Sharks — From Fear to Fascination
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Paleontologist John Long was on a research trip with a couple of friends. They were on a boat near the Neptune Islands off the coast of South Australia, and they were surrounded by white sharks. It's pretty scary. I mean, you see these really big sharks. Some of them are up to 14 feet long, so they're not the maximum size. These creatures can get up to 20 feet long, fully grown. But mature males are 12 to 14 feet long, so that's a pretty big one.

And you see them circling the boat. And John was about to get even closer to these fearsome creatures. You put on your gear and you back into a cage. A cage that was lowered into the water, giving John an opportunity to watch the sharks up close.

This experience was a big stretch for him. Ever since I was a kid and I was in the water when a shark was near the beach, I've never gone in the seawater deeper than about three feet. I'm happy if it's up to my waist and I can swim around, but I never go into deep water. He says a lot of Australians are afraid of sharks, and not without reason. We have a high number of shark attacks and fatalities, although we

We call it a high number. It's really, you know, when you look at the international shark files, it's something like five to ten fatalities a year. But basically, they're pretty gruesome and pretty scary. Now John had to overcome this fear. He felt anxious as the cage sank down into the water. But he started to settle into the serenity of his environment and the fish all around him. Beautiful big kingfish, three foot long, hanging around the cage and

giant silvery brim-like fish and what we call perchoid teleosts, the bony fish, swimming in and out of the cage through the bars, like all around you while you're in the cage.

And then suddenly the shark is there and it just appears out of nowhere. And they come really close up to the cage and you can see them face to face from, you know, three, four feet away sort of thing. You see their eyes are looking at you and their pupils are actually a kind of dark blue colour, not black as they appear.

And they study you and they're observing you as much as you are observing them. But they're really just powerful and fast creatures. They're just awesome predators. John also felt confident and secure about the strength of the cage he was in. Unlike the cage we saw in the film Jaws that was torn to pieces by a white shark with a very small actor in it, which made the shark look very large for the film.

Did you see the movie Jaws when it first came out? Absolutely, and it scared the hell out of me. The classic movie was based on a book by Peter Benchley, also called Jaws, that came out 50 years ago in 1974. John says the movie terrified beachgoers across the globe and

I'm sure a lot of you remember that. And along with overfishing, it had a devastating impact on sharks. The retribution that came to the sharks from fishermen

and other people that just went out to hunt them and kill them was terrible. The white shark population in the North Atlantic, for example, dropped by about 70% in the ensuing five years after the three Jaws films were shown. And at first you think, oh, well, they're just sharks. They'll bounce back. Why do we care? But we knew little about the biology of white sharks in those days.

Only recent studies have shown that North Atlantic white sharks, for example, take between 26 and 31 years to sexually mature. So it takes a long time for a population to then gain ground, especially because white sharks don't have a large litter of pups either. Yeah, a population of white sharks could take 50 to 100 years to get back to the

the levels that it was pre-Jaws. Sharks have been swimming around our oceans since before the dinosaurs roamed the earth. Now they're facing unprecedented threats from overfishing to climate change and many shark species are endangered. But there are surprising factors coming to their rescue. On this episode, sharks and what could help these ancient predators survive.

Let's stick with John Long. He's a professor of paleontology at Flinders University in South Australia, and he has a new book out, The Secret History of Sharks, The Rise of the Ocean's Most Fearsome Predators. So let's get into the history of sharks on this planet. Where do they come from? How did they evolve? This is one of the great mysteries of paleontology because sharks

We don't have much of a fossil record of the beginning of sharks, their origin story, shall we say. We have some scales that resemble modern shark scales that date back almost 465 million years old. That's a long time ago. It's before there was any life on land. In fact, it's older than the rings of Saturn, if you want to put it on a solar system scale. Before trees, before insects, before anything else, we had sharks or shark-like creatures.

Now, for that first 50 million years of shark evolution, we have just a handful of remains, basically scales, some spines, and one kind of articulated, nearly complete small skeleton of a shark-like creature from China.

but no teeth. Scientists believe early sharks didn't have the powerful weapon-like teeth that define sharks today. And they also had more competition. Another type of massive fish dominated the oceans, placoderms. This is what we think at the moment, is that sharks emerged and were very much the underdogs for about 70 or 80 million years until the placoderms went extinct at the end of the Devonian period, 359 million years ago.

