Steven Spielberg’s 1975 hit “Jaws” made great white sharks into new, horrifying icons. And though they keep to themselves and within their zone of hunting with other fishes and seals, they became depicted as man-eating monsters that could become a threat to humans at some point of time. After this movie, began the era when these sharks were hunted on a large scale for trade and hobby both. Great white shark populations crashed down to a great extent.
In the video above, science communicator Derek Muller takes us onboard and on deck with the Australia-based Fox Shark Research Foundation as they work to protect the recovering populations through observation and education. The way they treat sharks with care and ease shows that the creatures are not lethal to that extent that they should be ruthlessly hunted down.
The mission of the day was to tag sharks with small satellite-enabled devices to track them as they traveled, and maybe capture a few tissue samples that could be caught without causing any harm to the sharks. The video’s glimpse into the underwater world of the great white shark is just an extraordinarily fantastic treat to the eyes.
“We have to find out how many sharks are out there. We have to find out where they travel to, where they breed — that’s one of the holy grails that no one knows … And if you can’t protect sharks in those key areas, you’re not really going to have much of an impact across the population as a whole,” explained Dr. Rachel Robbins, founder and researcher at the foundation.
We’re not sure we’d be as brave as Muller while being lowered into the water near a hungry shark, but we’re glad that there are researchers and science communicators who are. The video is a hope that in a world where all that matters is digits and profits, there are people who work towards the preservation our natural resources be it coral reefs that are endangered or the white sharks who have their challenges to face from humans. For protecting corals from the various challenges of extinction, scientists are researching in cold waters while most of us sleep calmly under warm blankets. It is their efforts that give us new discoveries and things we would otherwise be unaware of. There is now good hopes for sharks too as scientists are working towards keeping them safe from hunting and fishing.