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The Predator We Created

Long before most of us ever see a shark in the wild, we already think we know what one is supposed to be. A dorsal fin cutting through the surface, a flash of teeth, a dark shape moving beneath a swimmer. Something watching, circling, and waiting.

Sharks have become so closely associated with danger that the imagery barely needs explanation. Two notes of music can evoke a shark without on ever appearing on a screen. A fin above the water can transform a normally peaceful ocean into something frightening. Headlines announcing, “SHARK ATTACK!” can travel around the world within hours.

But our fear of sharks didn’t just begin with Jaws. And Jaws alone did not create the predator we imagine today. That image been built over decades through real tragedies, survivor accounts, movies, news coverage, and the way humans perceive predator and risk.

Before Jaws

Thirty years before Steven Spielberg’s shark took its first bite out of Amity Island; the sinking of the USS Indianapolis became part of one the most horrifying survival stories of World War II.

After delivering components for the atomic bomb to Tinian Island, the Indianapolis was hit by two torpedoes from a Japanese submarine on July 30, 1945. Approximately 300 men died at the initial blasts, with the remaining 900 men going into the water with very few life rafts, no food, and almost no drinking water. Even with facing dehydration, exposure, exhaustion, and injuries, it was the sharks that became one of the most enduring parts of the story (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 2021).

Survivor accounts described sharks moving among the men and taking some of those who died or were still alive. Exactly how many deaths were due to the sharks, remains uncertain. This is because in later retellings, the distinction between men killed by sharks bites and those who from the many other obstacles they face in the water have been blurred with time.

Decades later, that story reached an entirely new audience through a fictional shark.

In Jaws, shark hunter Quint recounts surviving the sinking of the Indianapolis. His monologue connects the film’s fictional predator to a real historical tragedy, collapsing memory, fear, and fiction into one of the most memorable movie scenes, ever.

But the shark in Jaws was different from the sharks the sailors encountered in the wreckage of the Indianapolis, this shark had a target.

When the Shark Became the Villain

Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel Jaws, followed by Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation in 1975, introduced millions of people to a great white shark that repeatedly pursued people along the fictional beaches of Amity Island.

This shark was not simply an animal capable of harming someone, it functioned as an antagonist. It returned. It pursued. It seemed to methodically choose its victims.

That distinction matters.

When we describe an animal as “attacking” we can unintentionally assign motivation to behavior we do not fully understand, majority of the time. Researchers Christopher Neff and Robert Hueter have challenged the broad use of the term “shark attack,” noting that encounters ranging from contact without injury to fatal bites have historically been placed beneath the same emotionally driven and powerful label (Neff & Hueter, 2013).

As they put it “Not all ‘shark attacks’ are created equal.”

This distinction does not make serious or fatal shark bites a less real, however it does raise a different question: What do we assume about an animal when we describe its behavior using the language of intentional violence?

Jaws was hardly the last story to take advantage of the fear. Nearly three decades, Open Water placed two stranded scuba divers alone at sea as sharks gradually appeared abound them. The Shallows showed us a great white circling a surfer trapped on a rock. Dangerous Animals showed us how humans are more dangerous than these animals but used sharks to carry out their evil deeds. Deep Blue Sea had genetically altered sharks, hunting the scientists that experimented on them.

All of these films return to the same basic imagery: people enter the ocean, sharks appear, and humans become prey.

When Fiction Meets the Headlines

Movies are easily recognized as entertainment but when something we’ve only seen in movies become news headlines, it hits differently.

When a shark bites someone in Florida, Australia, South Africa, or anywhere else in the world, the injuries can be devastating, and fatalities do occur. These events deserve to be reported, and the experiences of the people involved should not be minimized, but the way those encounters are described shapes the kind of animal people imagine.

Muter et al. (2013) examined 300 shark-related articles published across 20 major newspapers in the United States and Australia between 2000 and 2010. More than half focused primarily on shark attacks. Conservation, despite the threats facing many shark species, was the primary topic of only 11 percent of the articles. The pattern was particularly pronounced in the Australian newspapers included in the study, where 58 percent of the articles primarily concerned shark attacks, compared with 47 percent of those from the United States.

