The Misunderstood Shark 



Under- sea photography is adding to our 

 scant knowledge of these wolves of the deep 



WILL a shark attack a man? "Yes," 

 say the landlubbers, some of whom 

 saw sharks deliberately attack and 

 kill bathers along the New Jersey coast 

 last year. "No," indignantly retort the 

 sea captains, fishermen and shark-wise 

 scientists. 



The truth is that only a few facts about 

 sharks are well established, apart from 

 the question of whether they do or do not 

 kill human beings. For instance, there 

 are so many different kinds of sharks that 

 it would take this page, set in fine type, 

 to list them. When it reaches a length 

 of three feet the dog fish becomes a shark 

 to most people. Yet the white or man- 

 eating shark attains a length of forty 

 feet. There are sand sharks, nurse sharks, 

 blue sharks and others too numerous to 

 mention. But the fact that the white 

 shark has the designation "man-eating 

 shark" is evidence enough that he is an 

 eater of human flesh. His triangular teeth, 

 his armor-like skin and his lightning speed 

 under water make him a wolf of the deep. 

 His home is in tropical waters, but he is 

 an occasional visitor to the waters of 

 Long Island — and without any invitation, 

 too. The white shark has been blamed 



for the attacks off New Jersey. 

 Sailors will tell you that 

 sharks will eat anything; 

 that they are shy and cow- 

 ardly; that they are inactive 

 in the daytime and feed 

 mostly at night; that the hungrier they 

 are the more ferocious they become, attack- 

 ing and killing other sharks, and that they 

 are the swiftest swimmers of the deep. 

 There seems to be some misunderstand- 

 ing concerning the way in which sharks 

 attack their victims. Some claim that 

 they turn over as they attack, so as to 

 bite more readily with their receding under- 

 jaw. Others claim that they attack head- 

 on, swimming to their victim in a straight 

 line. According to J. E. Williamson, whose 

 work in photographing the shark under 

 water for the motion-picture plays "Twenty 

 Thousand Leagues under the Sea" and 

 "The Submarine Eye" has been notably 

 successful, the "head-on" description of 

 attack is the correct one. 



"I can prove by my pictures that a 

 shark does not turn over to bite," states 

 Mr. Williamson. "If a shark wants to 

 pick up anything from the bottom of the 

 sea he goes right down to it as a cat 

 pounces on a bone and picks it up. A 

 shark does not turn over to bite any more 

 than any other fish does." 



In photographing sharks with his sub- 

 marine camera, Mr. Williamson used a 

 steer as bait. The carcass floated on the 

 surface of the water some ten feet from 

 the camera. It did not take long for the 



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