Ah, That Jersey Shore: The Fish Are Really Biting

By MIKE HALE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
August 1, 2009

Resistance is futile, really. From the moment you hear the words “The New Jersey Shore became a killing ground,” or “Klein pulls the arm out of the dead shark’s throat and rushes it to the hospital,” you’re hooked.

Shark Week has arrived on Discovery Channel, providing the usual feast of hapless swimmers and simulated gore. This year’s edition (the 22nd!) offers six new programs, beginning with the not so imaginatively titled “Blood in the Water” on Sunday. That two-hour film dramatizes the events of the summer of 1916, when four people were fatally attacked by sharks in New Jersey waters.

Those maulings would eventually inspire Peter Benchley’s novel “Jaws” and Steven Spielberg’s film of the same title, the template for Shark Week and all other depictions of beady-eyed, constantly moving predators. “Blood in the Water” is no “Jaws,” but it’s a highly competent television docudrama that relates its story clearly and with more than a little suspense.

But then it’s hard to go wrong with this kind of material. As vacationers flock to the Jersey Shore during a July heat wave, a swimmer is killed at Beach Haven, and five days later another dies at Spring Lake, the bottoms of both his legs bitten off. Among the animals blamed for the violence are giant sea turtles and oceangoing mackerel; sharks, never known to attack this far north, are further down the list.

Eventually scientists identify the culprit as a shark (or sharks), but the knowledge is of no use in preventing the summer’s most terrifying incident: the death of a young boy and then of a man searching for the boy’s body in Matawan Creek several miles from the ocean. This in turn leads to a paroxysm of shark hunting that employs nets, harpoons, guns and dynamite.

Running parallel to the story of severed limbs and befuddled marine biologists is an account of sensationalist journalism. As the attacks mounted, shark headlines screamed from the front pages of newspapers. This part of the tale serves only to highlight the shell game that Discovery has been playing for years: exploiting the queasy fear that sharks inspire while noting in passing how rarely they attack. “Blood in the Water” is nearly over when we’re told that there has been only one more death by shark off New Jersey in the 93 years since July 1916.

“Sharkbite Summer” on Tuesday takes this cheerful double-dealing even further. It mocks the news media coverage of what was called in 2001 the summer of the shark — one priceless clip shows Larry King staring into the camera and asking, “Are sharks rebelling?” — while vividly recreating the handful of highly publicized attacks that led to the frenzy. Again, we’re told late in the hourlong program that the “summer of the shark” actually included a lower-than-average number of attacks nationwide.

The facts and figures about shark-human interaction can build to a point where you really should feel silly watching these shows. You have a better chance of being hit by lightning or killed by a dog than of being attacked by a shark. But facts don’t need to stand in the way of horror movie fantasies and cool marine cinematography.

One particularly jolting bit of film shows a great white rocketing to the surface and knocking a seal many feet into the air, the better to snack on it when it comes back down. The seal footage, shot near South Africa, is so good that pieces of it show up in both “Blood in the Water” and “Shark After Dark,” a straightforward science documentary on Thursday night.

“Shark After Dark” features scientists swimming with their subjects as they investigate their nocturnal feeding habits; residents of the Seattle area will be interested to know that well inside Puget Sound, quite large sixgill sharks come to the surface for dinner within 150 feet of shore. Shark Week aficionados may be more excited that the program features Caterina Gennaro, the veteran underwater photographer and pole dancer.


SeaPics.com, via Discovery Channel

Lemon sharks in a scene from “Shark After Dark,” a documentary on Thursday night.

The double nature of Shark Week is captured perfectly at the end of “Sharkbite Summer,” when the narrator’s admission that “the actual chance of being attacked by a shark remains remote” is immediately followed by a shot of a funeral procession. You can never be too careful, apparently. Among the tips you can glean from these programs for avoiding that extremely unlikely attack: don’t go swimming with your dog (a shark might mistake it for a big struggling fish) and try to keep your heartbeat down — sharks can sense the electricity. And that’s an actual fact.