Marine biologist Jasmin Graham talks to co-hosts VV Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell about her new book. Sharks Don’t Sink: Adventures of a Renegade Shark Researcher, It is about the beauty and diversity of sharks and her career studying them inside and outside of academia. Graham, who dropped out of a PhD program and subsequently founded the community-based organization Minorities in Shark Science to make the field more accessible and inclusive, explains how The White shark-Fears about sharks misunderstand the species. She also talks about the similarities between sharks and black people, who are misrepresented, misunderstood, brutalized and threatened. Graham reads from Sharks don’t sink.

Watch video excerpts from our interviews on Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

VV Ganeshananthan: Peter Benchley, who wrote The White sharkby in some ways creating this dominant cultural idea of ​​who sharks are, he made people think that attacking sharks was justified or something like that. And he later became a major marine conservationist and regretted writing the book and said, “No, sharks are great!” And he learned, like you, the love of fishing and the water from his father.

People loathe and fear sharks in the context of this particular depiction, and authoritarian leaders, who we talked about a little bit at the beginning of the show, either demonize them, like our wandering friend Trump, or identify with them for dubious reasons. Earlier in the show, I mentioned the former president of Sri Lanka maintaining a shark tank, which seems to be some sort of gesture of identifying with sharks as strange, dominant, and malicious. What is this characterization of sharks? Why is it so popular? And do you have a favorite depiction of sharks in pop culture?

Jasmine Graham: Why is it so successful? That’s a good question. I think it’s the perfect combination of – I mean, Peter Benchley wrote a very emotional book, and you don’t realise the power of words until you’ve written them. And then sharks are also predators, and they’re not like us. So there are other predators that are more similar to us because they’re mammals that live in the sea. So things like orcas and dolphins are arguably in the same part of the food web as sharks, but because they’re mammals and we have this kind of connection to them, we say, “Ah, yes! They’re smiling!” No, it’s just the shape of their mouths. They’re not really smiling. You know, we’ve just ascribed these human characteristics to them because they’re similar to us in that they’re mammals, and they give live birth, and they do all these other things that are similar, and they care for their young in a similar way. And so we have this connection with them, so we make movies where little kids befriend orcas and dolphins, and it’s all fun and games. But sharks are fish, and they’re very different from us. So someone has to be the bad guy, and we decided it was the sharks, because they’re different from us.

That’s a big part of it, I think, because you could say, “Oh, that’s because they’re predators,” whereas there are other predators that we don’t have those feelings about. Oh, that’s because they have sharp teeth. Well, orcas, dolphins, and sea turtles have sharp teeth. Interesting fact: one of our co-founders studies both sharks and sea turtles, and she’s been bitten by a lot more sea turtles than sharks. She’s never been bitten by a shark. She’s been bitten by a lot of sea turtles. But sea turtles always say, “Oh, yay, turtles, they’re fun.” I think that’s it, and who got the short end of the stick in PR, and unfortunately that was the sharks.

As far as the Jaws effect goes, it’s very interesting because, yes, it created this phenomenon of people having this fear of sharks. It also gave them some charisma, so negative publicity, but we still have this whole genre of shark movies, and it gave rise to Shark Week and SharkFest and all these things. There’s a whole group of shark researchers who became shark researchers because they wanted to be Hooper. And all these other things that happened because of Jaws. It kind of has these two double effects. So it’s a very powerful book and a very powerful movie that together created this phenomenon.

Whitney Terrell: So shark movies work a bit like war movies. Author Anthony Swofford said there are no anti-war movies. He said people would watch Apocalypse Now and want to go to war. So for shark researchers, there are no anti-shark movies. Is that possible?

JG: Yes, there are people who watched The White shark and, “Oh, wow, I want to study sharks.” It’s just a weird phenomenon, but the human brain is interesting.

As far as shark portrayal goes, I think this is a silly example of my favorite portrayal of a shark, but if you’ve ever seen the movie Sharks, there’s a character named Lenny who I think is adorable, and it’s the silliest, most friendly portrayal of a shark we’ve ever seen. Lenny is just a nervous little shark who doesn’t really want to eat fish. He actually wants to be a vegetarian and he befriends Oscar, who is a fish. He poses as a dolphin in part of the movie. He says, “People don’t like sharks, so I’m going to try to pretend to be a dolphin and act like a dolphin.” And he’s nervous and the odd man out in his family because he’s not “sharky” enough. He just wants to be loved, and I’m like, “Oh, Lenny.” So that’s my favorite portrayal of a shark. That’s a cartoon, not a real shark, but he’s very cute.

VVG: It seems like you see this a lot in animation and comics. It’s supposedly a contradiction, like “Oh, the shark is so nice.” Bruce in “Finding Nemo” also says, “Sharks are such nice guys!” Or “Baby Shark” was, of course, super popular.

So I read up on Jaws in preparation for this episode and was intrigued to discover something new that I hadn’t seen before. It was actually a comic novel when he turned it in. He wanted to write a humorous novel, but they gave it back to him and told him to keep the tone of the first five pages, which were very serious. I can imagine that if he had written a comic novel, the fate of the species would have been very different.

I would also like to point out to listeners who may not remember that the character Matt Hooper – spoiler alert for this 50-year-old novel – gets eaten. So the fact that people watch Jaws and want to become shark researchers doesn’t make sense to me either. But it’s bloody and dramatic and, it seems, not at all representative.

So in recent years there are these other depictions that seem to make a comical note out of this incongruity, but it seems like it’s not actually an incongruity. As a child, one of my favorite ocean novels was a book by Diane Duane about little wizard children in the sea, and a shark, like a prehistoric shark, was one of the heroes of that book. And even that somehow couldn’t completely overcome my Jaws feelings.

JG: Yeah, yeah, I mean, people’s brains are weird. You never know what people are going to associate with it and how they’re going to be affected by things. I think that’s why we really have to be careful about the words and the language that we use, especially people who have a platform, like news people and people who do documentaries and stuff like that. I mean, the music that you have playing in the background of a shark, the adjectives that you use to describe sharks, all of those things have an impact on how people interpret sharks. And so in my book, I really intentionally used adjectives that people don’t normally attribute to sharks, like “cute” and “adorable” and stuff like that, because if people can associate sharks and “cute” in the same way that they associate dolphins and “cute,” it can offset some of those feelings that you get from sharks that have blood dripping from their teeth and are just out to eat poor, helpless people floating in the ocean, and that’s really important. Words have power and we must recognize that.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Edited and abridged by Keillan Doyle. Photo by Jasmin Graham by Sonia Szczesna.

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Jasmine Graham

Sharks Don’t Sink: The Adventures of a Renegade Shark Researcher • “How Japanese-American scientist Eugenie Clark advanced shark research” | Literary Hub

Other:

“50 years ago, Jaws hit bookstores and captured the fear of a generation” by Brian Raftery | The New York Times • Opinion | “What is Trump’s shark story really about?” by Eugene Robinson | The Washington Post • Opinion | “What’s going on in Trump’s head?” by Eugene Robinson | The Washington Post • The White shark by Peter Benchley • Deep Magic by Diane Duane • Find Nemo • Big Sharks – Small Fish • Shark Week • Shark Festival • Apocalypse now • Anthony Swofford • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 7, Episode 25: “Ivy Pochoda on Caitlin Clark and Female Athletes” • Nyad • “Donald Trump mocked for ‘bizarre rant’ about sharks” | Video | Newsweek