‘Jaws’ inspired generation of shark researchers

This past weekend was flooded by “Jaws” and shark fanatics driven to the Island to celebrate five decades of the film. Hype around “Jaws” hasn’t waned since opening weekend in the summer of 1975, and much of the Island that served as the backdrop to the classic summer blockbuster looks unchanged as when filming was underway 50 years ago.

But what has changed is what the world now knows about sharks.

“At the time Jaws came out, we knew virtually nothing about its basic biology,” Dr. Greg Skomal, a senior biologist at the state Division of Marine Fisheries who works with the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, said. “The only good shark was a dead shark” was how the species was perceived by the general public when the film was released.

“The truth of the matter at the time is that nobody, at least in the Atlantic, could go out and predictably find a great white shark,” he said. Most of what was known came from incidental captures by fishermen.

And if you can’t find something, you can’t study it.

But the horror film that tapped into the perception of sharks as dangerous animals and ran with a vindictive 25-foot, 5,000 pound white shark, didn’t only scare people out of the water, it also inspired a generation of “Matt Hoopers,” including Skomal, to become shark scientists like the oceanographic institute researcher played by Richard Dreyfuss. And in the last 50 years, the advent of new technologies has allowed for a better understanding of the species.

From virtually no knowledge other than those precipitated by fear, now possible for Skomal and his team is a great deal of information on white sharks, including seasonal migration patterns, predator-prey relationships and hunting strategies, and the three dimensional movements of sharks like water temperature and depth.

Also, a common misconception is that “Jaws” led to the demise of shark populations “because everyone wanted to go out and kill them,” Skomal said. But that isn’t the case, according to the biologist’s findings. Sharks landings have maintained a steady, linear increase over the course of the last 60 years, and even when “Jaws” came out in 1975, there wasn’t a major surge.

Skomal, in front of a crowd of shark enthusiasts, detailed the evolution of shark research, driven by “Jaws” and resurgence of white sharks in the region, in a talk Sunday at the Whaling Church as part of the “Jaws” 50th anniversary celebration on the Island. Skomal also spent the weekend evenings talking to and selling his book, Chasing Shadows, to fans at The Wharf Pub.

Skomal comes after the work of technological pioneers like Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute scientists Frank Carey, or “the real Matt Hooper,” who was the first person to tag a great white shark in the world and collected data on a shark through an acoustic transmitter for three days, as well as Jack Casey, who charted the historical distribution of the white shark in the western North Atlantic.

Skomal spent over two decades studying sharks on the Island, but white sharks specifically still weren’t seen often in New England or in Vineyard waters. It wasn’t until the 2000s that that changed, and Skomal’s wake-up call came in 2004 on Naushon Island.

“I get a phone call from a buddy of mine, and he says, ‘There’s a white shark in an estuary.’ And I said, ‘Have you been drinking?’” But, in fact, there was a 13-foot white shark trapped in a small pond in one of the Elizabeth Islands. They named her Gretel, and she was the first shark named in the Atlantic, Skomal said.

“I had stopped paying attention to white sharks because I was studying all these other animals, and I figured the opportunity to study white sharks was going to be very limited because of their rarity,” Skomal said.

But then, after more than 40 years of protection from the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the seal population rebounded. And they did so in large enough numbers in Massachusetts to draw the attention of that which feeds on them, Skomal said. White sharks started traveling to Massachusetts, particularly Outer Cape Cod, in larger and larger numbers to feed on seals.

For the first time, Skomal and his team had predictable access to white sharks and could find and study them with advances in the technologies used by his predecessors.

Skomal’s initial work focused on big picture type questions. They used satellite technology to better understand migratory behavior of white sharks over the course of a year. Then, they started to shift technologies to acoustic tags, which emit high frequency sounds that are picked up by receivers they place in the water to better understand when sharks arrive in New England.

Skomal still tags sharks using the technique developed by Casey in 1964 where he places a small intramuscular dart at the base of the shark’s dorsal fin. The tags can tell Skomal when the shark is going up or down or left or right as well as speeding up and slowing down. “It measures those parameters 20 times per second,” Skomal said. He even tethers cameras, which last two or three days, to the acoustic tags.

But efforts are less tedious now. “Instead of the tags lasting three days, and you are going to follow the fish on the boat and really wanting to kill yourself after hearing ‘ping, ping, ping’ for day after day after day, you just have a tag that pings for 10 years and swims within your acoustic arrays.”

Since 2009, Skomal and his team have tagged almost 400 individual white sharks, ranging from four feet to 18 feet long. And what he’s learned is that there isn’t a spot on the Outer Cape that there isn’t a white shark.

“The restaurant is really open on Cape Cod,” he said.

The white sharks, he said, for the most part bypass the Vineyard on the way to the Outer Cape. There’s seals around the Vineyard, but primarily in the winter, and most of those seals move to other areas in the summer. “In terms of seals, you don’t see those numbers of the Vineyard,” he said. The Island is rather a transient area for white sharks.

“They’re moving up 1-95. They bang a right when they get the Vineyard and Nantucket. They sweep along the southern side of those areas, typically anywhere from April, May, June into early July,” Skomal said. “And they’re going up to the first rest stop, which is that big Burger King on Cape Cod.”

Focus on big picture type questions changed when a series of the inevitable, in Skomal’s opinion, started happening once white sharks started to overlap with humans.

After a series of shark bites off the Cape, including a fatal attack in 2018, Skomal wanted to better understand the fine scale behavior of white sharks and investigate their predatory behavior and predatory strategy. He wanted to learn what precipitates an attack on a seal because the belief is that if a white shark bites a person, it’s incredibly rare and a mistake. “We think that the individual has been interpreted by the shark to be a seal,” he said

He started to move away from what the animal does week to week to what they do minute to minute and second to second with the hope of finding patterns in behavior that would reveal areas and times of day that are high risk to share with public safety officials.

In the predator-prey relationship, they haven’t yet seen any real patterns that could be immediately useful for summers, except that attacks on seals are likely to happen in less than 15 feet of water and could happen at any time of the day.

Still, Skomal says that the research has come a long way.

“Half a century is a long time, and it’s amazing what we know about the species now versus then,” Skomal said.

“Jaws” wasn’t just a movie for Skomal, it shaped his career. When he saw the film as a teenager at a movie theater in his hometown in Connecticut, he was fascinated by the shark and especially the shark scientist.

“That looked like a great job,” he said. “You know, the guy, who likes sharks, loves sharks, is studying sharks, seemed to be the voice of reason in the film.”