Basically, it was found that media coverage focused on and emphasized the risks sharks pose to people far more than the conservation risks facing sharks themselves. This distinction matters, as an individual story about a shark bite can be completely factual while still contributing to a much narrower picture when those are the stories audiences encounter most often. 

If much of what we learn about sharks and if our encounters with sharks are overwhelmingly mediated through stories of bites, injuries, or deaths, then an unusual interaction can begin to feel representative of the animals themselves.

The Summer of the Shark

Florida provides a particularly useful example. Its beaches attract millions of people into warm coastal waters that are also habitat for sharks. When multiple incidents occur within a short period however, individual encounters quickly become a larger story.

One of the clearest examples of this came in 2001.

That July, eight-year-old Jessie Arbogast was severely bitten by a bull shark while swimming near Pensacola , Florida. His was severed, recovered from the shark, and later surgically reattached. The extraordinary circumstances surrounding his injury and rescue drew enormous national attention.

Then there was another bite. And another. And another.

With reporters already following Arbogast’s recovery, subsequent shark encounters increasingly became part of the same developing story. George Burgess, then the director of the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida, later recalled that he ordinarily received around 300 media inquiries about sharks in an entire year. During that summer from July through September, he conducted more than 900 interviews (University of Florida, 2002).

Then Time put that phenomenon on it’s cover: Summer of the Shark

There was one major problem though, there really wasn’t a surge in human shark interactions.

The International Shark Attack File ultimately recorded 76 unprovoked shark incidents worldwide in 2001, down from 85 the previous year. Fatalities were down also, from 12 in 2000 to 5 in 2001 . Burgess later characterized 2001 not as an extraordinary year for sharks, but as: “the summer of the media feeding frenzy” (University of Florida, 2002).

The sharks had not become more dangerous, all of a sudden, the story just became bigger.

Surviving the Animal, You Feared

Statistics like those from the summer of 2001 can put shark bites into perspective but statistics can also make it easy to forget that behind every serious incident is a real whose like can change in seconds.

Paul de Gelder knows that better than most.

As an Australian Navy clearance diver, de Gelder spent much of his career in the water despite being terrified of sharks. Looking back on that period of his life, he’s been very open about feeling like the ocean would be better without them so he could do his job without fear (Stanton, 2026).

In February 2009, this fear became very real.

Paul was conducting a training exercise with the Australian Navy in Sydney Harbor when he came face to face with a bull shark. The shark attacked without warning, severing his right hand and causing major injury to his right leg, which was later amputated. He was left swimming in his own blood to help.

It would be easy to assume surviving such a catastrophic event would confirm everything he already believed about sharks but instead he decided to learn more about them.

Due to his story having widespread media attention, de Gelder became someone reporters repeatedly contacted whenever another shark incident occurred. He realized that is he was going to speak publicly about sharks; he needed to understand them. He explained in a 2026 interview that he began researching the animals because he did not want to appear uniformed when discussing them on television. The more he learned, the more his perspective changed with him saying “The more research I did, the more I realized how little we have to fear from them, and how much they have to fear from us” (Stanton, 2026)

Thus, was born Paul de Gelder, shark conservation advocate.

Not only did he return to diving, but to diving with sharks. Paul is a regular host on Discovery’s Shark Week, diving with great whites and even hand-feeding bull sharks.

Perhaps what makes his story so relevant is that his changing perspective did not require pretending that sharks are harmless. De Gelder carries permanent physical evidence of what large sharks are capable of. He also does not describe the shark that bit him as something deserving of blame. He understands that he entered the shark’s environment and willingly chose a life that involved risk.

That leaves us with something more complicated than any version of sharks we are often given. It leaves us with the realization that understanding risk does not require denying it.

There Is No One Shark

But there is another problem with the shark we have created: they’re often talked about as if they’re one animal.

The sharks of movies, headlines, and our deepest fears are usually large, predatory, and unmistakably built from the handful of species most familiar to us. Great whites. Tiger sharks. Bull sharks. The all have come to represent an entire group of animals that is far more diverse than the image media and humans have created for them.

Say the word shark to anyone and chances are you picture something fairly specific. A dorsal fin breaking the surface. Rows of teether. A large shadow of a body under water.

