Ideas - How Jaws made us believe white sharks are real villains

Episode Date: June 23, 2025

Fifty years ago, the movie Jaws put sharks on our radar in a very real way. It broke box office records and tapped into an underlying fear of sharks and the unknown lurking in the ocean. Turns out, sharks were already developing a villainous reputation before Jaws. In this documentary, producer Molly Segal explores the long history people have with the ocean, and our tendency across cultures and times to create 'sea monsters' out of the depths of the ocean. 

Ten years ago, I asked my partner Kelsey if she would marry me. I did that, despite the fact that every living member of my family who had ever been married had also gotten divorced. Forever is a Long Time is a five-part series in which I talk to those relatives about why they got divorced and why they got married. You can listen to it now on CBC's Personally. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayed. On June 20th, 1975, Jaws was released across North America. The movie was a game-changer. It smashed box office records to become, at that time, the highest grossing film in history. And it may have even been the very first of its kind, a summer blockbuster.

It has already made more money than any motion picture in history. The scientific types are horrified, but Jaws has made sharks popular. Steven Spielberg's massive hit also scared moviegoers away from the water. Which have millions of people leaving their local movie theaters after seeing Jaws and swearing they'll never even shower again. But it did something else too. People wanted to show off that they could get the Jaws, catch a white shark. Spielberg is a master at his craft and used images of the shark and even scenes without the shark to convey terror.

But on top of that, John Williams, the brilliant composer, his score further exacerbates that. So when you watch the movie, I mean, the shark really comes across as a villain, right? The villain is in some ways kind of a void where you can place your fears. And it radically changed the way people think about sharks because it was so visceral. Jaws did not cause people to fear sharks. The fear was already implanted in us.

It's like a primal, innate fear. And it just played upon that. So what's behind our age-old impulse to villainize the shark? Spoiler alert! If you've somehow managed to avoid all things Jaws till now, consider this your warning. I will be giving away the movie's ending. CBC producer Molly Siegel explores the cultural nerve that Jaws hid in her in this documentary titled Jaws and an Ocean Full of Monsters. The plot of the movie essentially comes down to this. of monsters.

The plot of the movie essentially comes down to this. The movie is really about a shark showing up in a tourist beach town. The shark strikes first at night. Young, blonde Chrissy Watkins out skinny dipping. One of the most famous scenes in Western cinema. And then the fight about how they're going to deal with it, and then ultimately you have three of the main characters go out and do battle with the shark and eventually defeat it.

You're going to need a bigger boat. There are three central characters. The first in the trio is Matt Hooper. Matt Hooper. Matt's an independently wealthy scientist, played by Richard Dreyfuss, who's called in to help deal with the shark. Then there's Quint, a gnarled fisherman played by Robert Shaw, who has his own axe to grind with sharks and leads the crew to find and kill the shark.

— But I'll catch him and kill him for ten. — And then there's Martin Brody. — I'm Brody, I'm Brody. — A cop played by Roy Scheider, who moves from New York to the small fictional town of Amity Island with his wife and two sons, only to encounter this villain, the shark. It's a movie about a shark that follows a cop to a small town, a villain who follows a cop to a small town. It's like your typical Western. You know, a good villain is aware that it's a villain.

The audience follows Brody around the whole movie. It meets the shark the same way, all that jazz. And by the end of the movie, it's just brody and the shark the shark really wants to get him for me jaws is a perfect movie it's one of those rare movies where you can watch it again and again and clean something new out of it every time there's a magic to the movie and i don't know exactly what it is it's a good study of the the id ego, super ego, if you really want to go crazy with that. It's got a great villain. That shark is a great villain. Well, my name is Melanie Engler. I live on the island of Motha's Vineyard. I've

been here since April of 2014. Gosh, I'm almost like a handywoman kind of thing. I work as a caretaker, landscaper, gardener, creative consultant. You know, that sounds kind of half-assed, but it's true. Just, I don't know, jack of all trades. Mechanic, in fact, this afternoon, I got to work on this guy's 66 Volkswagen. Melanie is also a mega-fan of Jaws.

I see it on the big screen at least once a summer because where I live they play it on the big screen all summer. Years after its June 1975 release, the movie was still bringing people together at screenings and festivals in ways that would, for some, define their lives. Like Jaws Fest in 2005, which brought hundreds of fans, cast, and crew to Martha's Vineyard,

which was the stand-in for Amity Island. I saw it on the internet, and I told my brother, I was like, you wanna go? And he's like, yeah, we'll go. Melanie's late brother even met his wife at Jaws Fest. I wouldn't have a niece without Jaws. And that niece was named after one of the lead actors. They wanted to name her Shaw as a thing for Robert Shaw.

