he's standing there,

"you know we all have to come together and-"

[chomps]

He just gets eaten.

[laughs]

Hi, my name is Apryl Boyle,

I am a marine and environmental scientist

who specializes in sharks,

and the founder of El Porto Shark.

And today we're going to review some

shark attack scenes in film and television.

So come on in, the water's great.

[electric guitar]

This clip is from Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg.

- What kind of a shark is it?

- Let me see, I don't know.

I think it's a "mah-ko".

- Got a deep throat Pratt.

- Yeah, but what kind?

What kind of shark?

- It's a tiger shark.

- A what?

- A what?

- I love this scene because it is a crack-up.

The fellas around don't know what kind of shark it is,

they've allegedly been in the water their whole lives.

They're watermen, they're fishermen, they're boaters.

They don't know what kind of shark this is.

First of all that's really silly to me because

if they've been waterman their whole lives,

they know what a tiger shark, a white shark, a Mako.

It's not "mah-ko", it's mako.

- I think it's a "mah-ko".

- So they're pronouncing things incorrectly,

and that's not something lifelong watermen would do,

or waterwomen but in this case the scene has watermen.

- But the fact is that the bite radius on this animal

is different than the wounds on the victim.

- The thing about bite radius,

there is something to that.

Often when a shark bites a surfboard, a boat,

anything, a person,

you can figure out how large the shark was

based on the size of the mouth.

So there is something to the bite radius thing.

- C'mon fellas, let's be reasonable, huh?

This is not the time or the place

to perform some kind of a half-assed autopsy on a fish.

- A necropsy is actually what it's called

when you do an autopsy on an animal.

And to do an animal necropsy

you certainly wouldn't do it on the dock.

Unless you had a lab or a setting next to the dock,

where you weigh the animal out

and you do it properly by weighing and measuring.

So back when this film was made,

they absolutely would've put the shark on display and said

look here's the man-eater

that's been terrorizing the beaches.

However today fortunately,

that's not the case in the US

and many other places where sharks are protected,

because since this movie came out,

there are 75% fewer great white sharks in the ocean

largely because of fear, misinformation,

and movies like this.

But, fortunately, this movie is what inspired me

to grow up to become Matt Hooper, so it did good.

Peter Benchley, who wrote Jaws,

is a green conservationist.

He spent his life as a conservationist

for sharks and the ocean.

Didn't realize what a bell he would ring with this one,

and the film was just so good and so suspenseful

it made us all afraid of sharks.

This clip is from Deep Blue Sea, directed by Renny Harlin.

[metal scraping]

- How long have they been synchronized like this?

- So, the whole lab setup and genetically modifying sharks

that is pretty absurd.

I can't imagine anyone funding that for starters.

Making sharks smarter,

I can't think of a reason to do that,

without doing other research first.

So the whole notion of

genetically modifying sharks to be smarter,

and work together and mind control.

This reminded me of the Aquaman cartoons

when I was a little girl,

where he would just telepathically get animals to do

what they wanted.

And I think I bet the writer's an Aquaman fan too.

[intense music]

- Tell me I didn't see that.

They recognized that gun.

- An interesting thing a lot of people don't realize,

is that sharks are skittish.

Most wild animals are skittish.

They all have personalities,

and you'll come across some who are curious,

and others not so much.

Generally though, a wild shark is skittish of

something that's not its food or it hasn't seen.

For example, it would not recognize that

there is a gun pointed at it,

or that a person is doing something in its harm,

because that's kind of not part of its world.

I myself have been surfing,

and because a great white shark can't

see directly in front of him,

or directly behind him,

as soon as it turned a touch to see me,

it was just gone,

just super skittish.

And I've seen this behavior with all types of sharks,

nurse sharks, blacktips, reef sharks, hammerheads.

I've had more of them swim away from me

than I've had come towards me.

[gunshot]

[Apryl laughs]

Tough guy.

Oh, they got him.

I'm not quite sure what he shoots into the shark

to make it just pass out like that

and go up and all that's really silly.