You probably don’t picture a whale shark filter-feeding tiny prey, a wobbegong lying camouflaged against the seafloor, a shyshark curling into a tight ring with its tail covering its eyes when threatened.

But all of them are sharks.

There are over 500 known species of sharks, occupying habitats that range from shallow tropical reefs and coastal estuaries to the open ocean and deep sea. They vary in size, shape, diet, behavior, habitat, reproductive strategies, and the ecological roles they fill (Cooper et al., 2024; Sorenson et al., 2014).

The animal we’ve spent decades turning into a single cultural character was never a single animal to begin with.

The Sharks Beneath the Stories

If we strip away the movie scores, headlines, and stories that have followed sharks for generations, what are we left with? Not a villain or a monster but also not a harmless, misunderstood animal.

We are left with sharks.

Animals that have survived hundreds of millions of years of change, diversified into hundreds of species, and evolved remarkably different ways of navigating, feeding, reproducing, and surviving in nearly every corner of the ocean (Cooper et al., 2024; Sorenson et al., 2014).

Understanding sharks means allowing them to be what they actually are: predators, scavengers, filter feeders, hunters, prey, competitors, and participants in complex marine ecosystems. Some are solitary, others form social groups, some travel thousands of miles, others spend much of their lives within relatively small area. Some give birth to live young, while others lay eggs. Some species can live for centuries, while the lives of others are measured in decades.  And even among members of the same species, behavior is not always identical (Chapman et al., 2015; Nielsen et al., 2016).

The real shark is far more interesting than the character we created it to be.

Built for Their Worlds

Part of what makes the shark we see on screen so effective is the idea that it is almost perfectly designed to find us. It can smell blood from impossible distances, sense the slightest bit of movement in the water, and somehow knows exactly where it’s prey is hiding.

There is some truth buried beneath these exaggerations.

Sharks possess an impressive collection of sensory systems, but they did not evolve them to hunt humans. They evolved them to navigate environments that can be dark, noisy, murky, enormous, and constantly changing. And we’ve already encountered an extreme example of what these senses can detect.

When the USS Indianapolis sank in 1945, the sharks did not simply appear because hundreds of sailors were injured, floating in the Pacific Ocean. Accounts from the disaster suggest the explosions and sinking ship initially drew sharks towards the area. Once there, blood, bodies, and the movement of hundreds of survivors struggled at the surface provided additional sensory cues.

What sounds like a horror story makes more sense when we understand how sharks experience their surroundings.

Sharks do not rely on a single sense to understand the world around them. They can detect sound and vibrations traveling through the water. Their lateral line system allows them to detect water movement and pressure changes around their bodies, while their olfactory and electrosensory systems provide other forms of information about their surroundings (Bellono et al., 2018; Gardiner & Atema, 2007).

Some sharks have demonstrated attraction to low-frequency, pulsed sounds. Early field experiments found large sharks responding to sounds predominantly between 20 and 60 Hz, while later experiments with reef sharks showed that the pattern and intermittency of low-frequency sounds also influenced attraction (Nelson & Gruber, 1963; Nelson & Johnson, 1972).

That doesn’t mean we can say the explosions from the Indianapolis acted as a literal dinner bell. Different sounds can produce different behavioral responses in sharks, and more recent research has demonstrated that some underwater sounds can actually reduce shark presence or inquisitive behavior (Chapuis et al., 2019).

But there is a much less horrifying example of sharks responding to sound; some sharks might be metalheads.

Heavy-metal music, such as AC/DC, has been played underwater to attract sharks, including white sharks (Elle, 2021; Myers, 2026). Of course, there is no evidence that sharks have a musical preference for heavy metal; however, the acoustic characteristics of the sound itself, including the low-frequency components and vibrations that the sharks are capable of detecting.

In one situation, that sensory world might contain explosions, movement, and chaos surrounding a sinking ship. In another, it might contain an underwater speaker blasting, You Shook Me All Night Long. The shark doesn’t know the story attached to either, it’s simply responding to the information moving through the water.

More Than a Nose for Blood

Of all their senses, smell may be the one sharks are most famous for.

We’ve all heard the claim of “a shark can smell a single drop of blood from miles away” at least once in our life. It’s an effective piece of the mythology surrounding sharks because it transforms these creatures into something almost supernatural. It’s like a scene from a vampire movie: single drop of blood from a pinprick and every vampire’s nose around is in the air tracking it to the human source.

