Benchley’s novel opens underwater, up close to its “great fish” with some hard science: “lacking the flotation bladder common to other fish and the fluttering flaps to push oxygen-bearing water through its gills, it survived only by moving.” But the book’s characters are haunted by the unknown: one describes sharks as “like tornadoes” which at random take out one building but “miss the house next door”; on a long digression about whether megalodon is truly extinct, Hooper muses, “If there’s enough down there to support whales, there’s enough down there to support a shark that big.” 

Benchley’s personal reverence for sharks, paired with his prior career in journalism, produced a speculative monster story that feels like truth. Hallmarks of legitimacy abound in the book, such as a fictional New York Times column covering Amity’s attacks (and exaggerating the timelines of real-life events in Matawan, New Jersey). Many of the book’s myths are easily busted today: we are often reminded that “a shark doesn’t think,” and a scene where the shark bites a man “again and again” conflicts with the well-documented tendency for sharks to test bite if they approach at all. But these fictions remain stamped on sharks’ public perception. 

One sentiment from the novel reflects just how little was understood about sharks in the ‘70s, and how imagination filled in the gaps: “Sharks do so many uncharacteristic things that the erratic becomes the normal.” 

Since 2020, wildlife videographer Carlos Gauna has used a drone to film great white sharks off the coast of Southern California. His YouTube channel, The Malibu Artist, opens up a whole world—often, just beyond the surf break. With thoughtful voiceover and soothing music, he depicts juvenile sharks’ fluid, fascinating movement through their habitat. 

“The single biggest thing that Hollywood and TV gets wrong is that [sharks are] very calculated in their movements,” he said. “They’re very indecisive for the most part. They will look at something and then look at it again, and then look at it again, and then go bump it with their nose.” 

Sharks often don’t even care about humans in the water. The first time Gauna filmed one passing right beneath a surfer’s foot, his audio was a panicked refrain: “Please don’t bite ‘em. Please don’t bite ‘em.” But the shark swam right by, and now, he said he’s seen the same thing hundreds of times. He doesn’t want people to forget that sharks are wild animals, but his footage quietly refutes the all-too-insidious narrative of shark-as-eating-machine. (Recently, he also brought us what may be the first-ever recording of a newborn great white). 

“Because sharks are such an attention-grabbing species, and they’re so polarizing, they’re one species on this planet that needs the most nuance,” Gauna said. 

But nuance is often not what they get. The challenge of shark PR is one of the biggest reasons that marine conservation biologist David Shiffman has become a vocal critic of the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week. In 2022, he coauthored an analysis of all 32 years of the highly lucrative show. Only six of 201 episodes discussed specific actionables of shark conservation policy—and 22.7% of guests that the show billed as experts or scientists had no peer-reviewed papers.

Shiffman sees Shark Week’s sensationalism and misinformation as a “missed opportunity” for helpful science communication—a topic he models and frequently advises on. 

“Just publishing a paper in a journal that no one’s ever heard of does not actually change laws and does not change people’s behavior,” Shiffman said. “You need to talk to people, explain it in a way that they can understand it and think it’s interesting and relevant—and that’s hard.” 

Without exposure to that expertise, people tend to turn to fictional stories to address real-life dilemmas. Some researchers have dubbed this the Jaws effect, whereby perceptions and solutions lifted from media are used to justify reactive policy approaches and make complex situations governable—like when a Western Australia Fisheries Minister ordered a weeklong shark hunt in 2000 following a handful of fatal shark bites. Ultimately, the shark hunt failed. 

Wendy Benchley, the late Jaws author’s wife, has built a career advocating for better marine management. While environmental organizations the couple worked with valued Peter’s way with words, she said she was “the policy person.” She sees Jaws as exploring questions about human behavior more than offering answers: “The book is certainly about how people cope with something that threatens them and that they can’t control.”

At California State University, Long Beach’s Shark Lab, one of the oldest shark research institutes in the country, scientists take a creative approach to cultivating support for conservation. Chris Lowe, the lab’s director, was a kid on Martha’s Vineyard when Jaws filmed there—and says because of that, he was never scared.

“My friends and I loved that summer that Jaws came out because we were the only ones in the water,” he laughed. 

But he knows he’s an outlier, so as great white shark populations rebound in California, he’s turned to psychologist Hancock to wade into the world of shark perceptions and inform the lab’s outreach. They published their first collaborative paper last June, on whether perceptions of sharks’ cognitive abilities predict people’s conservation behaviors. 

Belief in the “animals’ cognitive, reasoning, and emotional capacities” supported a greater willingness to learn, vote, and donate in support of conservation, the study found. Lowe’s lab has already studied local sharks’ favored habitats, diets, and migratory patterns; now, they know how to best package that information.

“If we can get people to think like the shark, they begin to relate better to the animal,” he explained. 

The framework of a shark’s lifestyle was the jumping-off point for the illustrated children’s book Sharks: A Day in the Life, written by marine biologist Carlee Jackson. Jackson fell in love with sharks at five, when a cover at her local book fair in land-locked Detroit caught her eye. In writing her own kids’ story, she showcased species from the tiny epaulette shark, which ventures on land to forage in tide pools, to the great white shark, which escapes from a hunting pod of orcas—the predator becoming the prey.

“My idea with the book was to just throw a child into the whole shark world,” she said. “I want someone to feel like, Oh my gosh, sharks are the coolest.”