And then sharks really took off with a bang and just became the dominant fishes in our oceans. And how come the sharks didn't go extinct at that time?

Well, this is the most amazing thing about sharks. They're the only jawed creatures on the planet that have survived all five of Earth's major mass extinction events. All five. What makes them so adept at surviving mass extinction events? We basically think it was their adaptability in terms of what I think their dental plasticity, the way they can develop teeth, not only into amazing shapes, everything from shark

pointed teeth for grabbing prey to serrated edge flat teeth like the white shark for tearing through flesh to rounded domed teeth for crushing like pavements and rays or stingrays today are a kind of shark. They evolved from shark like ancestors. So that are like a subgroup of the sharks as are the chmyrids and spookfishes and ratfishes.

But the thing about shark's teeth is not just their shape, it's their histology, the tissues they develop, various strong kinds of enamelioids, multi-layered enamelioids on the outer part of the tooth, different kinds of dentines, some of them very strong and dense, heavily mineralized. So it creates teeth that are not only very strong and powerful, but also very flexible teeth.

They can do a lot of different jobs, if you like. So the business end of the shark, how it feeds, is really their survival ability because they could then adapt to a whole range of different food types when the ecosystem was stressed. So it's almost like their teeth are also utensils and tools. Yes.

Yes, some sharks have got like Swiss Army knife mouths. They have sharp pointed teeth at the front for grapping prey. They have flat domed crushing teeth at the back for grinding up hard prey. So they could sort of eat a much wider range of prey types. And their teeth grow back.

Indeed they do. Sharks can generate up to 20,000 to 30,000 teeth in a lifetime, an individual shark. Some of them, like sand tiger sharks, are shedding a tooth every two days and replacing it with a new sharp one.

So they never have to go to a dentist. I'm so, that's like the thing I'm the most jealous of. Yeah, I am too. I just had braces for the last two years, so I'm very jealous of shark's teeth. So how does it, does the tooth grow back that quickly? It just like pops up?

Yeah, well, no, they have, if you look at a shark's mouth, they have rows of teeth where they're tucked in behind one another, like rows of teeth. And the ones at the front of the mouth on the active biting surface are the ones that grab the prey. The ones at the back just are moving forward on like a conveyor belt. They have an organ called the dental lamina, which most vertebrates have.

that produces the teeth, but they just produce it in overdrive, so they're producing teeth all the time. John says sharks have another strong advantage that has helped their survival. The other advantage

superpower that sharks have is their amazing cartilage. So we have cartilage, it's the soft rubbery tissue that forms our ears and our nose. And it's also the core that our bones form around. So when we're a baby, we have a fairly rubbery skeleton. We can't walk because our bones haven't ossified, they're mostly cartilage.

But sharks have a unique kind of cartilage that's very special in the way it's built. It's made of globular calcified what we call tesserae or little tiles. So it's not only super strong, but very flexible and light. So whereas other creatures in the seas at the time, the fishes had bony skeletons, bone is a heavier and more energetic tissue to make. They had lighter skeletons to make them more agile and lighter in the water and so on.

Talk a little bit about their role in the oceans as a predator. What are they doing to sort of like keep the balance of our oceans right? All apex predators, like lions on the Serengeti, for example, you know, keep the herbivores in check. In other words, so the balance of nature doesn't get out of whack.

If there weren't lions, then the antelopes and gazelle would eat all the grasses and things and then soon there'd be no grasses and they would overpopulate and then you'd have a terrible ecological collapse. Or what sharks do in the oceans is similar. As top-line predators, they keep the larger bony fishes in check that do a whole range of things like eat coral on coral reefs or eat other fishes that then eat other prey fish

right down the food chain from a whole range of invertebrates, different creatures. The other thing they do by doing this is they recirculate nutrients from one zone of the ocean to another. So you might eat predators in the top ocean parts of the sea, the top waters,

are eating prey there that then carries certain nutrients down to the lower levels or another part of the ocean where they're needed. What can the history of sharks and their ability to survive tell us about their future? A lot of our sharks are now threatened and their numbers have declined. Sharks are mostly under threat due to overfishing. And it's not just that people are out there fishing for sharks.