There is no doubt that sharks have highly developed olfactory systems, and smell plays an important role in locating food. However, detecting an odor and locating its source are not the same thing. Sharks must interpret chemical information as it is dispersed and transported through moving water, and research has demonstrated that other sensory systems, including the lateral line, can contribute to following an odor plume toward its source (Gardiner & Atema, 2007).

A big thing to remember too, smelling something does not mean the shark immediately makes a beeline toward it looking for a meal. More importantly, sharks aren’t navigating their underwater world with just their noses.

Along the sides of a sharks body runs the lateral line; a sensory system capable of detecting water movements and changes around the animal. This provides information about nearby movement that may not be immediately visible.

Then there’s perhaps the most alien of their senses, the ampullae of Lorenzini. Connected by tiny pores across the shark’s head, these allow them to detect extremely weak electrical fields, including those produced by muscle and nerve activity of living animals. For some species, this can help them locate prey even when it’s hidden under the sand or difficult to see.

What seems completely supernatural and alien to us, is simply an animal experiencing the ocean in ways different from our own.

Not Every Shark Hunts the Same Way

Even the word predator can flatten the diversity among sharks.

Some sharks actively pursue prey, others rely on camouflage and ambush. Depending on the species, shark may consume fish, squid, crustaceans, marine mammals, other sharks, and an enormous variety of other prey. Then there are sharks whose feeding strategies barely resemble the predator we usually picture at all.

Whale sharks, basking sharks, and megamouth sharks are filter feeders. Rather than pursuing seals or large fish, they filter plankton and other small organisms from the water. Wobbegongs flatten their bodies and camouflage themselves to disappear against the seafloor, waiting to strike passing prey.

There isn’t one shark hunting strategy because there isn’t one shark lifestyle.

Even among the large predatory species responsible for much of our culture image of sharks, feeding behavior is more complicated than an animal endlessly searching for something to attack. Predators have to make decisions about when to pursue potential prey, when to conserve energy, and whether the potential award is worth the risk or effort.

More Than Instinct

Swim. Find prey. Attack. Eat. Repeat.

This almost mechanical behavior is often the image we have of sharks, but their behavior does not fit quite so neatly into that sequence.

Research has shown that sharks can learn, retain information, change their behavior through experience, and form social associations. In some species, individuals repeatedly associate with particular sharks rather than moving randomly among every available member of the population (Brown & Schluessel, 2022).

Researchers have also documented consistent behavioral difference among individuals. One shark may be more willing to explore or approach something unfamiliar, while another member of the same species behaves more cautiously.

That doesn’t mean we need to assign sharks human personalities or motivations; it means that belonging to the same species does not necessarily produce identical behavior. A shark is shaped by its species and biology but it is also an individual animal interacting with its environment and responding to its experiences.

Suddenly, the idea of the mindless predator becomes much harder to maintain.

Predator and Prey

Being a predator does not mean they’re invulnerable.

Young sharks often become prey to larger fish and other sharks. Larger specied may consume smaller ones. And eve some of the ocean’s most recognizable predatory sharks can themselves become prey.

Enter the orca.

In several parts of the world, killer whales have been documented preying on sharks, most impressively the great white. Observations have also raised questions on how the presence of orcas alone have affected where sharks will congregate and use an area.

In South Africa, the now well-known male orcas Port and Starboard have been associated with predation on large sharks, primarily white sharks, but also the local bronze whaler sharks as well. The presence and predation of Port and Starboard have been associated with major changes in white shark occurrence in parts of South Africa’s Western Cape (Guardian staff reporter, 2025; Peirce, 2019). But this behavior isn’t limited to South Africa or even to one species of shark.

In the Gulf of California, researchers have documented killer whales hunting bull sharks, whale sharks, and, most recently, juvenile white sharks. During documented white shark predation events, the orcas manipulated the sharks upside down and targeted their energy-rich livers, even passing liver tissue among members of the group (Higuera-Rivas et al., 2025).

That last example is especially interesting because the prey were great white sharks; one of the very animals most responsible for our cultural image of the shark as the ocean’s ultimate predator.