As a young kid, Melanie saw the third sequel, Jaws 3, many times on cable TV. Yeah, it was on old time. So anyway, we were watching it one day and my mom's like, you know, there's a Jaws 1 and it's a much better movie. She rented Jaws 1, the first Jaws from HiHo video. In one scene Hooper, the scientist, and Brody, the cop, go looking for the shark at night. That's Ben Gardner's boat. And they come upon Ben Gardner's boat. Ben Gardner's a small character in the movie. Look Morton, I'm gonna go down there and check their hull.

Ben Gardner's boat, Ben Gardner's a small character in the movie. Look Morton, I'm going to go down there and check their hull. Hooper wants to go down and check the hull of the boat, probably to see if there's any teeth in it or anything like that. Then Hooper gets in his scuba gear and dives in. And he does find a tooth, but while he's searching for the tooth, he goes to a hole in the hull of the boat and a corpse pops out. And it's the way it pops out. The music, everything happening at once, it's very frightening.

Melanie looked away, but her brother saw the whole thing and he wasn't even five. I was six, it was 1983. Melanie would eventually finish the movie. But back in 1975, another kid watched Jaws for the first time. I'm John Chisholm. I'm an adjunct scientist at the New England Aquarium, and I study sharks. John was also fascinated by the same scene, not so much the jump scare with Ben Gardner's head,

which did terrify his brothers, but with the shark's tooth hooper plucks out of the Boats Hall. That fascinated me because my family's from Prince Edward Island, my father's family. And I knew the stories of white sharks in the area, going back to the late 19th century of different white sharks attacking dories up there. And the most infamous one was a Fortu rammer, the shark that knocked a hole in a boat off of Fortu, Nova Scotia.

The boat sank. One of the fishermen actually drowned. They identified it as a white shark because they pulled a white shark tooth out of the dory. If you're up on your jaws trivia, John tells me, you'll know that in an earlier scene, Brody flips through a copy of National Geographic with an article about this very incident. The National Geographic issue Brody was reading was the February 1968 issue, if I'm not showing off my Jaws nerd side enough.

But you know, that was already established, that was used in the movie because people were already aware of sharks. It's fear and fascination. It's one or the other, but no matter what, people just can't get enough of sharks, especially white sharks. — Details taken from real life help make the unreal parts of the movie real.

John was a bit too young to see the movie in theaters, though his uncle kindly let him watch it later that year. I was five going on six at the time and my parents were like, no, you can't, it's an R rated movie. I just wanted to see a shark. Do you remember what got you interested in great white sharks? I've always been interested. I was born a shark biologist. I was doodling sharks on my father's work invoices when I was still in diapers.

It's just always been there, the fascination with sharks. And I love white sharks, but there's so many other species of sharks too. There was a movie that came out before Jaws. It was a documentary called Blue Water White Death. The documentary came out in 1971, just a couple of years before Jaws went into pre-production. A movie crew arrives in South Africa determined to find the great white shark and to film it. They started out in South Africa and then finally found their white sharks with

Rodney Fox in Australia. So I had seen that before Jaws, but yeah I was already well on my way as a shark nerd before Jaws. Blue Water White Death was shot in Australia and South Africa and it featured divers Ron and Valerie Taylor, who went on to help shoot the cage diving scene in Jaws. And it's fair to say this documentary inspired things depicted in Jaws, both the movie and the novel before it. But it was Jaws that ultimately had, perhaps like no other movie before it, a massive ripple effect on the

real world. It had multiple impacts, both positive and negative. The positive side is, you know, it inspired a lot of young people to grow up and be shark biologists like me and a bunch of other people I know. But it also changed the way many people treated sharks. It definitely had an impact where people wanted to go out and catch these white sharks and just show off that they could catch a white shark, get the jaws, you know, really. It definitely had an impact where it increased shark fishing, recreational shark fishing,

I'd say more than anything. Sport fishermen saw white sharks as worthy opponents. And in the aftermath of Jaws, suddenly these sharks become highly fetishized. So owning a white shark tooth or saying that you successfully caught and killed a white shark takes on this new kind of resonance and importance. I'm Dr. Michaela Thompson. I am a historian and anthropologist of science, and I teach in the MIT anthropology and STS departments and at Harvard under the Sustainability and Global Development Practice Program. Michaela Thompson is also writing a book about the relationship humans have with great white sharks.

