Posted on 06/07/2021 2:05:01 PM PDT by Capt. Tom
A fear of great whites? Shark center aims to show fact vs. fiction Jason SavioCape Cod Times
There’s an 18-foot shark hanging in the air, waiting to greet you at the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy Shark Center in Chatham the next time you visit.
“Curly” is a life-sized replica of the largest recorded white shark tagged off Cape Cod. It’s one of many new features added to the Shark Center during a “pretty big renovation” that took place in winter 2020, says center manager Heather Ware.
The center is an arm of the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, which has a mission to "support scientific research, improve public safety, and educate the community to inspire white shark conservation."
But because of COVID-19 concerns, not nearly as many people got to hear that message, or see “Curly” or the rest of the renovation last summer as intended. Typically, the shark center would have had about 17,000 visitors in the summertime. Last year, just over 3,000 came by.
The life-sized white shark, Curly, hangs suspended from the ceiling at the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy Shark Center in Chatham. The 18-foot white shark was named for the unusual curl in her dorsal fin. She was found in 2018 feeding off a dead humpback whale off Cape Cod, and was the first white shark to be filmed underwater in the Atlantic Ocean in 30 years. She was also the fifth white shark to be tagged for Dr. Gregory Skomal's shark study through the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries.
“We had incredibly reduced numbers, which means a lot of our guests didn’t get to come and see this new space,” says Ware.
White sharks in the media And nobody last year would have seen the exhibit launched last month entitled “White Sharks in the Media and Public Perception.”
Although small, that new installation delivers a big message, trying to show how information in the media can be misconstrued and sensationalized to create an image of sharks that center officials don’t consider fair and accurate.
A model head of “Bruce” from the movie “Jaws,” a mainstay of the Shark Center, appropriately leads into the new exhibit, where headlines from different media outlets are compared. In one section, the question is asked “Which one of these headlines generates fear? Which one generates awareness?” Guests can compare a headline from 7 News Boston, which reads “Shark season officially underway as 3 great white sharks get tagged off Cape Cod” side by side with one from Fox News that reads “Great White Shark Devours Seal, Turns Water Bloody off Massachusetts Beach.”
Sharks and seals:Here's what you need to know about the animals off Cape Cod
“Our new exhibit looking at the public perception of white sharks has been an idea we have been playing with for several years,” says Marianne Long, center education director. “We have had many visitors who … talk about how movies or books have led to them having a fear of sharks, or how news reports have led to their fears. We wanted to do something to show our visitors how when you break down some of the headlines, and think about the behaviors of sharks, it can make things less scary. It is often a headline when a shark eats a seal, but when you think about it, what you have is a predator, eating its prey, in its natural habitat.”
The Atlantic White Shark Conservancy's shark center has a couple of new exhibits including this area that includes a whale bone.
The ‘Jaws’ effect' The “‘Jaws’ Effect” is a facet of the new installation that notes the impact the 1975 film had on how the world viewed white sharks as monsters in the ocean. Included is a quote from Peter Benchley, author of the book upon which the film was based, saying that in an updated version of the story, the shark would have to be written as the victim rather than villain because “sharks are much more the oppressed than the oppressors.”
Ware says that she, too, had a misinformed view of sharks at one time because of growing up watching the film, but a cage-diving trip off of Seal Island in South Africa changed that.
It was on that trip, “that I realized what I thought based on ‘Jaws’ was not accurate,” she says. “It’s not what they are like in the wild, and it was really a skewed perception that I had.”
Ware points to the differences between the replica of “Bruce” from the movie and the life-sized “Curly” model. “We see just how exaggerated the movie might have been,” she says.
The “Sharks in the Media” exhibit is part of what Ware describes as a “new flow” to the overall Shark Center, beginning with a wall dedicated to the history of sharks on Cape Cod when you first enter the room. A timeline shows a black-and-white photo from 1948 of a fisherman in Barnstable Harbor encountering a white shark, leading up to today and the research projects conducted by the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries.
The Atlantic White Shark Conservancy's shark center is located on Orleans Road in Chatham.
History of sharks on Cape Cod On the other side of the “History of Sharks on Cape Cod” wall, you can get a better understanding of how sharks are being studied thanks to a new look at CATS tagging that was conducted in 2020. With CATS tags, scientists get a “shark’s eye view,” like a GoPro, of sharks swimming and record fine-scale movements like swimming speed. They are temporary tags that pop off the sharks and are later recovered by research teams.
