50 years after ‘Jaws,’ sharks face their own terror

One June 20, 1975, a fictional great white shark stalked beachgoers on Amity Island — and struck terror into moviegoers around the world. Jaws, based on Peter Benchley’s best-selling novel, was a blockbuster. Its portrayal of sharks as bloodthirsty man-eaters bred widespread mistrust, fear and outright ill-will toward these animals.

In truth, you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than bitten by a shark. Millions of people swim in the seas each year, but an average of just 64 bites are recorded annually worldwide. And only 9 percent of those bites are fatal, equaling about six shark-inflicted deaths globally, according to the International Shark Attack File.

Rather than worrying about sharks while we frolic in the ocean this summer, we should instead fear for them. Sharks are keystone species that are vital to maintaining the health and resilience of the oceans. But since the 1970s, populations of the world’s sharks and their close cousins, rays, have declined by more than 70 percent, scientists reported in 2021. One-third of shark and ray species are threatened with extinction, according to a report released at the end of last year by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Although climate change, pollution and habitat destruction take a toll on sharks, the biggest peril they face is the humans who catch them. Overfishing has driven the decline of more than 90 percent of the 1,266 species assessed by the IUCN.

“Generally, people think that sharks are monsters — cold, unfeeling — and we don’t really have much compassion for them,” says Grant Smith, managing director of Sharklife, a research and education nonprofit in South Africa. “That just leaves them wide open to exploitation and harm.”

Steven Spielberg, the acclaimed director of Jaws, still feels responsible for turning humans against sharks. “That’s one of the things I still fear. Not to get eaten by a shark, but that sharks are somehow mad at me,” he said in an interview a few years ago. “I truly and to this day regret the decimation of the shark population because of the book and the film. I really, truly regret that.”

To save sharks, Smith and other advocates believe we need to flip the script, to think of sharks as awe-inspiring wildlife instead of food or foes. This requires concerted outreach about why sharks are more valuable alive than dead.

The shift in public perception of whales over the last half-century is one example of how this is possible. Once hunted nearly to extinction, these marine mammals are now protected in most parts of the world, and whale watching contributes more than $2 billion annually to the tourism economy.

The biology of sharks puts them at risk

Sharks, rays and skates are grouped together as the Chondrichthyes, the class of fish with skeletons made from cartilage rather than bone. They come in all shapes and sizes, from the whale shark, the world’s largest fish, which can grow as long as a bowling lane, to the dwarf lanternshark, which can fit in the palm of your hand. They live all across the world, from tropical reefs to polar straits. As predators, many sharks influence the entire food web by keeping in check the populations of fish, marine mammals and crustaceans that they eat. In turn, this impacts the growth of coral, algae and marine plants.

Although sharks have survived on Earth for at least 400 million years, their biology makes them especially vulnerable to threats like overfishing. They grow slowly and don’t reproduce until later in life. The Greenland shark, the world’s longest-lived vertebrate, has an average life span of 272 years, but females don’t breed until they are 150. Great whites can live to be 70 but aren’t ready to have babies until middle age. And while some sharks lay eggs, most give birth to only a few pups at a time after a long pregnancy.

This slow life cycle means sharks “can’t keep pace with how fast we’re removing them from the environment or how fast their habitat is changing,” says Jodie Rummer, a fish physiologist at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia.

Overall, we know very little about most shark species, especially ones that dwell in the deep. This lack of knowledge has made it challenging to protect them. Luckily, that’s starting to change. Research has proliferated in the 20 years since the IUCN’s first global status report on sharks, published in 2005.

Researchers are using an array of methods to learn more about sharks, from spear guns that collect tissue samples to underwater ultrasound machines that can detect pregnancies to aerial drones that document hunting behavior. Scientists are now discovering about one new shark or ray species each month, says Rachel Graham, executive director of the conservation nonprofit MarAlliance. One-quarter of the more than 1,200 known species of sharks, skates and rays have been identified since 2001.

Overfishing is sharks’ greatest threat

In a rural village on the coast of Oman, Rima Jabado drives up to a port where men are unloading hundreds of dead sharks from their boats. The shark scientist smiles to disarm the skeptical fishermen. She’s there to catalog the hauled-in species and hopes to rely on the men’s expertise. Then she wades into the mass of bloody bodies.

This is often how Jabado, who chairs the IUCN’s Shark Specialist Group, begins her fieldwork. Across Africa and Asia, Jabado and colleagues survey fish landing sites and markets, where they identify, measure and collect genetic samples from dead sharks and rays to estimate diversity. They also interview fishers to learn how and why they catch these animals. “People thought I was kind of crazy,” Jabado laughs as she recalls driving the coast of the United Arab Emirates and Oman for her Ph.D. research 15 years ago. “Not a lot of people are interested in spending days with dead sharks at a fish market.”

But it’s an effective, if grisly, way to figure out what is (or was) in different parts of the ocean. For instance, from 2010 to 2012, Jabado and colleagues collected data at a bustling fish market in Dubai, where sharks are auctioned daily for international trade. More than 12,000 sharks were identified from 37 different species, many of them destined for Asia, Jabado’s team reported in 2015 in Biological Conservation.

