Peter Benchley who wrote the book Jaws. Steven Spielberg's film version inspired a generation of shark scientists, despite initially vilifying sharks. Photo / Chris Polk via Universal Studio Home Video
Peter Benchley who wrote the book Jaws. Steven Spielberg's film version inspired a generation of shark scientists, despite initially vilifying sharks. Photo / Chris Polk via Universal Studio Home Video
When Steven Spielberg’s famous mechanical shark, Bruce, first appeared on-screen in the summer of 1975, Chris Lowe thought it looked fake.
Lowe, who now leads the Shark Lab at California State Long Beach, was 11 that year.
He had grown up on Martha’s Vineyard, the island in Massachusetts whereJaws was filmed.
He had watched Spielberg’s crew transform his hometown into “Amity Island”. Some of his schoolmates served as extras; he saw the mechanical shark in person.
But one of the film’s characters in particular captured his attention: marine biologist Matt Hooper, portrayed by Richard Dreyfuss.
Jaws, the highest-grossing movie of its time, cast a long shadow over the reputation of sharks.
Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, these ocean predators were vilified as voracious monsters and were drastically overfished. The only good shark was a dead shark, the thinking went.
But the film also ushered in an era of curiosity, inquiry and shark science.
It produced a generation or more of researchers fascinated with these creatures that remain largely unknown.
“I call it a blessing and a curse,” Lowe said.
Before Jaws premiered in 1975, most shark research was conducted by the United States Navy.
Much of it involved experimenting and testing repellents to prevent shark attacks on sailors.
Very little was known about sharks, and the research sought to understand why they attacked people.
The film helped shift public perception, leading to greater respect and understanding of sharks' complexity. Photo / Barbara Munker via Getty Images
Dave Ebert, a shark scientist at San Jose State University, first saw the film in 1975 as a high-school student in California.
It fuelled a passion to study sharks.
The following decade was “kind of like the Wild West” for shark science, he said.
There were countless open questions: How many species of shark exist? How far do sharks travel? Do they migrate? Where do they breed? How old do they get?
“If you could think of something, it’d be like, ‘Oh, go check it out,’” Ebert said.
His academic adviser had been a consultant on the movie’s mechanical shark.
To Ebert, the movie brought sharks out of the shadows, where they had been relatively understudied, and into the public light.
Ebert specialised in finding the “lost species” — elusive and rare sharks. He has discovered more than 50 species all over the world.
Today, biologists have identified more than 500 shark species.
None has been as closely studied as the species featured in the film: the great white shark.
Research has helped dispel its 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 migratory, and some become highly specialised to take down marine mammals.
Biologists typically refer to it simply as a white shark, dropping the “great” that has signified a misplaced otherness.
Greg Skomal, 63, a shark biologist with Massachusetts Marine Fisheries, has pursued his passion for studying white sharks since the start of his marine biology career. Photo / Lisa Hornak, Boston Herald via Getty Images
Greg Skomal, 63, a shark biologist for Massachusetts Marine Fisheries, had wanted to study white sharks since he first became a marine biologist.
In the early 2000s, seal populations around Cape Cod had rebounded after years of excessive hunting. As the seals returned, white sharks followed.
Skomal and his team studied white sharks in the Atlantic by tagging individuals and tracking their movements.
The researchers discovered that the predators migrated along the Eastern Seaboard of the US and that some even entered the open ocean.
Chris Lowe, now leading the Shark Lab, saw the 'Jaws' shark as fake at age 11. Photo / Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register via Getty Images
In 2018, a man was killed by a white shark off Cape Cod, the first fatality there since 1936.
Stunned by the attack, Skomal said he immediately found himself juggling the dispassionate 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 topic that Lowe referred to as the “Holy Grail”. Where do white sharks mate? Where do they give birth?
“We can tell you where they’re going,” Skomal said. “But it’s really hard for us to tell you what they’re actually doing.”
In 2018, scientists confirmed the existence of a white shark nursery in the New York Bight, just off Long Island, based on data from sharks they had tagged years earlier.
“Who would have thought that you could go right outside New York Harbour a few miles and find baby white sharks?” said Tobey Curtis, a shark scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Curtis, who works with more than 40 shark species, credited the white shark for being a gateway into shark science. When he and his team are out at sea studying the species, they often invoke quotations from Jaws.
“So, any shark that comes up, swims by the boat, we just say, ‘That’s a 20-footer’, even if it’s 3 feet long,” he said.
The film inspired many scientists, and it may have been inspired by the shark science pioneers who came before.
Don Nelson, Lowe’s predecessor and founder of the Shark Lab, was a leader of shark science when the movie came out.
At the time, Nelson was developing tracking technology to study sharks at California State Long Beach.
Nelson was asked to advise on a shark facts poster that was used in the film, according to Spielberg’s production company.
If nothing else, scientists inspired by Jaws have helped shift the notoriety that these ocean creatures garnered after the film premiered.
Fifty years later, people’s attitudes towards sharks have changed, too.
“People are looking at them differently based on all the things we’ve learned about them,” Lowe said. “I think people respect them more.”