Shark finning, of course, is a terrible thing. It should be banned. It is banned in many countries. But it's really the overfishing through bycatch. We get these giant ocean trawlers going out there to catch the edible fishes that we like to eat, the bony fishes that, you know, that then the sharks are caught as a bycatch.

and killed. And there's many hundreds of tonnes of sharks killed that way each year that isn't regulated. And we don't know the numbers of species that are being wiped out that way. We also have good examples, though, of places where fishing for sharks is not regulated or not enforced. The regulations are not enforced on the rare and endangered species that are threatened on the IUCN, the International Union of Conservation Red List.

plastics and pollution are another challenge to sharks there's massive amounts of oceanic plastic so that's of course not just sharks affecting other marine creatures right up through the entire food chain yeah but what will help them survive i think one of the biggest things that will help sharks survive is people's fascination with them the fact that now in this modern 21st century

Shark tourism is absolutely booming. Not just the great whites that I was out in the cage looking at, but you can go swimming with whale sharks in many parts of the world. You can go swimming with basking sharks off Scotland and Ireland. You can go swimming with hammerheads or bull sharks off Florida and the Caribbean and off Fiji. You can go swimming with tiger sharks off

There's so many different shark tourism opportunities all around the world now and they're growing like wildfire all over the place that I think the value of sharks as living creatures for tourism is going to soon outweigh their value as food resources. And that could be one of the big saving graces for sharks, that we humans are so fascinated by them. And the more we learn about them through doing these diving experiences and seeing them up close, the more we understand their biology and their ecology...

the more we realize they're such an integral part of all marine ecosystems. John Long is a professor of paleontology at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia. His book is called The Secret History of Sharks, The Rise of the Ocean's Most Fearsome Predators. Coming up, we meet a man who's obsessed with sharks and catching them. I shark fish.

Sharkfish, sharkfish, eat pizza and sharkfish. That's next on The Pulse. Politics is a lot these days. I'm Sarah McCammon, a co-host of the NPR Politics Podcast, and I'll be the first to tell you what happens in Washington definitely demands some decoding. That's why our show makes politics as easy as possible to wrap your head around.

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We don't go around the world. We're already there. Listen to the State of the World podcast from NPR every weekday. This is The Pulse. I'm Mike and Scott. We're talking about sharks.

Sharks face multiple threats today, from issues caused by climate change to overfishing. But in an interesting twist, many fishermen want to play a role in keeping sharks safe and alive. Alan Yu caught up with one of them who got hooked on shark fishing more than a decade ago.

I'm at an undisclosed beach in New Jersey at 5:30 in the afternoon, waiting for the people to leave. That's because I'm here with fisherman AJ Rotendeller and two clients who are going to fish for sharks.

AJ is busy getting the gear and bait ready. He drives metal stakes in the sand, sticks very tall fishing rods into them, and cuts up some of the fish he brought in a cooler for bait: bunker, bluefish, and dogfish. Shark fishing is what his life is about. I shark fish, shark fish, shark fish, eat pizza and shark fish.

That's pretty much it. AJ has always loved to fish. Waking up in the morning, you have no idea. It's a wide open ocean. Anything could be anywhere at any time. And I think that's fascinating. But he got into shark fishing 13 years ago when his brothers told him they could catch sharks from the beach. We went, we caught two, then we couldn't replicate that success for the rest of the season. So that like really got me

interested because I knew it was possible but I couldn't do it again. He became consumed with catching sharks. AJ was working as one of the crew on a party boat at the time but he wanted more time for his new quest. So I went to the captain I was like hey I only want to work Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and he goes are you kidding me you can't work the weekends that's that's the most busy time like no no I gotta go shark fishing I have to.

He's like, "You're gonna lose all the money." I'm like, "I don't care. I need to go shark fishing." But there was a big learning curve, a lot of trial and error and painstakingly tracking all of the factors that could lead to a catch. I obsessed, absolutely obsessed over this. And then eventually I learned about the tides, water temps, currents, moon phases, this, that and everything else. And that's just through sheer torture. It was horrible.

But looking back, obviously it's rewarding because now I can just pick and choose the window that I know is going to produce, catch a bunch and go home instead of having to sit out there for 60 hours and hope for a bite.