Talking with fishers and fish sellers also reveals how people use sharks and rays, Jabado says. In Mauritania, where people catch several tons of sharks each day, few people eat them. Instead, the animals are dried, packed and shipped to elsewhere in West Africa for food. In Monaco, the skins of critically endangered rays wallpaper elevators in luxury hotels and the interiors of mega-yachts. Around the world, women outline their eyes with makeup that consists of shark liver oil. In China, the bodies of small sharks become pet chew toys.

The 2024 IUCN report, led by Jabado, compiled information from 353 scientists in 158 countries to show where sharks are caught and where they are shipped — and it’s not all developing countries. Indonesia, India and Spain account for 35 percent of all sharks killed worldwide. The United States and Mexico round out the top five shark-fishing countries. Meanwhile, the European Union imports nearly 25 percent of all shark and ray meat globally.

Only about one-quarter of sharks are intentionally caught. The rest are bycatch, falling prey to the many nets, hooks and traps that target tuna, cod, shrimp and other seafood. Trawlers towing football field–sized nets that scoop up everything in their path are particularly deadly.

Still, demand for shark and ray meat has doubled since 2005. The global value of this food source rose from $157 million in the early 2000s to $283 million in 2016, according to the IUCN report. More people are turning to these fish as a protein source because supplies of other seafood have also declined from overfishing. And many rural communities depend on sharks for food and income, creating pressure to overfish.

Shark fishing can be sustainable, if the animals are responsibly harvested and quotas are set and enforced by authorities. For instance, 85 percent of the volume of sharks caught in the United States are spiny dogfish, which are certified as a sustainable seafood source by the Marine Stewardship Council because commercial harvests are carefully monitored and regulated. This abundant, roughly meter-long shark is mainly exported to the European Union for fish and chips.

One bright spot is that the demand for shark fins — used to make a popular soup in many Asian countries — has declined in the last 20 years. Typically, fins are collected by catching a shark, hacking off its dorsal fin and then chucking the bleeding animal back into the ocean to die. Targeted media efforts have illuminated this gruesome practice and led to many countries banning shark finning, similar to the outreach campaigns that helped reduce commercial whale harvests.

In 2006, the NBA superstar Yao Ming partnered with WildAid, an international wildlife conservation nonprofit, to expose how the soup is made. When the campaign began, three-quarters of the Chinese people surveyed didn’t know that the soup was made from shark fins. (The Mandarin translation is “fish wing soup.”) Nineteen percent believed that sharks grow their fins back. (They don’t.) Two years after Ming appeared in ads with the slogan “When the buying stops, the killing can too,” 82 percent of Chinese people surveyed said they would reduce or stop eating the soup. And 89 percent said shark finning should be banned, which China did in 2019. But illegal finning remains a problem.

Sport fishing also endangers sharks

Off the palm tree–lined coast of Key West, Fla., on a balmy April weekend, dozens of excited anglers head out in boats. Each team’s goal: Hook as many bull sharks as possible in two days to win the Spanish Fly Shark Tournament.

Catch-and-release tournaments like this one are popular in the United States, Australia, South Africa and other countries where recreational sport fishers hope to land a shark for the thrill of it. Between 2005 and 2015, more than 66 million sharks were hauled in by recreational anglers along the U.S. Atlantic coast.

Although most sport fishing rules require releasing the animal after it’s been landed, photographed and measured, many sharks are injured or die in the process. When they are pulled up from the water, their internal organs can be crushed and their vertebrae damaged. A global review of catch-and-release research found that an average of 14 percent of sharks die post-release, though mortalities are species specific: Hammerheads, for instance, nearly always perish after being released. Pregnant females of any species are especially susceptible to the stress of capture, which often leads to premature birth or loss of the pregnancy, according to research published in Conservation Physiology in 2023.

“Catch and release is still harm,” says Smith, of Sharklife. He argues this type of sport would not be condoned for charismatic land animals like lions. “Would you be allowed to exhaust an animal and then suffocate it for a while, starve it of oxygen, take a few pictures, everybody says, ‘Good’, and then let it free?”

If people were snapping gleeful photos with a dead or injured dolphin, Smith says, “there would be an absolute public outcry.” He hopes we can “close the public empathy gap” and treat sharks with respect and compassion, too.

Smith is advocating to revamp recreational shark fishing rules in South Africa to minimize harm, including mandating the use of professional guides who will enforce humane standards. Another change would be requiring recreational fishers to use low-impact gear like circle hooks, as opposed to the more common — and more deadly — j-shaped hooks. This would reduce the chance of hooking a shark in the gut or gills, which is much more likely to cause harm or death than hooking the fish by the jaw.

Getting people to love sharks

As I kayaked up to a century-old family fishing camp on Isla Partida off Mexico’s Baja California, a dozen children were playing on a sandy spit beside the blue sea. Their fathers and uncles sat in the shade mending fishing nets, the fourth generation of Leóns to make a living by chasing fish — including sharks — from dawn to dusk. Most of them hope the children do not follow in their footsteps.

