J. P. Botha, co-owner of Marine Dynamics, the company that took us out, told me that most of the operators are former commercial fishermen or abalone divers.

“We’re no different from the rest of the world,” he said. “Too many people, too few fish. Catches are down everywhere. Great white shark tourism—ecotourism, if you will—is a better business than fishing.”

Ecotourism is also joining the vanguard of research. More and more these days it is the naturalists and field operators, guides and dive masters who are contributing to the accumulation of practical knowledge about great whites. To cite just one example: Until recently scientists thought that the scars that mar nearly every mature shark were acquired either from prey that fought back or from ritual biting by prospective mates. Now there is eyewitness testimony of aggressive social interaction between sharks and also of spectacular threat displays that take the place of major—potentially fatal—encounters with other white sharks.

So we are learning—bit by bit, anecdote by anecdote—more and more about these magnificent predators. We must hope that we’re learning enough to save them before, through ignorance and inadvertence, we destroy them.

Great white sharks have survived, virtually unchanged, for millions of years. They are as highly evolved, as perfectly in tune with their environment as any living thing on the planet. For them to be driven to extinction by man, a relative newcomer, would be more than an ecological tragedy; it would be a moral travesty.

“Gift From the Sea”

by Peter Benchley

National Geographic, August 2005

Thirty years ago this summer, when the movie version of my novel Jaws was released, few people (including me) knew very much about great white sharks. For hundreds of generations, we humans have been taught to fear and loathe sharks, and the movie touched a nerve of horror. Ironically, though, Jaws also sparked a fascination with sharks that transcended this terror. In the past three decades a constituency has emerged dedicated to preserving and protecting sharks rather than destroying them.

Now something long thought impossible has happened: A great white shark was successfully held in captivity for several months. In August 2004 a very young female great white was caught accidentally in a fisherman’s net off Huntington Beach, California, then kept in an ocean pen for 25 days. Transferred to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, she thrived in the million-gallon Outer Bay Exhibit. Perhaps she was too young to understand that the enormous tank was not her natural environment, because she didn’t bash her head against the walls in an attempt to swim away, as others of her kind have done. And she began to feed almost immediately on salmon offered to her on a pole. In the months that followed, the shark incurred no serious injuries, caught no diseases, and grew noticeably larger, shattering all records for great whites in captivity. The longest any other great white has been held was 16 days.

Scientists were interested in how well the young shark responded to cues for food, and they were amazed at the détente she established with the tunas, barracudas, turtles, and other sharks that were her tankmates. Until February 23, that is, when she bit and killed a soupfin shark. As she grew bigger and her behavior grew more aggressive, officials at the aquarium knew the time had come.