He did not give me specifics about what he had learned about tides and currents and phases of the moon, except that he has learned from experience that right here is a good time and place. And that is what he likes about shark fishing. It's a challenge to catch one, especially fishing from a beach and not outdoors.

out at sea on a boat. To catch a fish with your feet on the sand without being able to chase them down or anything like that, I find that to be a lot more fun. And also, when you catch a huge animal like a shark, you get right up next to it instead of looking over the boat, looking at it, you know. AJ spends the summers in New Jersey and winters in Florida, so he can catch sharks year-round.

He runs a company called Apex Anglers, where he guides people who want to catch sharks. The beach has cleared out, and AJ casts a line manually out into the water. But he also wants to set up some lines further out.

He puts bait on a waterproof drone and flies it out far offshore, further than he could cast a line. Before drones, he used to get in a kayak to drop the bait off. He says we should see a shark very soon. Now we're 10 minutes from the shark. 10 minutes? Can I set a timer? You can. I mean, you can if you want. I can't guarantee it, but...

30 minutes later, one of his clients sees one of the lines shaking. Something's eating the bait. AJ drops the fish he was cutting up for fresh bait and sprints over to the line to reel the shark in. I think he's playing games with me. After about a minute of reeling the line, AJ drops it. We had a bite, a pickup, but he spit the hook out.

They put out some fresh bait. The sun goes down, it gets cooler. They get a few more bites, but no shark. They're killing us. Shark's three, us zero. And then after 10pm, more than four hours in, with the light of headlamps and the buildings behind us, we see another shaking line, another bite. Finish the meal please.

AJ hands the pole to his client, who starts reeling the fish in. Wow, you got yourself a fish right there. Pulling the shark is hard, with a strong current and the shark fighting to get away. We're gonna see the fish in like the next minute or two. AJ grabs his tools: a glove, something to pull the hook out if necessary, and a pair of cutters to cut the metal wire attached to the hook. These tools are right here, in case we need them.

He sticks them in the sand by the shore. After the client reels in the line for a few minutes, AJ, the client and I head towards the water. Soon we see it. It's big. A seven foot long sand tiger shark. It's gray on top with a white belly. The hook is in its mouth and it's wriggling in the water. AJ's headlamp illuminates the shark's mouth and its sharp teeth.

I'm close enough that I could touch it. AJ makes sure to keep the shark submerged so it always has water to breathe through. Come on, buddy. Where's that hook? Loosen up, loosen up. One of the clients runs over with the pair of cutters. AJ cuts the wire. The client grabs the shark's tail to set it back to the water. Back to the ocean. Keep going, keep going. Harder, faster. Wait for this wave.

Keep going, more, more, more, more. Spin her around, let her go. And there she goes. And she's gone. Just like that. We waited hours for those action-packed minutes. AJ had warned me beforehand that I would barely get to see the sharks they catch. And that is intentional, to make sure the sharks are not harmed.

You just want the fish to survive. That's the end of the story. The point is for this to be a sustainable fishery, you need to have fish swimming off and living a happy life after the encounter.

AJ makes sure to use a barbless hook, so once he cuts the wire, the shark should be able to just shake the hook off. He wants to catch the sharks, not kill them. And then when I started catching them, you appreciate them more, definitely, because you can get right up next to them. The care AJ takes with his catch is important, especially since many sharks are endangered, including the sand tiger.

AJ says he makes sure he has the right gear and the right techniques so that he does not have to fight a shark for a long time and the shark always stays in the water. Fish ecologist John Mohan says both of those points are important. The longer they have to fight, the less chance of survival. John is at the University of New England and has done research on what helps sharks survive after being caught.

Noah, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, supported his research. He says sharks get stressed from fighting an angler's line, and they need water to help them cope. If a shark...

has fought really hard, what can end up happening. Just like a human, when you're running, sprinting really fast, right, your muscles get sore because you're building up lactate, which is a byproduct of anaerobic metabolism. And so what you want to do is you want to flush out that lactate. And the only way to do that is to get fresh water over the gills, which is going to help freshen up their blood, essentially. It's like how human runners need to breathe more heavily after an intense sprint.

John learned some of this from a study he did with shark anglers in the Gulf of Mexico and looking at the black-tipped sharks they caught and how many of them survived. Anglers being worried about sharks surviving the catch is a somewhat newer development in the US. As Andy Danochuk remembers...