— It's called Shadows in the Water, Sharks and People in the 20th Century and Beyond. — Much like John Chisholm, Michaela was too young to see Jaws when it first came out. So when it was shown on TV in the early 80s, she sneakily watched it without her parents' knowledge. She was about six or seven. And it changed her young life. — I could not go in the bathtub because sharks were going to come through miles of plumbing into the bathtub and eat me.

— Michaela draws a direct line between that fear and one particular scene in the movie. There's one particular moment where Chief Brody, the main protagonist I would say in Jaws, where his son is in a lagoon, his boat is capsized, and it's the kind of first glimpse, true glimpse you get of the shark. The shark comes by and eats his would-be rescuer. And that in particular just, it was absolutely terrifying to me. I couldn't get it out of my head.

I mean, the shark really comes across as a villain, right? Pete Gerges is a professor of marine biology at Harvard University. Peter Benchley wrote the book. And here's, I think, a really important point. It was then picked up by Spielberg, who is a master at his craft, and used images of the shark,

and even scenes without the shark to convey terror. But on top of that, John Williams, the brilliant composer, his score further exacerbates that. So the movie was by design meant to instill terror because it was so visceral and so relatable. The shark is barely seen for really the first, pretty much two thirds of the movie, but it's this not quite seen menace that pulls people under the water. I mean, so for the first two major attacks on humans, you don't see the shark, you just see the person either getting pulled under dark water

or kind of disappearing in a spray of blood. Even though it is undeniably a shark, you can kind of put whatever you want on this villain because the villain is in some ways kind of a void where you can place your fears. A single shark stalking its prey, stalking us humans in the water, where we are out of our depth. The shark of Peter Benchley's 1974 novel was inspired by something called the rogue shark

theory, developed by an Australian surgeon, Victor Coppelson, from decades of monitoring shark attacks. In 1933, he published an article trying to debunk the claim that sharks were basically harmless to humans. And in 1958, he co-authored a book entitled, Shark Attack, How, Why, when, and where sharks attack humans? So the Rogue Shark theory, which is developed by an Australian surgeon called Victor Copleson, is the idea that one particular shark, for whatever reason, develops a predilection for

preying on human beings. Either because it's in some ways, like, dysfunctional and it can't eat its regular prey, or it just develops a taste for eating people. Now, this shark that swims along... Rogue. What's it called? Rogue. Rogue. And so it maintains a territory in which it deliberately seeks out people to bite and

eat. It's called territoriality. It's just theory. And so without the rogue shark theory, Jaws can't exist because the whole point of Jaws is that it's just one shark. It's not any number of sharks. And so once you remove the rogue shark from the area,

you've gotten rid of the bad shark. And then the water is once again safe for people. Along the coast of New South Wales, the surf bathing season gets underway. But with it also comes the graying menace of sharks, as terrors of the sea who yearly take their toll of unwary swimmers. By the late 1950s, sharks were starting to make the news. In spring of 1959, there were two teenagers, Albert Kogler and Shirley O'Neill, and they were at a beach called Baker Beach, which is right by San Francisco's Presidio.

So it's a city beach. We're not talking out in the sticks. They go for a swim. While they are swimming, Shirley O'Neill sees this big gray thing flapping up into the air, she says. Albert Kogler basically yells at her and says, get out of here, it's a shark. Instead of doing that, Shirley turns to him and swims towards him. She tries to catch hold of his arm. His arm is

really only hanging on by a thread. Nevertheless, you know, she manages to tow him to shore. Shirley, who's a very devout Catholic, in this moment of him, you know, lying in his own blood on Baker Beach, she baptizes him. And he does indeed pass away pretty swiftly thereafter. And this incident becomes so incredibly famous. It becomes covered by the press throughout the U.S. It is covered by the international press. It makes the front page in London.

