JAWS-THE REAL THING

Among sci-fi's most tired conventions is the one in which some latter-day cataclysm releases from an aeons-long sleep a monstrous prehistoric creature who rampages around for eight or nine reels until the combined brains of the military-scientific-industrial complex figure out a novel ploy to dispatch the thing.

Such strained fictions have always seemed a lot of fuss to ichthyologists. Why bother to wake the creatures of unimaginably distant geologic ages when you can find, in a condition essentially unchanged for 63 million years, a creature cruising handily off every beach in the world who once shared the planet with dinosaurs, ichthyosaurs and pterosaurs and is as strange, unpredictable and dangerous as those bad old boys?

That creature is, of course, the shark. Doubtless one of the reasons it has long exercised such a powerful hold on the imagination of everyone (except, until recently, novelists and movie makers) is that it attacks not merely out of the depths of the ocean but out of the depth of prehistory as well. The other great source of its near mythic fascination is that despite ever-growing attention by marine scientists, there is precious little reliable information about sharks. It is not even known how many varieties of sharks there are (best estimate: around 300) or how many of them must be regarded as definitely lethal to man (best guess: about a dozen, with the great white and the tiger leading most lists). It is almost impossible to make wide-ranging behavioral generalizations from the way the creatures act in captivity and even more difficult to study them in their natural habitat. Science therefore knows more about the natural history and physiology of sharks, which can be gathered from autopsies, than about how they actually live in the wild.

Ranging in size from six inches to 60 feet, all shark species lack skeletons. Essentially they are masses of cartilage covered by a remarkably tough hide (in itself a nasty rasplike weapon in the larger species). Theirs is an indiscriminating appetite. Everything from a keg of nails to a 100-lb. sea lion has been found in shark entrails. The biblical Jonah was there too, today's marine scientists theorize. Sharks are condemned by nature to a life without sleep or even rest. The reason is that they lack the swim bladders of the bony fishes, which permit the latter to float when they need to. A shark must literally swim or sink. If you wanted to anthropomorphize the beast, you could account for its wretched disposition by that fact alone.

Indeed, you might as well. Shark Expert H. David Baldridge insists that the notion that sharks are completely unpredictable is nonsense. "Of course their actions are predictable," he maintains. The problem is that "we are still so totally ignorant of shark behavior that we cannot do it yet." He may very well be right, but just to deal with the crucial part of the shark problem--attacks on human beings--requires confrontation with a bewildering set of data. The files of shark-research panels in the U.S., Australia and South Africa record attacks in cold water and warm, deep seas and shallow, at high noon and midnight and all the hours in between, when the ocean was calm and when it was rough, in all seven seas and miles up the rivers that lead to them. One can scare oneself with the notion that there is no body of salt water anywhere in the world where one can feel entirely safe from sharks. One can console oneself with the notion that the chances of being killed by a shark are about the same as being struck dead by lightning. Each year there are 40 or 50 recorded attacks worldwide. If a shark does strike, statistics give a human about a 65% chance of surviving the encounter, though possibly with fewer appendages than when he began it.

Still, a sensible individual does not carry a steel-shafted golf club on high down a fairway in a thunderstorm, and enough has been learned about sharks to put to rest the once common notion that sharks are lazy, cowardly, clumsy scavengers. It is true that you can hold the brain of a 20-ft.-long great white in your cupped hands, but it is not true that the sensorium transmitting information to that primitive organ is feeble. Experiments have revealed that sharks can smell out one part of human blood in 10 million parts of water, some actually see better in dim light than in bright (which gives them the edge on deep-plunging human divers), and their hearing is just fine, thank you.

Thus common sense suggests entering the shark's ocean domain discreetly, especially in temperate waters, where the majority of depredations occur (not necessarily because there are more sharks there, but because people congregate along mild shores). Rapid, erratic motion attracts sharks, as do contrasting colors closely juxtaposed. Thus an even tan--and a bathing suit to match--is a precaution. So is a smooth swimming stroke; and a calm disposition coupled with a cowardly nature helps. Sharks generally prefer to go after isolated swimmers rather than those who are grouped. Sometimes they just bump and run. Such tactics merely may be manifestations of curiosity rather than an invitation to a rumble, so experts advise staying still and saving your anger for dry land. You should fight only if the fish puts an unmistakably aggressive move on you. Then it should be barroom style, using any weapon, even risking a kicking leg or a flailing arm to the teeth that are, as the Bible says, "terrible round about." It is an awful, literally last-minute choice the creature offers--limb for life--and even then the sacrifice may be in vain. But the shark is congenitally erratic, and man is not necessarily so. It is the only advantage man has when he enters the element in which the shark's magnificent adaptation must compel admiration as well as awe. As a species, man has, after all, undergone thousands of adaptations in order to survive. As individuals, men improvise desperately in order to make it through the day. Sharks, so far, have found no need to do either.

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