He's a professor of fish conservation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I remember vividly going to the Florida Keys in the 70s and seeing all these big, massive tiger sharks and hammerheads all staked up this board outside of this fishing pier. But that changed as research showed the shark populations are threatened. Shark anglers became more conservation-minded.

For many recreational anglers, it is the immersion in the environment. It's the thrill of the chase, the opportunity to get close to the thing that you're targeting. And Andy includes himself in that group. He has been fishing his entire life, including for sharks. The more that I fished and then the more that I was observant of what was going on in the environment and with these species, I

I've started to realize that in order for us to have a future for being able to fish for these animals, we need to think about how we can use science to better inform their conservation and management. And this work is about fish behavior, but also very much about human behavior and what drives people's interactions with sharks. Some people like to fish for sharks.

Other anglers like to fish for other things and get annoyed when sharks eat the fish on their lines. There are commercial fishing operations that sometimes catch sharks in their nets without meaning to.

And they are people who want to see sharks when they're diving or snorkeling. So the challenge for scientists like Andy is to figure out how to work with all these people with their competing and overlapping interests and maintain healthy shark populations. We're doing a lot of science and social science and doing that in parallel because at the end of the day, we're not managing sharks or we're not managing fish.

The end goal of this work is to save sharks. And it means shark anglers like AJ can experience the thrill of the catch and watch them swim away to see another day in the ocean. That story was reported by Alan Yu.

This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about sharks. I want people to move from fear to fascination with sharks. Jasmine Graham's own fascination with the ocean started when she was a young girl, spending hours with her dad fishing off of a pier in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Today, Jasmine is a marine biologist and the president and co-founder of Minorities in Shark Sciences, or MISS. She specializes in small-tooth sawfish and hammerhead sharks. I think what fascinates me about sharks is that, one, I've always been drawn to the misunderstood.

Because I've felt that I've been misunderstood. People look at me and they make assumptions about...

who I am, and I've had many people say that I'm intimidating, and I don't find myself intimidating. I think I'm a very lovely, nice, kind person. But, you know, that's the perception that people have just from looking at me, and so I related to sharks in that way, that people perceive sharks as being these scary animals, but they're no different than any other animal. They're just out here trying to eat and sleep and

breathe and reproduce and do all of the things that other animals do. Jasmine has a new book out. It's part field diary, part memoir. It's called Sharks Don't Sink, Adventures of a Rogue Shark Scientist. If you had to...

give a sort of pep talk for sharks, or if you had to convince an audience that sharks are amazing, what are some of your favorite shark facts that you draw on? Oh, I have so many shark facts. I was hoping. One, I think that people, when they hear shark, they think of white sharks. They think of jaws. They think of these big, scary animals. Most sharks are less than four feet long. So,

So the big three, as we say, white sharks, tigers, bulls, those are the exception, not the rule. Most sharks aren't that big. Those are some of the few species that are that big. And they're just kind of swimming around doing silly little things. So there's little sharks like the bonnethead shark, which happens to be my favorite shark species, that eat seagrass.

And we just recently learned this, that seagrass actually makes up 60% of their diet. They're omnivores. We think of sharks as being meat eaters and only eating meat. But actually the majority of the food that they eat for the bonnet heads is actually plants.

And we have all of these weird, quirky sharks. We've got sharks with whiskers. We've got sharks with all of these brilliant colors that are able to camouflage. We've got sharks that glow in the dark. What? What?

What is that? What's up with that? We've got giant sharks like the whale shark that are just massive and huge. And what do they eat? Tiny little plankton. And they have throats the size of golf balls. And they couldn't swallow you if they wanted to. And there's just so much diversity in this group of animals. And for someone to just boil it down to this trope of big, scary man-eater with...

big sharp teeth is really doing them a disservice. And the sharks you study are not a danger to you, so I'm not thinking you're

you're feeling scared or anything to be around them. But do you ever get the sense that they interact with you? Do they acknowledge your presence? They are definitely aware that we are there. They are aware that we are there before we are aware that they are there. Different species have different, I'll say, characteristics.

of comfortability with people. Some are naturally more, and it kind of depends on where they fall in the food chain, right? Like a small shark that's used to being eaten by things is probably not going to stick around when something big and unknown starts swimming towards it because it's used to being prey. Larger sharks are a little bit more confident when they're closer in size to people and

They're still very wary because they maybe have not seen a person before and we look very weird to them. And I like to explain it to people like, imagine that you're just walking down the street and an alien just landed in front of you and started walking towards you. Some people are going to be like, oh, I wonder what that is and walk towards it. Some people are going to run the other way. It's the same thing with sharks. There are some sharks that are more curious than others and

And they definitely are very aware of our presence. They do respond to stimuli. They recognize people.

