In the Name of Sharks E-Book

François Sarano

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 351

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Twenty metres below water, the oceanographer François Sarano came face to face with a five-and-a-half metre great white shark. Seduced by the gentle elegance of this majestic creature, Sarano experienced a profound sense of affinity with her as they swam side by side, shoulder to shoulder, eye to eye, cutting a single figure through the ocean depths. It was an experience which made him realize the depth of our ignorance of the lives of sharks, leading him to become a passionate advocate for their protection.

Drawing on the latest scientific research on the biology and ethology of sharks and their exceptional characteristics, this book aims to break through the barrier of prejudice and to pay homage to their true nature. Representing a last vestige of wildness, their populations are nevertheless under threat – like so many species, they have been hunted and exploited by humans. Sarano argues for a change of mindset in which we lose ourselves in the world of the other, so that each living entity, human and non-human, can take their rightful place in the broader global ecosystem.

Also available as an audiobook.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

Introduction: Giving the ‘Voiceless’ a Voice

Notes

1. A Matter of Misunderstanding: From Pliny to Disney

The Andaman Islands sharks

Cousteau and Lord Longimanus

Final exit from the shark cage

A peaceful dusk among the sharks

An animal familiar to all, but which very few have seen

The realism of the early naturalists

Centuries go by without a word on sharks

Shark and wolf

The beast of Gévaudan

The literary debuts of the sea monsters

Appearing in the nineteenth-century bestiary …

The wolf’s successor

In the world of ordinary people

A cultural phenomenon

A shark in every home

And the shark became Jaws

Nemo, Shark Tale: The ‘Disneyfication’ of the world

And man created the virtual shark in his image

Notes

2. Shark? What Shark?

Sharks: a shape to suit every taste!

Sharks are not fish!

Revolutionary jaws

In pursuit of a chimaera

Hoovering up seafood

Cladoselache, the ancestor of ‘Jaws’

A hundred million spectacular years

Sharks in the age of the dinosaurs

The traveller in the abyss

Prehistoric sharks in the abyss?

Megalodon, the tyrannosaurus of the ocean

Today’s monster

Natural diversification in full swing

Notes

3. Giving Life

No cuddling

The womb versus the sea as a cradle

Several fathers for one litter

Mermaid purses

A thousand and one ways to reproduce

Successful for four million years, but blocked by the Anthropocene?

Abandoned at birth

A brief digression on ‘natural diversity’

Natural selection, a positive selection

Notes

4. Inside the Shark’s Head

Being a shark

Changing the world, changing the frame of reference

The master of smells

No appetite for human blood

Taste the water!

Hearing with the whole body

Seeing movements better than forms

Life in black and white

Sixth sense

All for one, one for all

Like a second skin

In the head of the shark

Notes

5. On the Road to Personality

A stingray in love

Cold-blooded animals, standardized robots?

Cooperative fishing

The dawn of a social network

Identity, personality

Environmental complexity and the expression of personality

Play as an evolutionary driver

Self-awareness, awareness of others

Understanding each other’s thinking?

Passing on experience

Notes

6. The Shark, Where it Belongs

Small fry, master of the shark

The small appetites of sharks

Prey on the alert?

An ambiguous alliance

Sharks are there; ‘predators’ much less often

Home-delivered meals

Prey as a baby, large predator as an adult

Cascade effect, from theory to reality

A ‘romanticized’ idea of the marine food chain

Sharks are not picky eaters

A brief aside on the importance of redundancy

A place, not a role

Opportunistic cooperation

In charge of the health of the ecosystem?

Almighty microbes

A pantry for parasites

Sharks’ allies

Carers to the rescue

Full- or part-time cleaner

Prey in rebellion

‘Jaws’, a prey like any other

Sharks as almost indispensable to the ecosystem …

Notes

7. The Ocean is Their Garden

Letter to my human friends

Embracing the immensity of the shark world

Miniature beacons and long-distance migrations

Guadalupe, the rendezvous of lovers?

