Great white sharks off the coast of Cape Cod are attracting swarms of tourists, coming out to see the iconic animals.
Jaws, the movie that made white sharks popular - and feared - was filmed in Martha's Vineyard, which neighbors Cape Cod. That 1975 film caused millions of people fear entering the water, believing the animal could lie in wait just beneath the waves, ready to strike.
Sharks are not responsible for vast numbers of injuries or deaths to humans, although they are skilled hunters. According to the conservation group Oceana, white, bull and tiger sharks are responsible for half of all attacks by the fish on people. Between 2006 and 2010, a total of 179 shark attacks on humans were reported in the United States. Shark attacks resulted in an average of 4.2 deaths each year worldwide.
A majority of those attacks in the United States - 110 - occurred in Florida, and just one of those was fatal. California was the leader among all states in fatal attacks in the U.S., with reports of two. Those were the result of just 14 such attacks in the Golden State. There were no shark attacks on human beings reported in Massachusetts during that time. Since 1837, only three attacks have been reported by sharks on humans in the Bay State.
White sharks are not properly called great whites, although the name is popular among the public.
In Jaws, the residents of the fictional town of Amity targeted the sharks in a life-or-death battle following a series of vicious attacks by the animals.
Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, a new advocacy group, was formed to "spread the white shark love!" This is a far-different approach than four decades ago, promoting the animals as objects of fascination, rather than fear.
"There's a line in the movie, that if you yell 'Shark!' on the Fourth of July, we're going to have a panic on our hands. In Chatham now, you yell 'Shark!' in the middle of town, people come running to the beach, not away from it," Kevin McLain, executive director of the Chatham Orpheum Theater in Cape Cod, told the press.
Greg Skomal, a marine biologist employed by the state of Massachusetts, is one of the people who helped to modernize the public perception of the animals.
Populations of white sharks off the Massachusetts coast could also provide a new research opportunity for marine biologists.
"For the first time, modern scientists have predictable access to white sharks in the North Atlantic and the ability to study their life history and ecology over multiple spatial and temporal scales. Without a strong sense of how many white sharks exist in this area or how many are being killed, the time to act is now," Skomal said.
