Snarknado :Shark movies

Audrey Helm, Editor-in-Chief

Shark movies are anti-shark propaganda, and they’ve got to stop. You are more likely to be killed by a vending machine than you are to be killed by a shark.

“Jaws” marked the beginning of a new era: the age of the summer shark movie. Two of the most recent have been “47 Feet Down” and “The Meg.” Thanks to movies like these, people all over the world over are terrified of sharks, and because humanity as a whole has a jacked up fight or flight response, we kill them, despite the glaring factual inaccuracies in shark movies.

Here’s the first Megalodon-sized issue: in “Jaws,” this giant maniac shark just decides to start murdering and eating people, right? The only problem is that sharks rarely decide, apropos of nothing, to start mauling innocent beachgoers. They’re kind of like people; most of them are okay, but every once in a while one of them goes absolutely bonkers, and then you get the shark version of Ted Cruz-sorry, I mean Bundy.

Sharks bite people for a few reasons, and it’s rarely ever truly malicious, and honestly probably deserved. The first reason is that humans on surfboards look like turtles or sometimes seals, two things that, unlike humans, are definitely on a shark’s menu. Sharks usually take a “Humans are friends, not food” stance. People have an awful taste that probably comes from our awful personalities.

The second is that sharks are like small children in that they explore their environment with their mouths. Fortunately, the second sharks realize that the human whose arm they’ve got in their mouth is not a tasty snack, they swim away. The fact that sometimes they do this with someone’s limb is sad, but ultimately an unfortunate side effect of the circle of life.

The monsters shown in your favorite summer blockbusters hardly resemble sharks at all. Jules Howard, a zoologist writing for NBC, said, “[…] the creatures in the movie aren’t sharks but merely Hollywood perversions of sharks. Real sharks are capable predators, after all, and communicative creatures — diverse, elusive, behaviorally complex and, frankly, beautiful animals. Hollywood sharks are nothing like that: They represent real sharks the same way Dracula’s diminutive form represents bats.”

You are more likely to be killed by a fellow human than you are to be killed by a shark (in 2017, there were only five people killed by sharks as per the Florida Museum, but according to Statista, in the same year there were 17,824 murders in the US alone) but the Purge still isn’t an actual thing. If we’re going to borrow any herring-brained, needlessly violent ideas from movies, maybe it should be that one. According to the Smithsonian, humans kill approximately 100 million sharks a year (it should be noted that shark movies are not the only cause of this, there are other factors). The loss of this many sharks is devastating to ecosystems and can destroy coral reefs. You can kill a shark, but you’re killing Nemo, too.