White Shark Café

Travelling trains the young

Globetrotting sharks and drifting continents

Continental wanderings work to create species

Secret information in thick liquid

The oceanic ‘roller coaster’

A compass in the head

Navigational error as a source of speciation

A brief digression on error and exaptation

‘El Monstro’, the unknown from the abyss

Sharks, oceanographers under threat

Notes

8. Fading Silhouettes

In search of the last grey sharks

Diving on a carpet of sharks

All over the world, the same story

Fins of shame

The hideous beauty of shark squalane creams

Driving on shark oil!

The management of misery

Shark flesh, deposits for heavy metals

A poisoned shark does not complain

What about climate change?

Change of territory, new threats

Notes

9. The Confrontation

Bull shark as villain

Bull shark as saviour

Better alive than dead

Why so much hate, why so much love?

Lightning worse than sharks

Improbable diving accidents

The charge of the great white

Sharks attack to eat

Making the unacceptable intelligible?

One confrontation, two actors

Sailors and consumers of seaside leisure activities

Avoiding accidents?

Culling only causes collateral damage

Destruction without limits

Need for caution

The misunderstanding

Is the ocean a wilderness or a theme park?

How can we change our perspective?

How far can we go to change opinions?

From Charybdis to Scylla

Indifference, the deadly enemy

Who speaks for the sharks?

‘Respect the sharks that injured us’

‘A dead shark is a wound in my flesh’ (Sandra Bessudo)

‘Being with sharks without frightening them’ (Steven Surina)

Rob Stewart, Sea Shepherd, Longitude 181

French Polynesian sharks saved by divers

Notes

10. Reconciliation

The death of sharks unravels the web of life

Necessary unpredictability of life in the wild

Sharks eliminated for convenience: who will be next?

What would a world without sharks be like?

In-different

Fundamentally different!

It is up to us to make peace with shark non-sense

Take the risk of being clumsy!

Lady Mystery

Beyond our singularities lies consideration

Notes

Acknowledgements

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Chapter 1

Fig. 1

The final shark cage dive in the Andaman Islands. © Marion Sarano

Fig. 2

Escaped convicts on a raft surrounded by sharks. Le Petit Journal Illustré, 20 M…

Fig. 3

Le Dauphiné Libéré, 18 July 1958. © Véronique and…

Chapter 2

Fig. 4

Fossil of the sun ray and the angelshark. © Marion Sarano

Fig. 5

Skate (ray) and shark. © Marion Sarano

Fig. 6

Geological time and vertebrate phylogeny. © Marion Sarano

Fig. 7

Evolution of the world’s oceans. © Marion Sarano

Fig. 8

Egg of an elephant fish (chimaera). © Marion Sarano

Fig. 9

First encounter with the chimaera. © Marion Sarano

Fig. 10

General morphology of modern sharks. © Marion Sarano

Fig. 11

Helicoprion. © Marion Sarano

Fig. 12

Fossil tooth of Otodus megalodon. © Marion Sarano

Fig. 13

Whale shark eye and dwarf lanternshark. © Marion Sarano

Fig. 14

Key to the identification of the major orders of sharks. ©…

Fig. 15

School of hammerhead sharks. © Marion Sarano

Chapter 4

Fig. 16

Schematic representation of the range of shark senses. © Marion Sarano

Fig. 17

Pores of the ampullae of Lorenzini distributed over the head of a great white shark. ©…

Fig. 18

Privacy sphere of a great white shark. © Pascal Kobeh/Galatée Films

Chapter 5

Fig. 19

Ana, a female bull shark. © Véronique and François Sarano

Fig. 20

The gaping mouth of the manta ray. © Véronique and François Sarano

Chapter 6

Fig. 21

A whale shark devouring the fish who had taken refuge next to it. © Véronique and…

Fig. 22

Parasitic copepods. © Véronique and François Sarano

Fig. 23

Parasitic remora fish. © Véronique and François Sarano

Chapter 7

Fig. 24

Thermohaline circulation of the world ocean. © Marion Sarano

Fig. 25

First visual identification of ‘El monstro’. © Véronique and François Sarano

Chapter 8

Fig. 26

Unloading of grey sharks at Zarzis, Tunisia. © Véronique and François Sarano

Fig. 27

Blue sharks caught during a ‘sport’ fishing competition. © Véronique and…

Chapter 9

Fig. 28

The author sketching in Guadalupe. © Gérard Soury

Fig. 29

Contortions of the great white shark. © Véronique and François Sarano

Chapter 10

Fig. 30

Lady Mystery and the author, shoulder to shoulder. © Pascal Kobeh/Galatée Films

Fig. 31

Lady Mystery carries the author on her pectoral fin. © Pascal Kobeh/Galatée Films