Some of them accidentally get conditioned to people. So in areas where people are doing the feeding tourism and stuff, where they feed sharks and people are diving, sharks actually learn the sound of boat engines and start coming towards boat. They learn that people with bubbles means food because they have the scuba gear and they create bubbles. Sharks are very capable of learning. They actually learn very fast.

And I think that they are aware of us. They're wary of us. But after a few minutes of us being in the area and them realizing, okay, they're not doing anything that's going to be a threat to me. So then they'll kind of go back about their normal lives. But they'll definitely be keeping an eye on you. You could always tell that.

that they've got an eye on you. They always know where you are. Even if you don't know where they are, they know where you are. Jasmine says for people who are afraid of sharks, she likes to remind them that shark attacks are very rare. For example, in 2023, there were 12 fatalities from shark bites globally. On the other hand, we kill 100 million sharks per year.

10 to 100 million, several orders of magnitude more. So if a shark is ever to encounter a person, it is far more likely that the person will kill the shark than the shark will kill the person. So they have every reason to be afraid of us. We have very little reason to be afraid of them. And we have a lot we can learn from them, not just like,

medical or like biomechanics of building things of, of how using nature as, and mimicking nature biomimicry in our own engineering and things like that. But also in understanding how the world was, um,

and how it is and how it could be because they've lived through ice ages they've lived through lots of changes in the environment and our environment is changing there's a lot that we can learn from sharks but we can't learn if we're afraid

And the last thing that I want is for someone to decide, well, I'm not going to go in the ocean and experience all of the beautiful things that the ocean has to offer because I'm afraid of sharks. And finally, the title of your book, Sharks Don't Sink. Is that one of the inspirations you take from them? It is. Yeah. So sharks are unlike bony fish. Bony fish have swim bladders.

So if you've ever had a pet goldfish or something like that and your goldfish dies and it floats to the surface because they got swim bladders, they got little air pockets. So when they die, they float up to the surface. Sharks, however, are negatively buoyant, we say. So they are actually more dense than water, unlike bony fish. So they sink when they die.

And in fact, when they stop swimming, they sink. So they're swimming. Their forward momentum is what's keeping them in the water. So if they were to stop swimming, then they would sink. And the reason why we don't have a bunch of sharks just sitting at the bottom is because they're swimming.

They spend most of their lives swimming, and that's what keeps them afloat. And so I like to remind myself that as long as you keep moving forward, you can't sink. Jasmine Graham is a marine biologist and the president and co-founder of Minorities in Shark Sciences, or MIS. Her new book is called Sharkstones Sink, Adventures of a Rogue Shark Scientist. ♪

Coming up, an underwater photographer turns a shark with unusual features into a celebrity. She has such a distinctive face. I will never forget seeing her for the first time. That's next on The Pulse. You're listening to the NPR Network. Live from NPR News, I'm Lachie. A living, breathing record of your neighborhood, the country, the world.

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This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about sharks. In recent decades, some of the Jaws-inspired fear of sharks has given way to fascination with these awesome predators. And there is a celebrity shark in Florida that's helping to change the narrative. Liz Tong caught up with the shark diver and underwater photographer who helped make this shark famous.

Reina Onan has always been drawn to the ocean. She loved mermaids and going to the aquarium. Eventually, her whole family got into scuba diving. And Reina says it was a transformative experience. When you jump in the water, everything on the surface and above water is so loud. But as soon as you go underwater, all you hear is like this very calming ocean noise, like white noise. And it's like, oh, my God, it's so loud.

and everything slows down. And it does kind of feel like you're in outer space because you're weightless and you just can float along and move in any direction you want to. It's very, very freeing and very relaxing.

