216 Sharks: The Animal Answer Guide
Shark Hoaxes. No discussion of sharks in popular culture is complete
without some mention of the multitude of hoaxes that appear in magazines
and, more recently, on websites. These usually involve some reference to
sharks eating people or sightings of sharks in unusual places, usually involv-
ing large (and usually White) sharks. In 1996 an American tabloid called
The Sun published an eyewitness account of giant, 75-foot-long sharks with
10-foot-wide jaws swallowing whole fishing boats in the North Atlantic.
The article purported to interview scientists who speculated that the gi-
ant sharks had been frozen in glaciers that had recently melted (perhaps
foretelling global warming?). The U.S. and Canadian navies supposedly
launched submarines to hunt down and kill these ship-devouring monsters.
Trust us: it’s not true.
Many hoaxes involve fairly skillful manipulations using computer soft-
ware such as Photoshop, with copyrighted images stolen from other web-
sites and pasted into other photos. One widely distributed photo titled
variously “A bad day at work” and “Picture of the Year” showed a White
Shark leaping from the water to attack a South African frogman who was
being hoisted up a ladder to a waiting helicopter; a large orange bridge is
in the background. The helicopter is in fact in front of the Golden Gate
Bridge, San Francisco, turned 180 degrees to disguise it. The shark is from
the now-famous Air Jaws series about the White Sharks near Cape Town,
South Africa, that charge out of the water in “Polaris breaches” to eat Cape
fur seals (see the discussion of ambushers under “How do sharks catch their
prey?” in chapter 7).
Another photo, purportedly taken from a police vehicle after record
flooding in New York State in the fall of 2011, showed a White Shark
swimming on the Rockaway Parkway. The shark is cropped from a well-
known photo of a White Shark following a researcher in a kayak, taken by
Thomas Peschak, again near Cape Town. The spectacular original color
poster, along with Peschak’s many stunning underwater photos, can be
found at http://www.thomaspeschak.com.
What roles have sharks played in art and literature?
Skates more than sharks and rays appeared regularly in seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century European paintings. Most depict fishmongers’
stalls, draped with an abundance of fishes and shellfishes—cod, salmon,
sturgeon, and flatfish predominating—plus one skate. Others are still lifes,
with fishes as the main subject. Interestingly, skates are almost always
shown belly up, and male skates with obvious claspers are almost as domi-
nant. This may reflect an artistic device, or perhaps only one painter actu-
ally saw a skate, painted it that way, and later artists just copied the image.
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