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

Introduction: Giving the ‘Voiceless’ a Voice

Begin Reading

Acknowledgements

Index

End User License Agreement

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In the Name of Sharks

FRANÇOIS SARANO

Foreword by Sandra Bessudo

Translated by Stephen Muecke

Original illustrations by Marion Sarano

polity

Originally published in French as Au nom des requins by François Sarano © Actes Sud, 2022

This English edition © Polity Press, 2024

This book is supported by the Institut français (Royaume-Uni) as part of the Burgess programme.

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5768-4

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023934605

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Foreword

François Sarano is an oceanographer who has had the good fortune to explore the world’s oceans aboard Captain Cousteau’s famous Calypso, and he shares my passion for knowing and protecting the living creatures that inhabit our oceans. Most of us are fascinated by sharks, probably the most emblematic of them all. Some even have worshipped them as gods, since ancient times. However, their bad reputation and the fear stirred up by films such as Jaws have encouraged their elimination. Overfishing for their meat and fins, and accidental capture by fishing gear not intended for them, have led to the collapse of most populations. The final blow has been dealt by the insatiable demand for shark fins from an ever-growing Asian market. As recently as September 2021, Colombian customs seized several thousand fins on their way to Hong Kong. Such wasteful carnage!

Scalloped hammerhead sharks (Sphyrna lewini), silky sharks, thresher sharks and many others, so abundant a few years ago, are in danger of disappearing. Our scientific studies show that all are highly migratory, crossing the oceans from island to island, continent to continent, disregarding our artificial boundaries. This can be a misfortune or an opportunity! A misfortune, if these sharks, protected in one country, are massacred in the international waters they cross and in the country where they go to breed. But it can also be a great opportunity to unite countries, governments and people in a common effort to protect sharks and the oceans, for the common good of our children and their descendants. This is what we hope to achieve by working towards the creation of a protected marine corridor that would link Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Costa Rica, all countries that are visited each year by hammerhead sharks from our Colombian Malpelo archipelago.

With his book, In the Name of Sharks, François Sarano, to whom I was able to offer a sample of the joys of diving in the dynamic, abundant and pristine waters of Malpelo, takes us on a whirlwind of dives, face to face with our shark friends. From these dives, sometimes surprising, always moving, he draws out his knowledge of the behaviours and relationships that sharks weave with other species. He demonstrates the importance of sharks not only to ocean ecosystems, but to us humans. François tells us how much we need to respect sharks to rebuild ourselves.

May this book make us understand the richness of our interdependencies. May this book be the advocate that raises our awareness and pushes us to protect this enchanting biodiversity. May this text be added to the testimonies of other scientists to convince us not to be the ones who cause the extinction of sharks that have survived so many geological extinctions.

Thank you, François, for this book that teaches us about sharks to make us love them, and that invites us to appreciate our good fortune in living alongside them.

Thank you, in the name of sharks!

Sandra Bessudo,Naturalist, former Minister of the Environment,former president and advisor to the Colombianvice president of the Colombian Ocean Commission,founderof the Malpelo Foundation and other marine ecosystems,instigator and first director of the Malpelo Wildlife Sanctuary,declared a World Heritage Site in 2006.

Introduction:Giving the ‘Voiceless’ a Voice

It was Lady Mystery who gave me the idea for this book, when she kindly granted me a remarkable tête-à-tête on 12 November 2006 off the coast of Mexico. With five metres of muscle and a tonne of elegance, Lady Mystery is a great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias, a sister to those in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.1 During the shooting of the film Oceans,2 we swam serenely side by side, shoulder to shoulder, eye to eye, a few centimetres apart. Two minutes of contentment and peace, an eternity of happiness! For my incredulous diving companions, as well as for Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud, the film’s directors, this harmonious moment was the occasion for a radical change in the way this much-feared creature is seen. This encounter, beautifully filmed by David Reichert and Didier Noirot, went viral all over the world. Millions of viewers changed their minds about sharks.