The San Francisco Chronicle published a front page article with an image of a mounted great white shark specimen and It bears just the really stark legend, this is a killer. And what's interesting to me as a historian is the fact that they're saying this is a killer is not because everybody knows that. My sense is they're saying this is a killer to make sure that people know this because it was so far off people's radar,

so far out of their frame of reference to think of sharks as being something that hunted and ate humans. ... It absolutely, I think for so many people, is the first time that they even thought of sharks as being something that could be a threat to a human being. The shark attacks making news headlines, grabbing the public's attention, were also happening elsewhere. Starting in December 1957, there was a spate of attacks off the eastern coast of South

Africa. Over the course of basically the Christmas holidays in the Natal province, there are a series of attacks that take place off of beaches in and around Durban. Nine attacks in total, six fatal. It became known as Black December. They are seaside resorts and they rely on tourist dollars and it becomes clear that something needs to be done to make tourists and visitors to the region feel safe from the danger of sharks. And something that had been ongoing in the city of Durban itself and in other parts of the globe, including beaches off of Australia and Hong Kong, they had instituted something

called beach meshing or beach netting. Now this isn't a fence that keeps sharks away from people. Great white sharks were getting tangled up in the nets, some of them dying. Essentially acting as a preemptive cull of shark populations in the area. And so in the wake of Black December, the Natal Coast communities essentially demand that beach meshing slash netting be expanded to them. The issue escalated pretty quickly from a local level to a national one. And there is an acknowledgement from the South African Department of Tourism that the shark

menace, as it is called, presents a significant issue for the economy of these communities. That tension between the town's economy and beachgoer safety is the central conflict in Jaws. Those proportions are correct. Love to prove that, wouldn't you? Get your name into the National Geographic. The mayor, Mr. Vaughn, wants to make sure Amity Island can compete with other tourist towns despite the presence of a killer shark on the loose.

I think tomorrow's the Fourth of July, and we will be open for business. It's gonna be one of the best summers we've ever had. Now, if you fellas are concerned about the beaches, you do whatever you have to to make them safe. But those beaches will be open for this weekend. Beaches and other parts of the world also experienced their own versions of Black December. In 1964, Dunedin on New Zealand's South Island

had five shark attacks, three of which were fatal. A year earlier in Australia, the diver Rodney Fox, who would later be part of the Blue Water White Death documentary team, survived a major shark attack, leaving him with hundreds of stitches. Come along and meet Rodney Fox, a dedicated spearfishing champion who takes a spear gun tipped with revenge.

Now he searches out and kills every shark he can find. And it looked as though the rogue shark theory was getting played out around the world. These stories were chronicled in newspapers seemingly everywhere, stoking a fear of great white sharks, a fear that Michaela Thompson says was relatively new, at least in its current form. At every point, humans' changing uses of the ocean are also interwoven with technologies that made that possible. [♪ music playing in bright rhythm and rhythm of the music playing in background. For example, the evolution of swimwear.

From bulky bathing costumes you might wear to simply wade into the water to the advent of... ...new elastic fabrics that make for more streamlined swimsuits. And then there was another stretchy fabric, neoprene. It had been around since the 1930s, but it wasn't until the 50s that it started to be used for wetsuits. So when you see the rise of violent encounters between people and white sharks in places like California with the Chile Pacific, off of Cape Town in South Africa, which is also quite cold. This is partially because these new technologies have allowed people to access these spaces

in the first place and also stay in these spaces longer. And as surfboards got smaller and lighter, more and more people began going out on the water. The rise of summer vacations and the rise of the kind of suburbs, all of these things coalesced together with also these technological innovations to really basically result in the fact that there are more people, arguably than have ever been before, going to the beach and then going into the water. [♪ Music playing. Chorda might bite at their feet and quickly swim away. Basically, they're investigating. And they may take a bite and, you know, let you go.

Of course, when a great white does it, it's a much bigger deal for us. You know, they may contest bite. It could be a fatal bite if it hits an ottery. Shark scientist John Chisholm. And I use this example. you're gonna have a salad for dinner tonight you would stop at the grocery store by you know your ingredients and when you get to the tomatoes you'd pick them up and what do you do you squeeze the tomato to see is this a ripe tomatoes this is a too soft too hard you know sharks don't have hands so a lot of times they see

something and they they'll bite it. But when they do get us they don't have hands, so a lot of times they see something and they'll bite it. But when they do get us, they don't actually like us. Or as Jaws fan Melanie Englert would put it, When they eat a person, they kind of feel ripped off. Melanie saw her first Great White in 2016. You just saw it like pass and then you see the tail go like swoosh swoosh and then that was it. Then it went back down again.

I thought it was cool. I wasn't scared because I wasn't in the water. I didn't go back in the water either after that. I was like, screw that. — Okay, I'd like to take a second here to clear something up. The consensus among shark researchers is that we humans are not generally the target. But when a person does get too close, then it might elicit a shark's aggression. That would be a provoked bite. For example, when divers harass sharks, or when someone tries to feed a shark, or a spearfisherman

attacks one. You get the idea. That's all according to the Florida Museum, which, since 1958, has been keeping a yearly tally of our interactions with sharks globally. It's called the International Shark Attack File. Here are some numbers from their 2024 report. The museum investigated 88 interactions between people and two dozen different shark species around the world. They found that 24 of those were provoked bites, but just over half were unprovoked bites. A total of four were fatal.