So in college, Raina majored in marine biology. And she got a job at an aquarium, which is where she was first exposed to sharks. And those jobs often involved wrangling the sharks for their vet visits. And sharks don't really understand vet visits, so sometimes you have to corral them for their best interest. Now, to me, this sounds like the worst possible introduction to any animal, let alone sharks.

Think about how your cat reacts when you try and take them to the vet.

But Raina says she really never was afraid of sharks. I like to tell people the first 30 seconds is like, oh my God, that's a shark. And then you look at it and you realize it's not charging towards you. It doesn't want to eat you. It's literally just swimming. After college, Raina moved to Florida to work as a scuba instructor in the Keys. While she was there, she heard about this special dive you could go on where you get to feed the local sharks.

So Raina signed up. And we went out in the morning and we went down on our first dive and one of the first sharks that showed up was Snooty. Snooty is a nine foot lemon shark. To the untrained eye, lemon sharks don't look all that different from great whites, except they're slightly smaller, have a yellowish cast and a blunter snout.

But Snooty in particular has a unique look. She has such a distinctive face. I will never forget seeing her for the first time. It's a big part of what's made Snooty famous. She looks just like Bruce the Shark from the movie Finding Nemo. Name's Bruce. It's all right, I understand. Why trust a shark, right? What?

See, where most sharks have mouths that are downturned, giving them a grim, menacing look, Snooty's mouth turns up at the corners, making it look like she has this big, goofy grin.

Reina says this signature look of Snooty's is probably either a birth defect or a fishing injury. But as Reina discovered at that first meeting, Snooty has the personality to match her sunny appearance. She just came up and she had such a personality. She came up right to me and bumped me like right in the nose and not in a threatening way. It's just like the way she says hi.

Raina started going on regular dives to see Snooty, and it seemed like right away, Snooty recognized her. And so it was really cool to get her attention. It's almost like she's the popular girl, you know, because there are a lot of other people in the water, and so the sharks are kind of all around.

But for her to like single you out to come up to is so incredibly cool. It's so cool when you're diving and you see her from the bottom and she just lifts her head up and you just see her face swimming right up towards you is like the best feeling in the entire world. In 2019, Reina got a job leading shark dives herself. And that meant she got to see a lot more of Snooty, anywhere from once a week to once a day. Now, Snooty was already a local celebrity, but

But she became world famous in 2023 when Reina posted a TikTok video of a smiling snooty swimming up for nose rubs. It ended up racking up more than 80 million views. People just love her. I think it's just her smile. She looks so funny. She almost doesn't even look like a shark. Like, I think the most common comment on that was like, that doesn't look real. Like, is that AI or like?

is that an animation? Since then, Snooty's online fan base has taken off. Reina's followers have started waiting eagerly for the next video of Snooty until the fall of last year when Snooty suddenly stopped showing up at their usual spot.

And, you know, a couple months went by and we're like, okay, you know, she might just be somewhere else. She might be hanging out elsewhere. It's not uncommon for sharks, if they are pregnant, to go somewhere else. And that could be what happened. Lemon shark's gestation periods can be as long as a year. But Snooty has been coming to the same place for more than a decade. And Raina worries that something else might have happened to Snooty. It all started with a little bit of a fight.

It always is a fear of ours in this area that she has been caught or killed by a fisherman. We see all the time the negative effects of fishing on our sharks. People shoot them, people try to hurt them. So I'm really, really hoping nothing bad happened to her, but that is a possibility. We do have a lot of sharks with bullet holes in their head where fishermen are just mad at the sharks.

for eating their catch. I've even pulled a knife out of one of their heads. For a while now, shark lovers have been lobbying for greater federal protections for sharks.

But in Florida, Reyna says, fishermen control a lot of the economy. And so they have a lot of pull when it comes to regulation. But I'm hoping that having shark diving in this area, we're able to say, hey, this is an economic revenue for this area and it's renewable. People want to come and see these sharks fish.

not just have them killed. So I'm hoping with the rise of popularity of swimming with sharks that we maybe can protect more of them. In the meantime, Raina is continuing to go out every day looking for Snooty. She isn't optimistic, but for now at least, she's holding out hope. That story was reported by Liz Tongue.

This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about sharks. Great whites look plenty fierce just because of their sheer size and massive teeth. But they pale in comparison to one of the great ancient sharks that's long been extinct, the megalodons.