Despite this, most humans, especially those who will never get close to sharks, remain convinced they are man-eaters and that it is a good thing to exterminate them.

However, for those like me who have sojourned with them for a while in their territory, this fear, based as it is in fantasy, is incomprehensible.

More seriously, it is unacceptable to see, in the midst of a general indifference, the dramatic collapse in numbers of all shark species and the virtual disappearance of some of them.

So, this book pleads the case for Lady Mystery, and for all sharks, for all the wild things who will never be able to speak up, for all those who are different and whom we fear out of ignorance. But it also pleads our own case, because we feel, as Romain Gary put it so eloquently in his ‘Letter to an Elephant’,3 that it is our humanity that we are massacring when we wipe out Lady Mystery’s freedom in the wild.

To be a good advocate, you need to be well informed. You have to get inside the heads of those you are defending. You have to be willing to lose yourself in the world of the other through their senses, you have to try to approach their Umwelt.4

In addition to the hundreds of dives I have made with all kinds of sharks, in all the seas of the world, this book takes note of the most recent scientific research on their biology and their exceptional sensory system. It focuses on the discoveries in ethology and neurobiology which, incredible as it may seem, are able to determine each shark’s individual personality.

This book also focuses on the men and women who dive with sharks and are committed to defending them. It shows how they have broken through the barrier of prejudice to discover the true nature of sharks. The hope is that the reader will be encouraged to take the same approach so that everyone can form their own opinion and no longer submit to the preconceived ideas that, tirelessly repeated by people who have never seen a shark, have become unquestioned commonplaces.

For in the end, while we humans progressively colonize a little more of the territory of others, without care for the rules of their ecosystems, contemptuous of their existence and their signals, thus multiplying the risk of dramatic confrontations, it is indeed a question of finding a diplomatic way, as Baptiste Morizot calls it, that will allow us to live in peace.5

This book is dedicated to our oceanic cousins, and it is also a reflection on our relationship to the world and to otherness in general. The shark, as a symbol of the ‘wildness’ outside of our rules, that frightens us because of our ignorance, a symbol of all that is useless and getting in our way, extending to all those who are different in their ways of life, their traditions, religions and cultures. In this sense, getting to know wild animals in order to try to reach a diplomatic consensus, could offer good lessons for living in society.

Finding out what each shark’s singularity is forces us to ask questions about its status as a non-human person, and consequently its right to exist. From there, more globally, we can rethink our place at the heart of the earthly ecosystem, alongside our wild companions. All living beings share the planet as our common good.

Notes

1.

Steven Spielberg, dir.,

Jaws

, Universal Pictures, 1975.

2.

Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud, dir.,

Océans

, Galatée Films, 2010, and in English,

Oceans

, Disneynature, 2010.

3.

Romain Gary, ‘Letter to an Elephant’,

Life Magazine

, 22 December 1967.

4.

Umwelt

is defined by the biologist Jakob von Uexküll in his book

A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With A Theory of Meaning

, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. It is not only the environment as our senses allow us to experience it, but also the dialectical construction between our perceptions and our actions acting on the environment. Each living creature is therefore constantly constructing its own world, its

Umwelt

, in all its singularity.

5.

Baptiste Morizot,

On the Animal Trail

, Cambridge: Polity, 2021.

1A Matter of Misunderstanding: From Pliny to Disney

The axe comes down on the body, which twists and turns. It strikes again and again. An incredible violence that seems to express all the repugnance humanity has towards such a vile beast: the shark! It is 1954, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, on the deck of the Calypso, Captain Cousteau’s ship; he concludes with a terse: ‘Sailors the world over detest sharks … But for us divers, the shark is our mortal enemy.’1

Thirty-five years later, aboard the same Calypso, in the same Indian Ocean, we set sail, off the shipping lanes, towards the mysterious Andaman archipelago. We aim to make an inventory of the marine fauna of this region where no one has ever dived and which, in 1989, was still free of industrial fishing. But our secret hope, after having scoured the Caribbean Sea, after having searched the Pacific Ocean, from the Marquesas Islands to the Great Barrier Reef, is to finally find a virgin ecosystem, full of shark communities. A place where sharks abound, a place so famous that Jules Verne himself refers to it in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea: ‘I know well that in certain countries, particularly in the Andaman Islands, the negroes never hesitate to attack them with a dagger in one hand and a running noose in the other; but I also know that few who affront those creatures ever return alive.’2