None of the fatalities were caused by great white sharks in that particular year. What I'm trying to point out is that when it comes to fear versus facts, sometimes fear gets the better of us. Mr. Vaughan, what we are dealing with here is a perfect engine, an eating machine. It's really a miracle of evolution.

All this machine does is swim and eat and make little sharks. And that's all. They are a perfect predator. And they've just have evolved all these different attributes that help them be as flawless as you can get as a species. To me they look amazing. They're like perfection personified. Everything about them has been fine tuned

like a fancy race car, high performance car. You know, they have a fusiform body, which is basically a torpedo shaped body, the pointed nose. Not all sharks have serrated teeth, but white sharks, you know, they have the serration along the edge. When you look at them up close, it's a conveyor belt.

They always have another tooth in the line ready to go once they lose an old tooth. So they always have a fresh mouth, a full mouth of fresh teeth. And they're huge. Pictures don't do justice to just how big they are, you know. And they're, once they get up over 14, 15 feet, they have huge girth, not just the length, but the girth of the shark. It's like, you know, the size of a small car. And it's just, you can just see how powerful they would be

in, you know, out of the water, they are not as impressive, but in the water, they're very impressive. The sharks John and other scientists tag in Massachusetts travel from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. And they're rebounding after their favorite food, gray seals, became a protected species in the late 1990s. And later, protections came for white sharks in the U.S. and then Canada. But even as white shark populations in areas like the Northwest Atlantic rebound, shark

attacks remain rare. And yet, they're still scary. I think it touches on the fact that, particularly in the 20th century, that the ocean may be a restorative place of leisure, but it's also a scary place in which we are very fundamentally not at home. Michaela Thompson is a historian and anthropologist of science at MIT and Harvard. We can't breathe underwater. Our vision and our hearing are muffled.

So we're very much not at home there. And sharks are. I think in some ways they become a physical manifestation of our uneasiness around the ocean as the space that is in many ways seen as untamable. For me the biggest thing sharks symbolize is fear of the unknown. Melanie Englert. Of what you can't see, of what could come out to get you. If anyone hears the word shark at a beach everybody's gonna go running.

You yell shark? We've got a panic on our hands on the 4th of July. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca. You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts or on the CBC News app. I'm Nala Ayaad. Did you know Canadian news is still banned on Instagram and Facebook? And this August will mark two years since that ban began. So if you can't trust the algorithm to keep you updated, trust World Report instead.

I'm John Northcott. I'm Marcia Young. And we want to unblock you from the news that matters most. Give us 10 minutes every morning and we'll give you the biggest stories happening in Canada and around the world. You can find and follow World Report wherever you get your podcasts. The great white shark villain of Jaws didn't arrive on big screens in June 1975 out of nowhere. Jaws did not cause people to fear sharks. The fear was already implanted in us. This is shark scientist John Chisholm. This is shark scientist John Chisholm. And this is CBC radio producer Molly Siegel with her documentary Jaws and an Ocean Full of Monsters.

It's like a primal innate fear and it just played upon that and that's why the movie worked so well. Go back through history and look at the painting by Winslow Homer called The Gulf Stream of the Guy on the Raft Surrounded by Sharks. The 1899 painting by American artist Winslow Homer depicts a black man on a small boat rocked by rough seas, while a group of sharks surrounds the boat. The painting is layered with meanings. One of them is the conflict between people and nature in the form of sharks, a conflict captured in an even earlier painting featuring a 14-year-old boy named Brooke Watson.

The Watson and the Shark painting, that was the late 1700s, 1778, based on a 1749 shark attack in Havana Harbor, where Watson, who was 14 at the time, got his leg taken off by a shark. The painting featuring Brooke Watson was by John Singleton Copley. It depicts a small vessel crowded with men. Watson, in the water, is face-to to face with a shark bearing its fangs as others lean overboard to try and rescue him.

Whether the interactions are based on true or imagined events, humans have a long history of depicting the ocean and its creatures as forces to be reckoned with. Monsters are in the world, but not of the world. They are paradoxical personifications of otherness within sameness. This is an excerpt from Religion and Its Monsters, first published in 2002 by American scholar of religion, Timothy Beale.

