Do Great Whites Think?

Charles Hood · Issue 23, Mar/Apr 2005 · pp. 52–56

Products mentioned: Nikon D100, Sea & Sea D100 housing, Nikon 16mm lens, Seacam

In 1974 Peter Benchleyʼs novel Jaws was first published. The following year a film by the same title sealed Steven Spielbergʼs talent as a master entertainer. It gripped the world. Great white sharks were the enemy. What Speilberg managed to achieve was to instil in peopleʼs minds that a shark could think. It could actively strategize about what it was going to hunt and serve up on the dinner table. While this may have been highly successful for Hollywood it would prove to be a disastrous for Carcharodon carcharias. It is now well documented that sharks just react on their instinct, or do they? Today, the majority of us have changed our minds about the great white. More and more people want to observe this super apex predator in the wild rather than see its extinction. Fishermen who once hunted the great white now take out parties of divers. The saying now is, a great white alive is wort…