So it's kind of not feasible at all.

This is, I would say this is almost 100 percent fiction.

- And I'm still starving.

- We're about to have a feeding frenzy.

[whimpers]

- Come on, let's get this over with.

- This is finding Nemo, directed by Andrew Stanton.

[bell dings]

- Right then.

The meeting has officially come to order.

Let us all say the pledge.

- [In unison] I am a nice shark.

Not a mindless eating machine.

If I am to change this image,

I must first change myself.

Fish are friends, not food.

- What I do love about finding Nemo is

they try to portray a different side of the shark with the

"fish are friends, not food".

I can't tell you how many students have said that to me

because of Finding Nemo.

And I think that's great because it's showing that

hey look, the sharks are trying to care,

we should care,

and I think it's trying to send

a bigger environmental message.

But showing you that sharks can be

quote-unquote humanized

to where they're cuddly or friendly.

Which is why conversation is hampered,

because they're thought of as

eating machines, killers, et cetera.

So this humanization if you will,

I think was great 'cause it kind of

gave kids a less scary intro to sharks.

In a way that wasn't so much like

yes, they're going to eat you no matter what.

- Now do you all have your friends?

- Got mine.

[whimpers]

- A lot of sharks have very

symbiotic relationships with other fish.

You'll see pilot fish

and you'll see remora stuck to the bottom of sharks.

So those are both kind of

really great symbiotic relationships.

The pilot fish and the remoras

are not part of the sharks food,

they don't think to eat them.

So they hang around and get protection

from the shark and pick up scraps.

They're very specific eaters,

great whites, hammerheads, everyone,

they have their specific niche in the ecosystem,

so they don't just eat everything.

So they do have relationships with other fish.

- That's mine give it back!

- Dory cut it out!

- Give me-

Ow!

- Oh I'm sorry, are you okay?

- Ow ow ow.

- I'm so sorry.

- Yeah you really clocked me there.

Am I bleeding?

- Oh.

- Ow.

- Here we go.

- Dory, are you okay?

Oh that's good.

- [Together] Intervention!

- The little tiny bit of blood

that goes into Bruce's nose

and he inevitably is drawn into a frenzy.

Which is one of the best shark myths that scares everybody.

And I have to say,

I've used it to my advantage before

to get people out of the line up surfing.

Oh you have a cut you better get out.

More waves for me.

But honestly,

if I could cut my finger,

stick it in the water,

and have white sharks or any other sharks come to me,

imagine how easy my research would be.

How easy would it be to attract them?

The truth is,

there's a whole cacophony of smell out there

and while sharks can detect

a small amount of blood in

an Olympic sized swimming pool,

that doesn't mean that's what drives them to go and eat.

Great whites in particular are very picky eaters.

They don't simply eat everything.

Its a little more complicated than that,

they're not just indiscriminate eaters.

Yes, tiger sharks and bulls

are sometimes known as garbage cans of the sea

and they'll eat everything.

White shark's far more picky.

So every shark has its specific food.

And again, we have another clip from Jaws.

[crash]

[intense music]

Oh lost the spear.

[Apryl laughs]

So the shark in Jaws is a great white.

And we do cage dive,

or use cages to observe great white sharks in the wild,

however, most of the time

the cage is attached to the back of the boat,

there are those that go down by themselves

farther into the water,

but they're not as flimsy as it appears.

The shark simply bumped into it,

and the cage falls apart.

It's far safer than you think.

And interestingly,

I have never seen a great white

or any other shark attack like that.

It seems like in movies they're made to like,

act like a dog.

I've seen them like,

take something and

[growls]

or like keep going and

[growls]

and that's just not how a great white shark feeds.

So, the shark is a bit unrealistic,

quite a bit unrealistic,

in the film.

Now, if the shark actually

did get in a cage and present a danger,

he could feasibly go down into

hide in a coral area.

In Southern California he can hide in a kelp bed maybe,

he can hide in some rocks.

So that's feasible,

that part is more believable than the shark.

- Marcel we have a real problem here.