By 1989, the world had definitely changed.3 The exploitation of ‘marine resources’ was at its peak. More than ninety million tonnes of fish were shipped worldwide, a critical threshold that would never be reached again.4 The shark is no longer the enemy; it is in danger. And Cousteau, whose exploration of the marine world had turned him into an environmental protector, wanted to sound a warning about the massive and rapid disappearance of sharks. Perhaps, inwardly, he wanted to repair the damage his film The Silent World had done to them.

The Andaman Islands sharks

On 4 April 1989, Calypso dropped anchor at 11° 8′ north latitude, 93° 31′ east longitude, on Flat Rock, Invisible Bank. Five o’clock in the morning. Camera, writing slate, sample tubes, everything is ready for the first reconnaissance dive. Dawn is just breaking. The sky and the sea merge into a greyish uniformity. The ‘Invisible Bank’ is formed out of a skull-like volcanic rock crowned with foam at water level. It is low tide. We tumble down under the surface. With no time to turn around, to take our first breath, there are three silvertip sharks (Carcharhinus albimarginatus) and two large grey reef sharks (Carcharhinus amblyrhynchos) coming straight towards us. How did I identify them without seeing them properly? Their bodies are barely visible. Only the bright fin edges are dancing in the obscure depths. Opalescent flames circling quietly in the distance, then they wheel and suddenly shoot off.

The sea seems to be giving birth. Sharks coming into the world: first the black crescent of the mouth which contrasts with the paleness of the snout, then the powerful roundness of the body, stabilized in the dense water by the pectoral and dorsal fins. The eye is perfectly round. A golden iris with a vertical anthracite pupil. It stares without letting go. The five gill slits, like exclamation marks. Then the muscles playing under the skin that is both granular and silky. A mass of energy, contained, ready to explode. Supreme power. Finally, the whip of the tail, like a white flag that leaves you spinning.

We reach the bottom. We wedge ourselves between a coral mass and a red sea fan. The biggest shark comes up to us, a large female grey reef shark. She measures at least 2.8 metres, maybe three metres, a giant for a species whose biggest individuals rarely exceed two and a half metres. This is a sure sign, no fishing in these parts. It is a pristine ecosystem. Indeed, these rare mature giants are the first to disappear as soon as fishing begins. And they are never replaced, because the harvesting rate is such that the young ones no longer have time to grow older and larger. This matriarch shows deep bites on her flanks and a large tear on her left fin, traces of her numerous couplings. This one scarred female tells the story of a world, of a former Earth, populated by such noble savages, prodigiously enormous beings who had grown old unmolested. This makes me forget the notes scribbled on my slate and my samples. Dull figures and words cannot convey such an impact.

Cousteau and Lord Longimanus

Returning from this survey, the decision was made to use the protective cage, given the abundance of large sharks. In these unexplored waters, Cousteau did not want to take any risks. He had been cautious since his misadventure with a big oceanic whitetip shark (Carcharhinus longimanus)5 in 1948 off the Cape Verde Islands. Memory does not fade away so easily. It left a deep impression on him, so much so that he, often discrete about his past adventures, told us the story many times around the Calypso’s dining table, and described it in several books, with various embellishments over time:

We had scarcely entered the water and were only fifteen or twenty feet below the surface when we saw Lord Longimanus … He resembled none of the sharks we had met before…. Confident – too confident – in ourselves, we dropped the line that still linked us with the ship [the Elie Monnier] and swam straight toward him. His squat, gray-brown silhouette was sharply etched against the clear blue of the water. His head was very round and very large, his pectoral fins enormous and his dorsal fin rounded at its extremities…. It was time – much too long a time – before we realized that the Lord of the Long Arms was drawing us with him into the distance, but was not in the least afraid of our approach. As soon as we realized this, we were seized with an almost paralytic fear and wanted nothing more than to return to our ship. But it was too late … Two blue sharks, very large but classic in form, came to join our longimanus and then the three squali began to dance around us, in a gradually narrowing circle. For twenty seemingly interminable minutes, the three sharks, prudently but resolutely, tempted a bite at us each time we turned our back on them or each time one of us went up to the surface to signal – in vain – to our far-off ship. Miraculously, the gig which the captain of the Elie Monnier had put overboard to look for us found us and saved us from imminent death. Shortly before we were hauled from the water I had arrived at the point of smashing my camera against the head of the longimanus, in the forlorn hope of warding off his attack and gaining a little time.6

Final exit from the shark cage

Even though we were not in the same situation – we didn’t have three kilometres of water under our flippers, only fifteen metres – we did not want to argue about J.-Y. C.’s (Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s) instructions or put ourselves in a difficult situation simply out of bravado. So, at 9.30 a.m. the shark cage was hanging from the end of the crane behind Calypso. It looked a bit like one of those papier mâché Mardi Gras decorations that are burned in public to mark the end of winter. It was a disturbing impression. Those steel bars, carefully painted yellow, behind which the pioneers of underwater exploration took refuge in ‘shark-infested’ waters, seemed quite useless at that moment. We had already had so many encounters with sharks that we had changed our minds about these unloved creatures. At the same time, this cage, the stuff of dreams of generations of divers and millions of television viewers, which had given me comfort in my childhood, linked me fraternally to my predecessors, those marvellous heroes of Calypso’s earlier odyssey.

Solemnly lowered in the Zodiac, the cage was tipped into the sea at the dive site, a few hundred metres further on. And what everyone predicted happened: the great whitetip sharks kept their distance, ceding the place to the many colourful small fry that are the soul of the reef. Only a few whitetip reef sharks (Triaenodon obesus) and a tawny nurse (Nebrius ferrugineus) came close enough to bump into Didier Noirot’s camera. No need to take refuge behind bars!

That was the last time the shark cage was used. Before day’s end it was dismantled and stowed, never again to bring a yellow glow to the Cousteau films; that special hue, that little something that made us Calypso’s intrepid frogmen. A page in the history of our relationship with sharks had been turned.

A peaceful dusk among the sharks

It was a frustrating day, so I dived again at dusk, this time alone. The sleek unicorn fish (Naso hexacanthus) and banana fusiliers (Pterocaesio pisang) that enliven the reef were already lying in crevices. I found the big whitetip sharks again. A dozen or so on the hunt. As in the morning, I could hardly make out the grey bodies that were blending in with the masses of coral reefs. But, despite the darkness – or perhaps because of it – the white tips edging their fins seemed luminescent. I found this ballet of white flashes hypnotizing and soothing, transporting me to a powerful, wild, former world, like a time traveller in communion with all the other living creatures around me, not only the sharks, but the fish and the coral. I felt alive, a part of that great incomprehensible wholeness – in the sense that it is totally beyond us – which is the mystery of life. Being part of the world of the animals, a world of raw meaning, without complex reasoning, intuitive, primordial. I imagined myself as a shark, or perhaps like those ambivalent shamanic creatures who bridge the gap between humans and Others, as a lycanthrope, a cynocephalus, half-man half-beast. I was overwhelmed by a deep desire to speak for the sharks, to be their conduit, their ambassador to my fellow man. I wanted to shout out loud about the peace they can bring.

‘Peace’, ‘calm’, ‘serenity’, these are the words that best describe these dives among our shark cousins. Writing now in 2021, thirty years later, I feel even more how privileged I was to have these precious encounters, the happiness of these rare moments.

Fig. 1 The final shark cage dive in the Andaman Islands as we dreamed it would be, surrounded by whitetip sharks.

An animal familiar to all, but which very few have seen

What a contrast with the fear that the mere mention of sharks arouses. Why is it so deeply rooted in our collective imagination, even among people who have never seen the sea, let alone sharks? Fear and rejection seem to be universal, whether among city dwellers in overpopulated megacities or cattle farmers in the American heartland.