That is, they're threatening figures of anomaly within the well-established and accepted order of things. They represent the outside that has gotten inside, the beyond the pale that, much to our horror, has gotten into the pale. He talked about this very idea of what is the other and what is us. And monsters, in many ways, kind of move between those two. In some ways, monsters are others, the things that we don't understand and control. But in some cases, those monsters are us and they reflect humankind's worst attributes.

My name is Pete Girgis. I'm a professor of marine biology at Harvard University, and I study life that lives in the deep ocean and how it influences ocean health. Pete Girgis also teaches a first-year seminar course called Sea Monsters. He explores our relationship with the ocean and its creatures, together with his students who bring in examples of sea monsters from their own cultures and traditions.

We found examples of sea monsters or sea deities, right, sea gods, going back millennia, right, if you talk about pharaonic Egypt, for example. There are examples there. There are examples in South Pacific Island traditions. But this is not new. This isn't just a 19th or 20th century phenomenon because we've started making movies and films and the like. It goes back much farther.

AMT – Archaeologists working in what's now Mexico have found Olmec depictions of a shark monster figure on ceramics and monuments. In his 2005 paper, The Shark Monster in Olmec Iconography, Philip Arnold dates these images between 1500 and 400 BCE and suggests that the defeat of the monster was part of a creation story. Well, I might as well do this right. I'm going to take you to the beginning of the exhibit. In 2024, Pete's popular course inspired an exhibit at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

Called Sea Monsters, Wonders of Nature and Imagination. Since I couldn't make it there in person, Pete gave me a virtual tour of some of his favorite things on display, like the medieval and Renaissance maps. This is a map of Iceland from a 1595 edition of Abraham Ortelius's atlas called the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. And it was a really, really famous compendium of maps. And on this map, we see so many portrayals of sea monsters.

The map is very colorful and, oddly, full of land animals. That have land representatives. — Now, if we go back almost to millennia, we find Pliny the Elder introducing a philosophy that for every land animal, there is an equivalent sea animal. — The ideas of Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist and naval commander, remained in currency centuries after his death. As I could see on one of the maps Pete showed me, many aquatic equivalents of creatures you'd could see on one of the maps Pete showed me, many aquatic equivalents

of creatures you'd normally see on solid ground. Creatures like sea chickens and sea cows and it gets even weirder. So right here you can see a depiction of a whale as a sea monster and we know it's a whale because it has spouts on the top. Right, okay, spouts. It looks to me like, I don't know, more sort of like lizard-y. The whales are portrayed as maybe having the head of a boar. So they'll have a pig snout with some tusks.

But then the whales often have this frilled collar like you might see on a lizard. And if you look closely, a lot of the whales have claws. Not only claws, but scales, red lips, and a fish-like tail. So, I mean, there's a lot of creative license going on here. But they look nefarious. And I think it's really interesting because our relationship with whales today is so different, isn't it? There's an almost universal love of whales that we see amongst people today, and that has not always been the case.

But these depictions, on the one hand done with reverence and love, to others looking nefarious and dangerous, all lead us to a question. What exactly is a sea monster? Part of the answer begins with the fact that maps like these were commissioned by wealthy patrons and were less likely to be used for actual navigation on a ship than they were to be displayed on that patron's wall. They can either say if a person is making a living with a fishing fleet, stay out of these waters. But those monsters can also be a cautionary statement

about the hazards of cross-cutting the North Atlantic, for example. And to warn sailors to navigate the waters with an eye out for other monsters, like the Kraken. Oh, I love, I love the Kraken. In large part because it was first really described by a Danish fellow around 1750 and from there it has just taken off. And I think the kraken, which really is referring to a large cephalopod, that's the scientific name that we use for squids and octopuses.

Like squids have those little fins on their heads, octopuses don't, but they have eight arms or eight arms and sort of two tentacles. And I think that's what makes them really unsettling. And in some Amazonian cultures, there's a legendary giant snake called Yakumama. The legend has it that Yakumama would suck up any living being that passed within a hundred paces of it. And so to protect themselves, the local people would blow on a conch horn before entering the water, believing that Yakumama would reveal herself as being there, and they could avoid

being eaten. When you look at sea monsters in the Judeo-Christian traditions, you immediately go to the Leviathan in the Book of Job, for example. Can you draw out Leviathan with a fish hook? Can you fill his skin with harpoons or his head with fishing spears? Lay hands on him. Think of the battle. You will not do it again. The Leviathan in the book of Job itself is a reflection of an older Canaanite creature called Lotan, which was a monster defeated by the god Hadad. These monsters in the Judeo-Christian tradition serve a similar purpose as they did in other traditions of the age.