Yet here, the shark was prey.

This knowledge, changes the apex predator image we have of sharks. It makes us realize that a sharks place on the predator scale, depends greatly on species, age, location, and what other apex predators are around. Predator describes an ecological relationship, it does not describe the entire animal.

Built Different

Perhaps some of the most important differences among sharks are the ones that receive the least attention. Sharks do not all grow at the same rate, mature at the same age, live for the same length of time, or produce the same number of offspring.

Their reproductive strategies alone are remarkably diverse. Some lay egg cases. Others give birth to live young. Gestation can be lengthy, and some species produce relatively few offspring at a time.

At the extreme end is the Greenland shark.

Living in the cold waters of the North Atlantic and Arctic, Greenland sharks have taken the slow approach to life to an almost unbelievable level. They grow extremely slowly and may live for centuries. A 2016 study that used radiocarbon dating of eye-lens tissue from 28 female Greenland sharks estimated a minimum lifespan of at least 272 years. The largest shark examined, measuring just over five meters, was estimated to be 392 ± 120 years old (Nielsen et al., 2016).

A Greenland shark that washed ashore in Ireland in 2026 offered a striking example of what those numbers mean for an individual animal. At roughly three meters long, researchers estimated the shark was more than 150 years old. By human standards, it had lived an extraordinary life. By Greenland shark standards, researchers believed it may have only recently reached reproductive maturity. As marine biologist Emilie De Loose explained after examining the animal, it may have taken around 150 years just to reach the point where it could contribute offspring to the population (Hardach, 2026).

And there is still an enormous amount we don’t know.

These differences matter for reasons extending far beyond interesting biology. A species that grows slowly, takes years or even decades to reach reproductive maturity, and produces relatively few offspring cannot necessarily replace individuals as quickly as they are removed from a population. Other shark species have faster life histories and may respond differently to the same pressures.

That means there is no single answer to how vulnerable “sharks” are, just as there was never a single shark to begin with. But for many species, the biology that allowed their ancestors to persist through hundreds of millions of years of change is now colliding with something very different:

Us.

Beyond the Fin

For generation, our attention has focused on the danger sharks might pose to us. Now many of us are beginning to ask the reverse question: What danger do we pose to them?

It would be easy to answer that question with a familiar image. 

A shark pulled from the ocean. Fins removed. Body discarded back into the water.

Shark finning has become almost synonymous with shark conservation. It’s graphic and difficult to watch but simple to understand. Documentaries, conservation campaigns, photographs, and advocacy efforts have helped turn the fin trade into one of the most recognizable examples of human exploitation and devastation of sharks.

The fin trade is not a relic from the past either. Shark fins remain valuable internationally, and recent research continues to identify conservation and enforcement problems within the trade. Genetic analysis of pelagic thresher shark fins sold in Hong Kong, for example, revealed geographic patterns inconsistent with reported legal trade under CITES, suggesting substantial unreported trade continued after the species was listed (Cardeñosa et al., 2026).

There’s a reason this image became so powerful. Sharks entered the conservation conversation carrying decades of bad press and cultural baggage. The same animals movies taught us to fear, headlines warned us about, and generations of stories turned into symbols of danger were suddenly shown in a very different light.

This time the shark wasn’t the threat. It was a victim.

That switch has helped tell a different kind of shark story.

The Conservation Story We Know – Finning

Shark finning refers specifically to removing a shark’s fins (dorsals, pectoral, pelvic, anal, and lower portion of tail fin) and then tossing what’s left of the shark back into the water, at times still alive and unable to swim.

Measures intended to prevent finning increasingly include requirements that sharks be brought to the shore with their fins naturally attached. Fisheries-management bodies have described this as one of the most reliable ways of enforcing finning bans because inspectors can more readily determine what was caught and reduce opportunities for fins and bodies to be recorded separately.

The cruelty and waste associated with finning have also made it particularly powerful conservation imagery.

Films such as Eli Roth’s Fin have taken audiences into the international shark trade and confronted viewers with images far removed from what they saw in Jaws. Instead of seeing a fin cut through the water surface, audiences see approximately 40,000 shark fins drying on roof tops in Hong King, drying on streets, in gutters, and then stores filled with fins labeled with what shark they came from (Roth, 2021). That image is one hard to forget.

