The sight of a dorsal fin, an iconic signal of instant fear, triggers an ancient fight-or-flight response. This dread, which turns the joy of summer swimming into a nightmare, taps into thalassophobia—the fear of the dark, unknown, and seemingly bottomless deep. Sharks are the closest thing to a real-life sea monster, embodying the ancient fear captured in tales of the Kraken and the Leviathan.
While sharks are in their natural element, and attacks are unpredictable, your chances of being the victim of an unprovoked attack are statistically very low.
Fact vs. Fiction: The History of Fear
Sharks were not widely viewed as “monsters” until the mid-19th century.
- 1852: The HMS Birkenhead – After this troopship sank off South Africa, many survivors in the water were killed by sharks. Accounts of this event, which helped establish the “women and children first” protocol, also cemented the primal fear of a “feeding frenzy.”
- 1916: The Jersey Shore Attacks – This series of attacks, which killed four people over 12 days in July, caused mass hysteria. Newspapers labeled the animals “man-eaters,” an event credited as a major inspiration for the novel Jaws.
- 1945: The USS Indianapolis – After this cruiser was torpedoed on July 30, 1945, the stranded sailors suffered one of the worst open-sea mass shark attacks in history, fueling wartime terror.
The release of the book and film Jaws (1974/1975) poured fuel on the fire, making shark fear mainstream and launching the killer shark genre. Peter Benchley, the author, later expressed regret for writing the novel, acknowledging he would not have done so with his eventual knowledge of the animals, and he became a dedicated shark conservationist.
The Real Threat
Remember that sharks are just animals, not movie killers. Sharks have far more to fear from humans than we do from them, as human activity is responsible for the death of millions of sharks annually, compared to a handful of human fatalities from unprovoked bites each year.