Megalodons dominated the oceans 20 million years ago, and they still dominate many people's imagination. They also have a starring role in the movie The Meg. What do we actually know about these massive predators and why they went extinct? Lauren Tran-Muchowski looked into it.

There's something simultaneously glorious and terrifying about megalodons. It's difficult to visualize the largest shark to ever exist, with its size ranging from 40 to 70 feet. Of course people are fascinated by an animal the size of two school buses roaming our oceans. I think it's just the fact that there was this giant super-sized shark that used to be in our oceans that would prey upon whales, and you're just like, oh my goodness. That's Philip Stearns.

a shark researcher at the University of California at Riverside. And then, you know, seeing a megalodon tooth, you're just like, holy cow. You know, when it's bigger than your hand, you're just like, yep, that's a supersized shark. But what exactly did this shark look like? Shark skeletons are cartilaginous, so they don't preserve well. All we have left of the megalodon are teeth and one well-preserved vertebral column. Jack?

Jack Cooper, a PhD student at Swansea University in the UK, used those fossils to produce the first ever 3D rendering of Megalodon, using the great white and other similar sharks for reference. There's about 140 of their vertebrae or backbone that came from one individual. So by 3D modeling that entire vertebrae and using that as the basis for our shark's size,

and then filling in some gaps with its ecological analog, the great white shark, we can essentially use free animation and modeling software to fit hoops around those skeletal elements and produce the overall body shape of Megalodon. After rendering the 3D model, Jack's calculation predicts that the Megalodon's stomach could fit almost 10,000 liters. That's an entire orca whale.

Philip Stearns is not sold on this model though. He says we don't have enough in the fossil record to be so sure. So all we have left in the fossil record are these three things. So to make your justification that Megalodon looked like these modern-day sharks, you're making a really big jump with that assumption. But there are some details shark researchers agree on when it comes to the Megalodon. For example, how they got to be so massive.

While most fish are cold-blooded, megalodons and other big fish have a trait called regional endothermy, or partial warm-bloodedness. Their internal body temperature is warmer than the surrounding seawater.

Philip says that for megalodons to maintain their higher body temperature, they had to eat a lot. As the shark was eating more, it just helped, you know, you're getting more nutrition in and over time these animals are just getting bigger and bigger and then evolution is just happening and then more prey becomes available. So it's like, okay, this shark was eating a lot of food and then there's a new prey item available and then a new species evolves and it eats even larger prey and even more so its size just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

And as they got bigger, they had to consume even more calories to maintain their body temperature. And as it's eating more, just natural growth is going to happen. And, you know, once you get to such a big size, there's really very few competitors that can really compete with you. And then it's like, OK, who's going to slow down such a big carnivorous shark? Megalodons mainly ate small to medium-sized cetaceans, the order of aquatic mammals that includes dolphins, porpoises, and whales.

But their size and voracious appetite eventually contributed to their demise. Jack says about three million years ago, there were sea level changes that, over time, ruined the coastal habitats of the megalodon and its prey. At the same time, this could have also ruined...

Potential nursery areas where Megalodon babies were living. And essentially what that leads to is less habitat for the shark to live in and move around in and find food. And at the same time, the Great White was starting to evolve and may have potentially been out-competing the smaller Megalodons. So we think it was probably down to a combination of less prey availability, more competition and less habitat, which ultimately led to Megalodon's extinction.

Given that so many shark species face extinction right now, Jack says the fate of megalodon can carry important lessons. No apex predatory sharks thankfully have gone extinct yet, whereas megalodon represents an apex predator that has gone extinct,

So if we can understand the extinction of that animal and what effects that had on the wider marine ecosystem, then that gives us something to anticipate and to understand how ecologically our oceans could change if we lose today's sharks. For The Pulse, I'm Lauren Tran-Machowski.

That's our show for this week. The Pulse is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia, made possible with support from our founding sponsor, the Sutherland Family and the Commonwealth Fund.

You can follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Our health and science reporters are Alan Yu, Liz Tong, and Grant Hill. Our intern is Lauren Tran-Muchowski. Charlie Kyer is our engineer. Our producers are Nicole Curry and Lindsay Lizarski. I'm Maiken Scott. Thank you for listening.