But finning is only one story.

More Than Fins

The fins aren’t the only thing people are after from sharks.

Worldwide, sharks are targeted for their meat and for products derived from their skin, cartilage, and liver. The markets for those products vary among regions, with shark meat contributing to diets and livelihoods in some parts of the world rather than representing only a luxury commodity (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO], 2026; Hasan et al., 2023). Which makes the global trade far more complicated than just a single market focused on fins.

The international shark-meat trade involves countries across multiple continents, with European and South American nations among important trading and redistribution points. In India, Gupta et al. (2025) examined shark supply chains in Goa and Kakinada, illustrating how shark fisheries can be connected to broader markets and local economic and subsistence needs rather than being driven solely by the fin trade.

Sharks are also caught as bycatch when fishing operations target other animals. Longlines, gillnets, trawls, and other fishing gear can encounter sharks alongside the species fishers actually intend to catch. Depending on the fishery, species, regulations, condition of the animal and economic value of the catch, those sharks may be retained or discarded.

This is where the conservation story becomes considerably bigger than finning. Even if shark finning disappeared completely tomorrow, sharks would still be killed through target fisheries, retained for meat or other products, and caught incidentally in fishers targeting other species.

Fishing is the bigger issue in shark mortality.

Fishing Pressure

When looking beyond fins, the broader problem is pretty clear: fishing.

Overfishing is recognized as the dominant global threat facing sharks (and rays), although the intensity and consequences of that pressure vary enormously among species and regions (Dulvy et al., 2021).

As anti-finning regulations have expanded, they have not produced corresponding reductions in overall shark mortality. Recent global analyses have therefore emphasized the need for management that addresses total fishing mortality rather than finning alone (Worm et al., 2024).

This means the conservation question for sharks in turn must change also; We must ask how many sharks have been removed? What species? From which population? How quickly can that population reproduce? And what level of mortality can they realistically sustain, if any?

Those questions are considerable harder to answer but they are also more useful.

Biology Catches Up

Fishing mortality stats tell us how many sharks are being removed from the oceans, with current numbers showing approximately 100 million per year. But without understanding the biology of these sharks, most may not understand what that scale of loss actually means.

Sharks are often described as slow-aging, late-maturing animals that produce relatively few offspring. When compared to many bony fishes, this is generally true, which leaves shark populations with a limited ability to withstand fishing pressure.

But even within sharks, there is enormous variation in how quickly species grow, when they begin to reproduce, how often they reproduce, how many young they produce, and how they use the ocean.

Let’s start with the Greenland shark. This species lives for centuries and as mentioned earlier, may not reach maturity to reproduce until they’re 150 years old. The Atlantic shortfin makos, who’s females do not reach reproductive maturity until around 19 years old, have a gestational window of 18 months, and only have reproductive cycle of about 3 years.

Smaller coastal species such as the Atlantic sharpnose shark live much faster lives. They grow relatively quickly, mature within the first several years of life, and reproduce more frequently than many of the larger sharks we tend to picture when we hear the word shark.

Which sharks are removed matters too.

A fishery catching juveniles can affect a population differently from one removing mature breeding females, while the location of that mortality can be just as important. Some species repeatedly use particular nursery or reproductive areas, as documented in lemon sharks, while highly migratory species such as shortfin makos may travel across multiple jurisdictions during their lives.

This is why shark conservationist cannot simply count fins or even sharks. Removing ten sharks from one population will not have the same biological impact on another population. And when zoomed in even further, within a single population of sharks, we have look at which sharks are removed.

It’s not just about numbers anymore.

What species was caught? How old was it? Was it sexually mature? Where was it caught? Is that location an important nursery or reproductive area? How quickly can this population replace what was lost? Answering these questions requires reliable information about species, population, reproduction, movement, habitat, and fishing mortality. But that information isn’t always available.

According to the FAO, only 36% of reported cartilaginous-fish catches were identified to the species or genus level, while about a third were reported under the broad category of “sharks, rays, skates, etc.” Although species-level reporting has improved, significant gaps remain (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO], 2026).

That matters when animals with very different life histories can disappear into the same dataset. A relatively fast-growing shark and one that takes decades to mature may both simply be recorded as “sharks,” making it much harder to determine which populations are being affected and what level of fishing pressure they can withstand.