They are examples of God's power, or on the other hand, they can be a metaphor for a powerful enemy. — Pete also points to a parallel kind of creature in the Hindu tradition. — There is a creature called Makara that's a half-terrestrial animal. It could be a deer or a crocodile or maybe an elephant in the front, and a half-aquatic animal, you know, usually like a deer or a crocodile or maybe an elephant in the front, and a half-aquatic animal, usually like a fish or a seal. The Makara is a guardian figure, protecting entrances to temples. They have this benevolence about them.

Two very major religious traditions of modern society have monsters baked into their holy texts and into their oral traditions. And of course, there's the biblical story of Jonah and the whale. You know, it's the story of God sending a big fish or a whale to swallow Jonah and to save him from drowning. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. And of course, while in the belly of the whale or this big fish, Jonah praised to God. I called to the Lord out of my distress and he answered me. And God had the big fish throw Jonah up. And it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.

Jonah went on to preach and warn people to be repentance. What fascinates me about the story of Jonah is that it immediately evokes this image of a very large creature swallowing a human, which even today I think most people would find unsettling, right? And then nevertheless though, this big fish or whale is what saved Jonah.

And I think that's kind of neat. Turns out that in real life, a large whale would not actually be able to swallow a human hold like this. Although the closest thing may be a video from early 2025 of a kayaker off the coast of Chile getting scooped up in a humpback whale's mouth, only to be spat back out unharmed. The fact that that video went viral with millions of viewers points to the enduring appeal of an ancient story like Jonah and the Whale.

It's this beautiful story of humankind's fear of the ocean and fear of the ocean creatures, but also of God's grace. There are also spiritual overtones in Herman Melville's classic novel of Captain Ahab seeking his revenge on Moby Dick. Which was a white whale that on a previous voyage destroyed his ship and severed his leg. Sharks do figure in, because bad things happen to this ship and this crew that I would say are a direct consequence of Ahab's obsession of hunting this white whale. And so sharks are not portrayed very nicely in this book.

The sharks, the sharks, cried a voice from the low cabin window there. Oh, master, my master, come back. But Ahab heard nothing, for his own voice was high lifted then, and the boat leaped on. Yet the voice spake true, for scarce had he pushed from the ship when numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out of the dark waters beneath the hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars every time they dipped in the water. You have Herman Melville as far back as Moby Dick, you know, saying that these are terrifying, ghostly,

flaky white sharks, which is not true because they're gray on top. As Michaela Thompson points out, we are continually reimagining the shark for ourselves. They've been called white death. They've been called just man-eaters. So if you look up the etymology of the term man-eater, even though it is applied to other animals as well, it generally is connoted with sharks and specifically white sharks, so it's the man-eater shark. You also have biologist E.O. Wilson saying, you know, that they are the kind of embodiment

of sharkness. You'll have people say that they're monstrous. You'll have people say that they're beautiful. You'll have folks say that they're, you know, villains. Eventually, I would say now in the 21st century, they've kind of been recast as heroes almost, as critical and ecological actors. So these are some of the ways

that white sharks have been framed. And there's another one. I have to admit, this one was new to me, the coward. The idea of shark as coward, which is also a way that other animal predators have been framed as well. You can see those kind of narratives woven around wolves and coyotes.

They were often also seen as competition for fish amongst fishermen. And so people weren't thinking about them as a threat to humans. They were thinking of them as a nuisance. Whether nuisance or man eater, it doesn't generally go well for critters that we decide are a problem. Yeah, it's basically the fear of something out of our control. Bears, lions, tigers, they also instill fear because we can be killed by them

and there's really not much we can do to control that if we find ourselves in a compromised position with them. But despite the various similarities to the large toothy animals on land, our relationship to those in the sea has an extra dimension. When you add in the element of the ocean and just the mystery, you can see a bear coming through the woods and try to escape if it's coming after you.

But when you're in the water water and people, I think, all too often take for granted that the water is like their personal pool. And it's really a wilderness area. It's just as wild as going into, you know, the Amazon or out on a safari in the Serengeti. And if you were gonna go on a safari, you would gear up. You would be prepared.