In 1970, when he did a rerun of a television series, Cousteau did not hesitate; he chose to make a documentary devoted solely to sharks. He understood that, more than any other subject – sunken treasures and cities, dolphins and whales – sharks would fire up the viewers of his Odyssey:7

The first film in the series was scheduled to be the one most likely to intrigue and attract the attention of the viewers’, and what maritime subject is more fascinating to everyone than the shark? It is a legendary animal, known to all, even to those who live far from the sea.8

And that is the heart of the matter: an animal-familiar-to-us-all, but which we know no better than the dinosaurs that disappeared sixty-five million years ago.

Where does this familiarity with an unfamiliar animal come from? In the West, there is no trace of sharks in our legends or in our myths, which are, on the other hand, populated by wolves, bears, witches and dragons. Except perhaps in one of the many versions of the Greek legend of Lamia, daughter of Poseidon, who was turned into a shark by Zeus so that she could avenge the massacre of her children by devouring those of other peoples.9

The realism of the early naturalists

Unlike the fantastic accounts usually expected of ancient writers, the ancients’ description of sharks is more realistic than poetic. In his History of Animals, written in 343 BCE, Aristotle already recognized several species: the great white, the fox, the smooth hammerhead (Sphyrna zygaena), the blue shark, the spiny dogfish (Squalus acanthias), the catshark and the tope (Galeorhinus galeus).10

Three hundred years later, Pliny the Elder took up Aristotle’s writings and provided very relevant information on the reproduction of ‘cartilaginous fish … While the (bony) fishes are oviparous, these (the selachians) are viviparous like the cetaceans’.11 Pliny focuses on the threat that sharks pose to sponge fishermen:

A multitude of sharks infest the seas12 where the sponges are, to the great danger of divers … […] They attack the groins, the heels and all the white parts of the body. The only resource is to go in front of them and take the offensive. Indeed, they are as much afraid of man as they are of him. Underwater the game is equal, but on the surface of the water the danger is imminent, the diver loses the advantage of facing the shark as soon as he tries to surface. His only hope is in his companions.13

Centuries go by without a word on sharks

Little was added to our knowledge for centuries. Descriptions of marine animals, and especially sharks, were rare, particularly since scientists, philosophers and scholars were not sailors. They did not venture out onto the ocean where the underworld lies. They leave it to a few intrepid men, not quite human, not quite alive, nor even dead, to be bold enough to venture out onto the waves. Anacharsis, the philosopher, was astonished by the thinness of the hull of ships separating ‘the world of the living from that of the dead’.14,15

Worse still, knowledge of the marine world regressed dramatically in the Middle Ages. The Earth, which Anaxi Mandra of Miletus16 already knew to be spherical in the fifth century BCE and whose circumference had been calculated by Eratosthenes17 at the beginning of the second century BCE, became flat once again!

It was just a disc at that time, a central land area surrounded by the ocean, and at the border people fall into the abyss.18 Needless to say, in this context, history with a ‘human-terrestrials’ bias is written without sharks being properly described or even mentioned in the inventory of monsters.

By 1539 nothing had changed, but after twelve years of hard work, the Swedish archbishop Olaus Magnus offered Renaissance scientists his ‘Carta Marina’, a representation that brought together the knowledge that Westerners had of the marine world. Sharks did not even figure in his incredible bestiary, a dreadful world where mermaids, sea pigs, whales, unicorns, sea snakes, sea bishops, krakens and other dragons are milling about.

Even the famous naturalist Pierre Belon maintained the mixture of real and legendary in his Histoire naturelle des estranges poissons marins,19 written in 1551. There is a detailed description of the ‘monk-like sea monster’ as well as a fairly precise description of the sharks brought back by fishermen. In his magnificent 1577 Whale Book, Adriaen Coenen presented realistic paintings of sharks brought in to Dutch ports: the spurdog, the school shark, the hammerhead shark and the angular roughshark (Oxynotus centrina). But he too continued to pay a good deal of attention to sea monks and mermaids, still the most dangerous of monsters, along with the sperm whale and the kraken.20

Only Guillaume Rondelet, in his book De Piscibus Marinis, argued forcefully in 1554 that the Leviathan that swallowed Jonah was not a whale but a great shark, the lamia. ‘This fish is very greedy. It devours men whole, as we know from experience. In Nice and Marseilles, lamia were once caught, and in their stomachs they found a whole man with his armour on …’21 Is Rondelet referring to the legend of Lamia? In any case, this name was used by Mediterranean fishermen to designate the great white shark until the twentieth century.