“We really wanted to improve the flow and tell the story of white sharks a little more cohesively,” Ware says. “A better narrative.”
See, it makes a big difference whether an animal to stupid to tie its shoe kills you because it wanted to kill you or kills you because he thought you were something else.
BS. White sharks eat people. Kill them, and kill the animals they are hunting.
I recall a pbs thing...
Man had killed off the wolves in this area. Which resulted in a population increase of deer and other prey animals ...
Well the deer began to eat all the vegitation along a river bank. The banks began to erode. Then massive flooding began. Then the town folk lost everything because of the flooding ...
Yada. Yada. Yada years later, they brought back the wolves.
We’re gunna need a bigger story. (See what I did there?)
With drones being practically ubiquitous now to the point that they’re frequently used by county lifeguards to survey the shoreline for sharks, authorities in SoCal believe that white sharks are far more common in the surf than previously thought. “Juvenile” white sharks are what are seen the most. Of course, even a 6’ white shark is considered young.
If anything though, I think this underscores that the fear of most shark species, white sharks in particular, is overblown because attacks are so incredibly rare. They’re their and they certainly are aware of humans even if the humans aren’t aware of them and yet, attacks almost never happen.
Having said that, whenever I see a bull shark when diving, I give it a very wide berth because it’s been my experience they are incredibly aggressive and bold.
Have a dive buddy who did the cage dives at Guadelupe (Mexico). If those sharks really want to get into those cages they
can.
People or sharks?
Wow. If Guadalupe were closer to shore, like doable in a day trip, I might have considered it. Not necessarily done it, but considered it. But that video is not inspiring confidence.
Personally if I’m going to take a week to go diving, I want to dive. I don’t want to be fin-less, overweighted and hanging on surface-supplied air while these predators get whipped into a frenzy and crash into these aluminum cages.
I read an interesting thing about the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone. (I recall it was from a book called “Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park”...the focus of the book is to help people understand why the things they made as leading tourist attractions in Yellowstone are there for a good reason, as opposed to the places people want to try to go because they aren’t high on the list of places)
Anyway, the guy said he was walking down a trail, and up ahead of him was an extremely steep hill maybe a hundred feet high, densely wooded at the top right up to the edge of the hill, and then the grassy hill down to his trail.
As he was walking, he saw a large pack of coyotes running pell mell out of the woods onto the hill, tumbling head over heels while others frantically tried to run down the hill as best as they could.
He had never seen them behave like this and when he looked at the top of the hill, he saw a lone wolf appear, looking calmly down at the tumbling coyotes.
Apparently, before the reintroduction of the wolves, the coyote population had exploded (big surprise) and some coyotes grew to very large sizes, larger than usual.
When the wolves reappeared, the large coyotes who were used to being the top of the pack tried to stand their ground and were slaughtered, and the rest of them learned to run away anytime a wolves were around.
I guess wolves are better apex predators than coyotes.
What’s interesting is that coyotes are normally solitary animals. After the wolves were killed off the coyotes started to pack up to go after the bigger game.
Life is dynamic. You can’t hold it still. It’s not a zero sum game, as our dumber liberal citizens seem to believe.
The stupidity of Leftists in this respect is astonishing. Nearly every case where some invasive species has destroyed an ecosystem, it can be traced back to some dumb ass Leftist who thought they could control nature better than God by importing some Brazilian Stag Beetle because it eats the invasive Spotted Lungwort plant, and the imported beetle destroys everything.
(I just made those things up...I don’t know if there even is a Brazilian Stag Beetle!)
Also, Leftists seem to believe everything from wealth creation to shark populations is a zero-sum game.
Idiots.
Read about the Tamarask invasion of the Western river system thanks to Govt ecological geniuses.
Or the introduction of Raccoons into the Rockies.
Morons.
Here is a good example for you. -Tom
https://www.honeycopy.com/copywritingblog/hawaii-mongoose-problem
Wow… They got nearly every single thing wrong there!
Ummm....OK, I just don’t agree with throwing our hands up in the air and thinking “Oh well, things will be OK”.
I had never heard about the issues of introducing raccoons into the Rockies… I thought they were always there. Do you have a link that talks about it? I’m interested, and did a search but I’m having trouble finding anything that relates to that.
The were introduced many years ago before there was any noise about environmental impacts. They are just pests now that weren’t around before. And they pushed out other natural rodents.
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