But yeah, when you add in that ocean factor that you can't see below the surface, you don't know what's there. Statistically, it's really unlikely that a great white shark will bite you. In fact, the number of people globally who die from great whites is usually in the single digits. Yet in 2019 alone, we humans killed more than 100 million sharks, intentionally and unintentionally, from fishing. And we're the ones afraid of sharks? Michaela Thompson. These random encounters in which, you know, a shark and a human meet and there's a violent

outcome, we want to explain why they happen. And we also wanna explain why they happen in a way that is comforting to us. So the idea of an animal that eats a person being somehow exceptional. So rather than simply saying, okay, there are any number of apex predators out in our ecosystem. Every once in a while, people and apex predators come into contact and that apex predator,

being opportunistic, decides, oh, that looks good, maybe I'll eat that. Instead of going with that narrative, we come up with the narrative of the rogue shark, the man-eating tiger or lion, the problem bear, an animal that is somehow unnatural, and that's why it eats people. The International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List found great whites are a vulnerable species. They live a long time, they're slow to reproduce, and people continue to kill them for sport. John Chisholm didn't even see one until 2004, many years into studying sharks.

It was a great white that had made its way to a salt pond across from Martha's Vineyard. And this shark showed up and was stuck in this area for about 14 days. We thought maybe with another storm, with a high tide, the shark might find its way back out. But when it didn't leave after a few days, we were getting concerned, like, people were going to want us to kill it and drag it out of there. And it was exactly the opposite. It's interesting because in 2004,

a great white came to the island. Melanie Englert. People were trying to shove it away with rubber rafts and stuff. I'm like, they're crazy. Everybody was just fascinated by it. People wanted to come out and see it. It got international attention. So they do make news around here.

In all our efforts to get it out, we finally successfully got it out on the 14th day. But it was really a great surprise to see how many people wanted this shark saved. And just the irony of it being literally in the waters where Jaws was filmed. You know, we could see Martha's Vineyard from where we were working. It was right across Vineyard Sound. Um, you know, just 50 years earlier in 1954, a few islands away on Cuttyhunk Island, another shark about the same size, another white shark, swim into Cuttyhunk Harbor.

And they killed it. You know, no questions asked. They, they just killed it. And it just shows how even though sharks, a lot of people still fear them, attitudes are changing. Today, decades after this rescue, shark populations have continued to rebound. In Atlantic Canada, great white sightings used to be rare.

A recent paper looking at tagged white sharks in the Northwestern Atlantic documents an increasing presence of the species in recent years. But there's still a lot that scientists don't know. We know where the nursery areas are, but we still, no one's ever seen one give birth. We don't know where they mate. No one's ever seen them mate. I've seen white sharks that definitely behave differently than, you know, some are very mellow

and some are like really high strung. I think they do have individual personalities, just from the ones I've seen and how differently some of them behave. But, you know, it's hard to prove that. But it's a good question. Why do you think white sharks represent wildness? To me, white sharks represent wildness. You know, the uncontrolled, unrestrained, just a species that we, when we go into the ocean, we're in their world. It's hard for me to put into words just that awe.

I'm in awe of them. I think if we take a long, hard look at ourselves, we see that we do some awful things to one another. I personally think we also do awful things to the world we live in. We humans benefit from having a way to talk about the horrors of humanity without talking about a person or ourselves. It's too much.

And I think we are often unwilling to look at ourselves and say, yeah, we humans can do some awful things. So we put them, we heap them upon sea monsters. And it gives us a way to talk about these horrible things that we do to one another without such an overwhelming sense of shame or guilt or anger. So I think that's one role that the stories of sea monsters play in our cultures. There's also another role that so-called sea monsters, like sharks, especially great whites,

play in our culture. When Michaela was doing her PhD field research in South Africa, she spent a few days volunteering on a cage diving boat. This shark arrives at the boat and she was a massive five meter female. And as she would resurface every time, my brain would not be able to fully comprehend what I was seeing because she was just so enormous and so almost otherworldly. I became aware of the fact, one, that this was an animal that was a thinking animal because it was clearly just there to check the boat out.

And also that this was a creature that was, in some ways, just profoundly alien to me. There was just this sense that we would never be able to have a kind of common means of communication, that it saw the world in a way that I put on this moment in time, this interaction with this profoundly alien creature, it didn't matter. The absolute sense of having a moment where all of the kind of commonalities, all of the kind of everyday stuff fell away

and there was just this huge amazing creature in front of us. You were listening to Jaws and an Ocean Full of Monsters by CBC radio producer Molly Siegel. Special thanks to Heather Bowlby and David Schiffman. Readings by Greg Kelly. Danielle Duval is the technical producer of ideas. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. The senior producer is Nikola Lukcic. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.