to hear of your experiences. I have never thought of sharks as being "mean". But it is their world we visit. It would seem Im much more afraid of them when Im on land. All the hype and stuff. Once underwater I dont think about it. I dunno. Mabe you have some good sites on sharks and shark behavior you could share with us scardy cats? To help us understand.

Scuba Two,

You are most welcome! I only wish that I had the sources of information that are so freely available now when I first started diving.

I do not know your current level of knowledge, so I will suggest several things. Here is a basic site giving a brief overview of shark facts.

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/sharks/

Now if that is too basic, try:

http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/Sharks/sharks.htm

And finally, you noticed in my post that I was in the Galapagos Islands. The reason I was there was to help with a Whale Shark research project for Dr. Alex Antoniou of Rutgers University.

Here: http://www.sharks.org/main_menu.html

Dr. Antoniou, and the research done in the Galapagos and other areas, is helping people to understand that the shark is NOT the demonic eating-machine that Hollywood portrays it as. They are endlessly fascinating animals, and are very necessary in the eco-system of the sea.

I can guarantee that the first time you see a Whale Shark glide by and wonder how such a giant creature can be so gentle (--they are plankton eaters with no teeth--), you will fall in love with them!

They are wild creatures, and to be respected, but from a diver's stand-point, we are more interested in them, than they are in us.

Rob Davie

 

[MSilvia]

But as for the arching the back and lifting the pectorial fins, is it really that obvious?
I don't know if I would quickly recognize an agressive behavior, unless it was bitting me, or someone else.

It's as obvious as it is for any other animal IMHO. If you see a dog walking through a yard, you get a very different impression than you do from a dog that's snarling and has it's hair bristled. In the same way, if a shark looks like it's out for a leisurely swim, it gives a very different impression from a shark that's quickly darting around, making tight turns, bumping against you, arching it's back, or dropping it's fins.

You'd rarely run into a situation where it would be hard to tell a shark was getting aggressive.

 

[doole]

It's as obvious as it is for any other animal IMHO. If you see a dog walking through a yard, you get a very different impression than you do from a dog that's snarling and has it's hair bristled. In the same way, if a shark looks like it's out for a leisurely swim, it gives a very different impression from a shark that's quickly darting around, making tight turns, bumping against you, arching it's back, or dropping it's fins.

You'd rarely run into a situation where it would be hard to tell a shark was getting aggressive.

IMO this is an excellent point. A shark's behavior, like that of any other fish, is stereotyped and he's either behaving normally or something must be very wrong.

Like a dog that isn't wagging his tail.

And when sharks are behaving normally, they're positively timid.

 

[Stirling]

On the subject of statistics, I think most people believe things about shark attacks that just aren't true. The idea that people are at greater risk on the surface than on the bottom is probably false - more people get attacked on the surface because more people are swimming on the surface than beneath it. Sharks attack people at certain hours of the day because that's when more people are in the water - if you plot shark attacks by time of day, they drop off abruptly during the middle of the day when people get out of the water for lunch, and then resume again after lunch. Those statistics that show when and how sharks attack are mostly describing *human* behavior, not shark behavior.

I've been diving among enormous schools of scallop hammerheads in the Sea of Cortez, where they were so numerous in every direction that it was like trying to look through a crowded tank of guppies.

The first time I ever saw them schooling like this, we were diving on the fringes of where they were schooling, and only some of the outliers swam out to where we were hanging around the anchor line in more shallow water. And then a boat full of newbie divers from the Tucson School of SCUBA Diving arrived, and they all started jumping into the water right into the middle of the schooling hammerheads. I thought I was going to see people stand up and run on top of the water back to the boat, but they all seemed to be enjoying the experience, and nobody paniced and nobody got hurt.

On subsequent dives, we were sometimes lucky to get right in the middle of crowds of sharks, and I never saw any really aggressive behavior from any of them. The closest thing to a scare anybody got was when a person who really should have known better speared a big fish and swam it back to the dive boat, where a bunch of people just getting certified were snorkeling around the boat. He didn't know that he was followed all the way back to the boat by a very big hammerhead (it looked about 15' long so it was probably closer to 10 or 12) that finally turned away when he got closer to the others around the boat (a couple of whom were trying to climb out of the water on the anchor line). I was fascinated by sharks and thought I knew a lot about them at the time, and I thought that was about the most reckless thing he could do in the circumstances. Still, nothing happened.

I have been very nervous around little bull sharks, and think I would be unsettled by meeting a large tiger shark (probably much more than a great white, although I don't know why I think so). Is a fear of sharks really irrational? I think there are places that I would not go diving because of the sharks (like the Zambezi River) or crocodiles, and I don't consider those irrational thoughts.

 

[dlndavid]

And where are Tiger Sharks common?

 

[Stirling]

And where are Tiger Sharks common?

http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/Gallery/Descript/Tigershark/tigershark.htm

I have always associated them with the South Pacific (that big red blotch on the map in the article just linked to), where I have never been diving. You can see they occur along the Pacific coast of the U.S. and Mexico, and I know they have been found in most of the places where I have been diving, but I have never seen one (I don't think - at least not a big one that I could identify as a tiger shark). I have seen a lot of smaller sharks in onesies and twosies at a little bit of a distance, but have assumed they were probably something else, without being close enough to identify them.

By the way, that Florida Museum of Natural History website is a fantastic resource.

 

[doole]

On the subject of statistics, I think most people believe things about shark attacks that just aren't true. The idea that people are at greater risk on the surface than on the bottom is probably false - more people get attacked on the surface because more people are swimming on the surface than beneath it.

In general, there is a point here but most sharks do in fact exhibit a surface feeding pattern, simply because that's where what they eat is. (IE sea lion, fatigued turtle or something already partly maimed.) That's why it's quite important not to be witlessly imitating any of those things.

 

[ScubaTwo]

Thank you to everyone who has posted links. I have been reading them all day even those I had already read before. I certainly does help with understanding. Oddly enuff the site that set my mind to ease the most dealt with shark attacks. Some of it was grusome but almost every case stated the same thing. Water activities at dusk or dawn, murky water, around baitfish (most times these seem to be combined resulting in mistaken dinner plans). So I dont know about the original poster but I feel much better now lol. Thank you all

 

[ScubaTwo]

P.s. That dosnt mean if I ever see a Tiger or Bull shark I wont need to get my drysuit cleaned lol. But its a start