‘Jaws' made people fear sharks. 50 years later, can it help save them?
When 'Jaws' debuted in U.S. theaters 50 years ago today, it helped launch a new era in American movies. Steven Spielberg's blockbuster about a bloodthirsty great white terrorizing a beach town also stoked fear and fascination, exacting a toll on sharks.
After 450 million years of evolutionary history, shark populations are collapsing, and more than a third of shark species and their relatives face extinction. Now scientists are trying to use the lure of 'Jaws' to advance shark conservation efforts.
With the exception of surfers and fishermen, people 'didn't think about sharks much' 50 years ago, said David Shiffman, a marine conservation biologist at Arizona State University. But after 'Jaws' was released, many summer beachgoers began to worry about sharks, even though attacks on humans are rare. Last year, there were 28 confirmed unprovoked bites in the United States — and only 47 worldwide.
This excessive fear of sharks was termed the 'Jaws effect' and helped fuel a surge in shark-fishing competitions — especially targeting white sharks.
Although sportfishing posed a threat to sharks, Shiffman said the most significant impact of 'Jaws' was more indirect. When the film came out, industrial fishing was just beginning to ramp up, and the risks posed to shark populations by commercial fisheries have become clear over time.
'Unsustainable fishing practices are the single largest threat to marine biodiversity, including but not limited to sharks, more so than climate change, more so than plastic pollution, more so than oil spills,' Shiffman said.
Following the release of 'Jaws,' efforts to protect sharks lost traction. The lack of movement to curb indiscriminate fishing techniques or take specific action to prevent the targeting of sharks for their fins and meat led to sharp declines in global shark populations.
An estimated 100 million sharks are killed each year, according to studies, and the global number of oceanic sharks and rays has declined by 71 percent since 1970.
'We know over the last 50 years, in the period really since 'Jaws' came out, that shark populations worldwide have been absolutely smashed by fishing,' said Colin Simpfendorfer, a shark fisheries researcher at James Cook University in Australia. 'We didn't do a lot about it because a lot of people thought sharks were bad and getting rid of them was probably a good thing.'
In 2022, Congress attempted to address the issue of shark finning — the practice of chopping the valuable fins off live sharks and dumping their bodies overboard. But banning finning in the United States has had little effect on the practice in international waters, especially in Asia, where the fins are prized as the main ingredient in shark fin soup.
Studies have shown that bans on finning have been largely unsuccessful as long as the sale of shark meat remains legal.
The European Union restricts the trade in shark fins, and the 2022 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora expanded protections for 97 shark species and further restricted the international shark trade, but effective enforcement remains a challenge.
Citizen-led efforts across the world have gained momentum, including the launch of the Asian Shark and Ray Alliance this year to drive conservation across the continent. An increase in dive tourism has also spurred protection efforts in Southeast Asian nations like the Maldives and Indonesia.
For endangered sharks, it's a race against time to gather information that might help save them. And while 'Jaws' might have contributed to the harms of unsustainable fishing practices, researchers and conservationists are now attempting to use the film to further scientific understanding and influence public policy.
'It created a fascination with sharks, and people began to realize we don't know that much about them, and a huge amount of research has happened on sharks and exploration of their lives in the last 50 years,' said Steve Palumbi, a marine biologist at Stanford University.
Wendy Benchley, a conservation advocate and widow of author Peter Benchley, who wrote the novel on which 'Jaws' is based, said the enthusiasm generated by the film has been a powerful tool.
'Thousands of people around the world wrote letters to Peter saying, 'Oh I'm just riveted by sharks, I can't wait to learn more,' ' Benchley said. ' 'Jaws' has, and I have, been working on this for 50 years. So this moment is important because people are concentrating on sharks and on 'Jaws.' '
This interest has driven scientific advances that enabled researchers to study sharks' responses to pollution, stress and environmental change. The key to that research can be found in sharks' jaws: their teeth.
Shark teeth, which are replaced every few weeks, can number in the thousands over a shark's lifetime. The chemical makeup of the teeth can reveal information about the environment the sharks lived in. And increasingly, their accumulation — or absence — is helping track how human activity has reshaped ocean life.
'There's been some really interesting work to reconstruct the population of sharks to understand exactly when human populations start to really affect sharks, and how dramatic that effect has been,' Simpfendorfer said.
Recent studies have also confirmed sharks' importance to maintaining coastal food ecosystems, with significant human implications.
'Understanding the role they play in ecosystems is a powerful argument for understanding why we should protect them,' Shiffman said. 'We want healthy food chains off our coasts because they provide billions of humans with food and tens of millions of humans with jobs. And to have a healthy food chain, you need a healthy top of the food chain.'
Yet as shark populations hurtle toward extinction, the perception issue persists.
Other apex predators such as tigers, polar bears and lions have benefited from forceful worldwide conservation campaigns that have translated into legal protections. But sharks haven't received the same degree of attention.
'Jaws' has already given white sharks a much-needed boost, and conservationists are hoping this will translate to other species.
'Great white sharks are actually one of the best studied and best protected species of sharks, and that is in no small part because of the fascination from 'Jaws,' ' Shiffman said. 'There are many other species that are doing much, much worse. There are many shark species that don't have five scientific papers about them.'
In the United States, some researchers are noticing a greater harmony between the public and sharks.
'Over the last five to eight years, more and more sharks have been hanging around the beaches of Cape Cod,' Palumbi said. 'It's led to more people realizing that they have to give way, that they have to share space with white sharks, and that means moving someplace else to swim, not going to places that the white sharks are hunting.'
John Baker, president and chief program officer at WildAid, a conservation group, is hoping this trend will continue.
'With the spotlight back on 'Jaws' after 50 years, we kind of need to elevate the image of sharks as the 'polar bear of the ocean,' ' Baker said.
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