Suffolk Closeup: Sharks, summer and being scared

In a summer punctuated by a string of incidents of sharks biting people swimming in the Atlantic Ocean off the East Coast, causing significant concern about swimming in ocean waters off Long Island and elsewhere, let’s turn to the person key to getting people really scared of sharks: Peter Benchley, who authored the 1974 novel “Jaws.”

“Jaws,” not too incidentally, was based on a fictional Long Island town. Benchley’s inspiration for the book was Montauk charter boat captain Frank Mundus catching a 4,550-pound great white shark in 1964. However, the 1975 movie was shot on and off Martha’s Vineyard and so had a Massachusetts setting.

Although the book was a bestseller, it was the film — the highest-grossing film until the release of “Star Wars” a couple of years later — that ignited widespread shark anxiety. The movie, co-written by Benchley, is cited in several psychological studies as among the top “cinematic stress inducers.”

But what followed was Benchley expressing regret for what he had wrought about sharks. In 2005, the year before he died, his book “Shark Life, True Stories About Sharks & The Sea,” was published. “The truth is that the hysteria is not justified by statistics or other facts,” he begins the book.

Benchley goes on to state: “Shark attacks are natural news leaders. They are the perfect show-stopping spectacle: blood and guts (ANIMALS SAVAGING HUMANS!)”

And, he continues using all-caps again, “Even if the camera can’t get a shot of shark or victim, it can pan the empty beach and the forbidding ocean, focus on the BEACH CLOSED or DANGER SHARKS signs, and capture the comments of panicky witnesses.”

“Shark attacks continue to occur,” he acknowledges. “But in the United States homicides or fatal accidents in the workplace are 10 times more frequent. And motor-vehicle deaths are over 1,000 times more common than shark attacks. As for shark-attack fatalities, well, they’re so rare that they’re not even on the scale.”

“I’ve swum with sharks of all species, sizes, and temperaments all over the world, from Australia to Bermuda, South Africa to San Diego, almost always on purpose but sometimes by accident. I’ve been threatened, but sometimes by accident. I’ve been threatened, but never attacked, bumped and shoved but never bitten, and — many times — frightened out of my flippers.”

“Over the years,” Benchley writes, “I’ve learned how to swim, snorkel, and dive safely in the ocean. I’ve learned how to co-exist, really — with sharks and the hundreds of other marine animals I’ve been lucky enough to encounter.”

“Shark attacks on human beings generate a tremendous amount of media coverage. That’s partly because they occur so rarely. But it’s also because people are, and always have been, both intrigued and terrified by sharks. Sharks come from one part of the dark castle where our nightmares live — the deep water beyond our sight and understanding. So they stimulate our fears and fantasies.”

“Of all the shark statistics,” he says, “one that is almost totally ignored by the media and the public is the most horrible of all: for every human being killed by a shark, roughly 10 million sharks are killed by humans. Sometimes they’re killed for their skins and their meat. But mostly they’re killed for their fins, which are made into soup that is sold for as much as a hundred dollars a bowl all over the world. Shark fin soup is regarded as a delicacy in China and other Asian nations.”

Also, he emphasizes: “Sharks are critical to the ocean’s natural balance in ways we know and in ways we are still discovering. Wiping them out, through greed, recklessness, or simple ignorance, would be a tragedy — not just a moral tragedy, but an environmental one as well.”

Shelter Island, of course, is not on the ocean. But on July 4, 2012, as the Reporter would subsequently report, then Councilman Peter Reich saw a three-foot shark in Menantic Creek and several days later when the shark — identified as a thresher — reappeared, he took a video of it swimming in the creek.

The Reporter said Reich “noted that it was not acting aggressively in any way and was not bothered by onlookers. It jumped slightly when he reached out to grab its tail at one point.” Added was: “Even though the Menantic Creek shark did not appear to be aggressive and may be native to the area, Mr. Reich still suggested that swimmers use caution and look out for signs of sharks nearby.”

A Sag Harbor connection to the film “Jaws” is Roy Scheider, long a resident of the village. He plays Martin Brody, a police chief. And the movie’s director, Steven Spielberg, has a home in East Hampton. It’s Scheider, who died in 2008, who declared in the film after a huge shark appeared behind the boat he and others are on: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”