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.”
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“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.”
A narrative means Spin a LIE .
Drop her off the Ptwn coast at night fall .
She will be spun by a few sharks .
How are things in your area going so far this year??
Yours, ex-cadet/tex
Hall & Oates brought it back.................. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRYFKcMa_Ek
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