For some species, even the biological information needed to answer those questions remains incomplete.

The Pacific sleeper shark, for example, is believed to be slow-growing and long-lived, but scientists are still working to establish fundamental information about its age and growth. NOAA researchers have even turned to the chemistry of shark eye lenses to help answer questions traditional aging methods have struggled to resolve.

The Greenland shark may be the dramatic example, but it is part of a much larger issue. We cannot protect a species based only on what we know about “sharks.” We have to understand the shark in front of us. And sometimes protecting an animal begins with admitting how much of its story remains unwritten.

Protecting Sharks

There is no single approach to protecting sharks because there is no single shark conservation problem.

Some species receive legal protection that prohibits or limits retention. Fisheries can establish catch or effort controls, require the release of particular species, modify fishing gear and practices, and protect important nursery and breeding grounds. Finning bans and fins naturally attached policies address the practice that became the public face of shark exploitation, while international agreements such as CITES regulate trade listed species (FAO, 2026; CITES, 2024).

Conservation also happens before a shark is ever caught.

Protecting critical habitats, changing where or when fishing occurs, modifying gear, and reducing bycatch can prevent encounters or mortality rather than focusing on only what happens after a shark reaches the boat.

But regulating on paper and conservation in the water are not the same thing.

Sharks cross national boundaries and move between jurisdictions. Fisheries and supply chains can span countries. Once processed, shark products can be difficult to identify to species, while incomplete catch and trade reporting can make it harder to determine where the animals even originated. Protecting a highly mobile animal in an equally mobile global economy is rarely as simple as passing one law.

And deciding what protection looks like, is even harder.

Not every species of sharks faces the same future, not every population experiences the same fishing pressure, and not every community catches sharks for the same reason. The means strict protection is no necessarily the only conservation tool available. Where shark populations can biologically support fishing, scientifically informed management may be possible. For other species or populations, particularly those unable to withstand continued mortality, stronger protection and minimization of human caused deaths are necessary.

That does not mean every shark fishery is sustainable, it means sustainability has to be demonstrated through evidence rather than assumed in either direction. What works depends on the species, population, specific fishery, location, level or mortality, and how much we actually know about each of them.

That nuance is harder to fit onto a poster than a shark without its fins. But sharks have never fit particularly well into the stories we’ve created for them, have they?

The Shark We Think We Know

We began with a shark swimming beneath a human imagination.

A dorsal fin. Teeth. A shadow circling under the surface.

For generations, we turned hundreds of species into a singular character. Movies, headlines, and stories of tragedy created a monster. Then science revealed animals far more diverse and complex than that image allowed. At that point we began telling another story, one of sharks as victims in need of protection.

Like most things, there is truth in both.

Sharks are predators, capable of injuring or killing us that fear of them is not entirely falsely in our heads. And simply understanding sharks does not require we pretend otherwise. But it does mean we have the responsibility to understand; sharks are vulnerable to us. Fishing, bycatch, international trade, habitat change, and the multitude of other human pressures have consequences for populations around the world. Protecting them does not require pretending every species faces the same threat or that every conservation problem has the same solution. The mistake comes when any one of those truths becomes the entire animal.

When we look closer, the single shark we imagined from youth became hundreds of species. Filter feeders. Hunters. Solitary travelers. Social animals. Predators turned prey. And animals whose lives unfold across vastly different timescales.

There is no single shark. There is no single way to understand them. And there is no single story that can tell us everything we need to know about protecting them. Perhaps sharks don’t need us to replace fear with admiration or monster with victim.

They need something much harder from us: the willingness to let them remain complicated. To recognize what they are capable of without defining them by it. To protect them without romanticizing them. To Acknowledge what science has taught us while remaining honest that there is a lot we still do not know.

Because somewhere beneath the dorsal fins, movie scores, headlines, statistics, and conservation campaigns are the animals themselves. Not the sharks we fear. Not the sharks we want to save. But the sharks we are still learning to understand.

 References

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Brown, C., & Schluessel, V. (2022). Smart sharks: a review of chondrichthyan cognition. Animal Cognition, 26(1), 175–188. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-022-01708-3

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