The majority of open ocean survival stories that I have read or watched featured the fear of shark attacks as a major threat. Some of them claimed that sharks were constantly circling and even bumping them, their raft or life-boat. However, shark attacks on humans are extremely rare. Is there something about being in the water a long time that attracts them and makes them more likely to attack?
Fear of shark attacks in ocean survival accounts doesn’t mean that shark attacks are actually any more common in those circumstances than other situations.
Floating objects far at sea are likely to attract fish. In turn smaller fish may attract sharks which will stay around the boat even if they are unaware of the people on board and have no intention of attacking them.
Much of the fear of sharks in survival situations may have stemmed from the famous Indianapolis disaster near the end of WWII, when many of the survivors of a Japanese torpedoing were in the water for several days and many were in fact attacked by sharks. The story was memorably told in the film Jaws by Quint, a survivor of the sinking.
Why so many movies about zombie survival stories when zombies are even more rare than shark attacks? Visceral fear sells whether you’re being ripped apart by sharks or the undead.
Its postulated that Oceanic WhiteTips, the most common type of shark involved in mid Ocean shark attacks on shipwreck survivors is unusually aggressive, much more than Great Whites or Tiger Sharks. Its not seen in Coastal areas as much as other sharks, although there was an attack in IIRC Alexandria Egypt a few years agp.
Also
i) Sharks tend to have an attack pattern which is to make one bite, then withdraw until the prey drowns from blood loss and exhaustion. This gives a human time to get out of the water; which is might not be an option for shipwrecked sailors.
ii) Many beaches have active measures to prevent shark attacks; like nets. Not something that a shipwreck survivor will have.
I am not just talking about fictional movies. I have also heard it among real shipwreck survivors. Shark attacks were one of their primary worries even though they should have been much more worried about dehydration and exposure.
I was just wondering why people worry about it at all in those situations. A reasonable analysis would show that lightning and maybe even jellyfish stings are a bigger risk to life but that may not be as true in the open ocean.
The USS Indianapolis case that Colibri linked to is an interesting one. It really was a mass shark attack on shipwreck survivors that lasted days. Everyone knows about Great White sharks but I had never heard of Oceanic Whitetips that live in the open ocean. Apparently they can be very aggressive.
People lost in tropical forest worry about attacks by big cats, snakes, and spiders even though stinging ants and bees are a worse threat. How scary a threat is is not necessarily related to how likely it is.
Shark attacks compared to the whole population of big countries where most people don’t even live near the ocean (like the US) are very rare. Shark attacks are quite rare even compared to the population of people going to the beach and boating near shore, especially in countries mainly in the temperate zone (again the US, or even countries more notorious for shark danger like Australia or South Africa).
But shark attacks on people dumped into the open sea in the tropics as by ships being sunk or a/c downed in WWII were not rare at all. The Indianapolis case is more infamous than most, but lots of crews of sunken ships, and downed airmen, in the Pacific War were set upon by sharks. If the crews weren’t rescued fairly soon it would pretty typically happen eventually, especially if also they weren’t all in boats (as opposed to open bottom floats), and the survivors of a warship sinking typically wouldn’t be.
It’s part of our evolutionary biology to be scared of big predators with lots of teeth.
People are also scared of barracuda which are pretty much totally harmless. (my diving instructor called them the puppy dogs of the sea.)
It’s theorized that a/c crashes & explosions on boats send a signal similar to thrashing around in the water, but on a much larger scale. The likelihood of someone being attacked by a shark after their boat sinks due to leaks is much lower.
Pardon the semi-hijack, but this is a perfect place to mention an item I saw at Target today: Shark pajamas. The logo says “Quinn’s Scuba Club”.
You need to differentiate between wondering why the STORIES include these attacks, and why some attacks do occur.
They show up in a lot of STORIES, because lots of movie writers go for the easy plot element.
On the other end of things, the rarity of attacks that you refer to, could be distorted in a way. Are you sure that they weren’t calculated against the big picture, instead of the particular circumstances of the people in those stories? For the crew of the Indianapolis, the chances of shark attack were VERY high. For me going to a local beach, not so much.
Funny, but the Jaws character is Quint, not Quinn.
Alien attacks are even rarer but there’s no shortage of horror stories about them. It wouldn’t matter if, as with aliens, there were no genuine attacks. Sharks are scary, that’s reason enough to exaggerate the danger. The media and Hollywood love this stuff, as does the public. (At a safe distance of course!)
Might have changed the name to avoid a shark attack.
Sharks like great whites might do that with larger prey, but with human-sized prey they normally will attack and consume without releasing. It’s more commonly accepted that the attacks on humans are due to the shark making a quick investigation (via bite) to determine what exactly this unfamiliar object is and when realizing it’s not a usual food source simply ends the attack.
Seeing a 1983 Plymouth Scamp GT (made for one year) in public is extremely rare not getting killed by a shark. You can go your whole life and never see this kind of car and I’ve only seen one once on Ebay. It’s one of the rarest cars ever made.
Just trying to emphasize “extremely” by this car example. According to wikipedia there were 35 shark deaths in 2012 and that’s not an example of extreme. Seeing a 1983 Plymouth Scamp GT is though.
Read the blogs about 4 girls who rowed the pacific ocean
At one point, they were pursued by several sharks for weeks. They actually named the sharks.
When they left the boat a few times and were in the ocean, the shark(s) would bump the girls (which scared the heck out of the girls) but they were not attacking but more playful.
However, I could see the playful bumping being mistaken for an attack and given the right circumstances could injure someone causing them to drown.
Interestingly enough, they considered the flying fish that would jump out of water and hit them repeatedly, a bigger hazard than the sharks.
This is a huge part of the answer, and bears repeating. Fish gather around floating objects in mid ocean. Why they do is not well understood, but they do. This is such a well known phenomenon that FAD’s (fish attracting devices) are used for various commercial and other purposes.
A FAD consists of nothing more than an object in the ocean. No fancy pheromones or noise makers or colours. Just anything in the ocean will attract fish.
If you read about the Kon-Tiki or Ra expeditions (or any other account of being on a raft at sea for a long time) you will read about the way fish congregate under and around the raft.
When I crossed the Atlantic on a yacht we were moving too fast most of the time but when we were becalmed for a couple of days we had fish and sharks that hung around us.
There is no question that a survival raft in mid ocean will attract fish, and sharks.
I’m not a shark expert, so maybe I’m wrong. It seems rather naive to describe such bumping as ‘playful’, when it could just as easily be the shark equivalent of ‘playing with your food’.
Or sniffing and poking something to see if it’s edible.