Paloma Aniló Calderón León, 15, wears a t-shirt with a hammerhead shark logo, framed by the name of a local conservation organization, Pelagios Kakunjá. She told me that she wants to be a marine biologist when she grows up. Her mother, Ana León, and father, Malaeel Salgado Calderón, are all for it. “Fishing is not a business, with the changes we’ve seen,” Calderón says. “There are very few fish left today.” Because it takes increasingly more time and more fuel to find sharks, he says, the profit from fishing is marginal at best.

Now, Calderón hopes to get paid to study sharks instead of kill them. He and his family are part of a project led by Pelagios Kakunjá to train 30 fishers in Baja California as field technicians. Each will drive a boat to find the sharks, then collect blood and tissue samples, drop cameras to collect videos and place sensors underwater to track temperature and water chemistry. One of the species they are searching for is the scalloped hammerhead.

“Coming to Baja in the ’80s and ’90s, it was like going to the Galápagos. There were hammerheads everywhere,” says James Ketchum, a shark ecologist who cofounded Pelagios Kakunjá in 2010. The collapse of shark populations in Baja was sudden, he says. By 2012, “there was nothing, it was an empty lot,” Ketchum remembers. “I was basically crying underwater.” The number of scalloped hammerheads near Isla Partida declined 97 percent in the last 50 years, Ketchum and colleagues reported in Marine Policy in 2024. They cited overfishing as the primary cause.

In 2012, Mexico banned shark fishing from May through July each year to protect vulnerable species during the breeding season. And sharks have started to come back. Last year, researchers captured and tagged a juvenile hammerhead for the first time in Cabo Pulmo National Park, a marine protected area near the southern tip of Baja.

Other fishers in Baja are joining the growing ecotourism industry. The region is a world-class destination for swimming with or watching mako, blue, thresher and white sharks. Cristobal Perez, cofounder of the tour company Nomad Diving, says he “hires 100 percent Mexicans” as captains and guides, often choosing local fishers for their knowledge of the ocean and wildlife.

More people on and in the water watching sharks also means more eyes — and cameras — observing them, a boon for science. Kathryn Ayres, a shark ecologist with the conservation nonprofit Beneath The Waves and a tour guide with Latitude Encounters, leads shark-watching trips out of Cabo San Lucas. In 2024, Ayres and colleagues used tourists’ videos from Baja to help document how orcas feed on whale sharks.

Ayres is also collecting data for an economic valuation of sharks by surveying tourists who come to Baja. Shark-related tourism generates more than $300 million per year globally, a number expected to double in the next 20 years, according to the IUCN report.

With our help, sharks can recover

While snorkeling in the teal water off the island of Rangiroa in French Polynesia, I watched two scientists scuba diving below me in search of great hammerhead sharks. When they spot one, they film the animal for identification and use a laser plate to measure its 4-­meter-long body. Next, they deploy a spear gun that places a tracking tag on the shark and also collects tissue for analysis. It’s a little like giving a human a shot with a needle, and the hammerhead swims away unharmed.

As part of the three-year Tamataroa Project supported by the groups L’Œil d’Andromède and Gombessa Expeditions, this data will help reveal why endangered great hammerheads aggregate off this island from December through April, where they migrate from and what they eat.

Rangiroa is home to one of the largest remaining groups of these sharks, whose population has declined by an estimated 80 percent globally over the last 70 years. The area also boasts abundant tiger sharks, lemon sharks, gray sharks, blacktip reef sharks, manta rays, stingrays and spotted eagle rays.

There’s at least one clear reason why sharks thrive here: A law banned shark fishing in 2006. An analysis of nearly 14,000 observations collected by divers from 2011 through 2018 found an increase in the overall abundance of sharks and rays in French Polynesia, including in Rangiroa. Divers sighted a total of 20 species of sharks and seven species of rays and demonstrated the fishing ban is helping endangered species recover, researchers reported in 2023 in PLOS ONE.

Polynesians’ willingness to protect sharks stems in part from the “grand cultural link” between people and sharks, says Tatiana Boube, a shark ecologist at the University of French Polynesia in Tahiti. “In Polynesian culture, mankind is at the same level as any other life.” For some Polynesian families, sharks are a totem animal.

French Polynesia’s success shows that the people who live closest to these animals need to be on board with keeping them alive, Boube says. It also gives hope that sharks will return in force to Baja and other coastal regions where local fishers are changing practices.

Once people are invested in conserving sharks, they are more willing to create and uphold rules that help keep sharks alive, says Graham, of MarAlliance. Conservation regulations in play globally include limits on how many sharks can be killed, no-take marine protected areas and restrictions on fishing gear like nets that kill sharks as bycatch.

The most positive sign that the currents might be shifting in sharks’ favor, Graham says, is a change in attitude and behavior. She points to reactions from tourists in Belize as an example. “Instead of ‘Oh my god, I’m so scared … They need to kill the shark.’ It’s ‘Oh my goodness, we got to see a great hammerhead! It was huge. Everybody was so excited,’ ” Graham says.

Her grand vision is that everyone sees a shark every time they swim in the ocean. For that dream to come true, Graham says, “we need a shark hero in every community.”