Shark and wolf

At the same time, on the other side of the Earth, in the heart of the immense Pacific Ocean, the Polynesians worshipped sharks. Setting out from Melanesia in sailing canoes that carried entire clans, these exceptional sailors, experts in the art of orienting themselves by the stars, sailed for weeks on end without any land in sight. ‘Mother Earth’ for them is the ocean. Their mythology and stories are filled with sea creatures. Their gods are sperm whales, whales, turtles and, of course, sharks. These protective deities guide the sailors on their perilous journeys. Kamohoalii reigns over the pantheon of shark gods. He can take human form. Assisted by Kane-i-kokala and Ka’ahupahau, a human-born shark goddess, he protects sailors and rescues those shipwrecked.22

The Maori legend of the impossible love between Kawariki, the daughter of the Matakite sorcerer, and Tutira, the low-born slave transformed into a shark, is reminiscent of the story of Romeo and Juliet. But, as a seafaring people cannot get angry with the sea, the story has a happy ending thanks to Hinemoana, the goddess of the Ocean.23

As one might expect, in Europe, Asia, Africa, among all the ‘landlocked’ peoples, the shark, just like other sea monsters, does not feature in popular stories. Tigers, lions, turtles and wolves reign supreme. In Scandinavian mythology, the wolf, Fenrir, is an evil one, terrorizing the people, the knights and even the gods. For the Iroquois and Sioux, the wolf is a benefactor, guiding the souls of warriors across the plains of the Great Spirit. He is the father of the Mongolian people whose kings, led by Genghis Khan, are descended from the Blue Wolf, Börtea-Chino, symbol of Heaven. A she-wolf even presides over the foundation of Rome by suckling Romulus and Remus. The wolf is omnipresent, and a great master in extraordinary legends.

The beast of Gévaudan

France had nearly 20,000 wolves before the nineteenth century, so the story of the Beast of Gévaudan spread easily, terrorizing the whole country. The national and even the international press reported each attack extensively. For the first time, the media played a role in the creation of a supernatural being, installing the beast in everyone’s mind. The wolf emerged from folklore and entered the pantheon of diabolical creatures.

Marine creatures did not benefit from such public exposure. Notwithstanding a few frightening or heroic tales told by sailors, sharks did not interest a France of city dwellers and peasants. And it wasn’t John Singleton Copley’s 1778 painting, Watson and the Shark, that changed this, especially as this work – in which a shark attempts to devour Brook Watson (who was actually bitten and later became mayor of London) – remains exceptional among marine paintings.24

Paradoxically, in the nineteenth century, Mediterranean tuna fishermen appreciated the help of sharks. The naturalist Marcel de Serres has the following description:

We also see mackerel eating sardines just like tuna eat mackerel. The tuna themselves are in turn devoured by the sharks, which pursue them with such relentlessness and a kind of fury that they prefer to beach themselves on the coast rather than suffer the cruel death that awaits them under the sharp teeth of these tigers of the seas, with their insatiable appetites. The fishermen take advantage of the terror that the sharks inspire in the tuna to pick them up during the day. These facts are so well known to the fishermen of the Mediterranean coasts that the appearance of sharks is, in their eyes, a good sign that tuna are running.25

The literary debuts of the sea monsters

Thanks to the talent of some of the major writers of the nineteenth century, Westerners discovered the amazing bestiary, the real one, populating the ocean. The sperm whale, Moby Dick, was brought to the fore by Herman Melville, and the giant octopus was celebrated by Victor Hugo: ‘The devil-fish has no muscular organization, no menacing cry, no breastplate, no horn, no dart, no claw, no tail with which to hold or bruise; no cutting fins, or wings with nails, no prickles, no sword, no electric discharge, no poison, no talons, no beak, no teeth. Yet he is of all creatures the most formidably armed. What, then, is the devil-fish? It is the sea vampire.’26

Barely three years later, in 1869, Jules Verne, who, with his monumental Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea