A great white shark with its head above water and its mouth open.
Oceans

What Jaws gets wrong about great white sharks

By James Ashworth

Jaws is an iconic piece of cinema, but it really jumped the shark when it came to great whites.

Discover what mistakes Jaws made about great white sharks and why they don’t really deserve their killer reputation.

Fifty years ago, Jaws darted onto movie screens and made an almighty splash, becoming one of the highest grossing films of all time.

The tale of a great white shark menacing the fictional New England town of Amity Island is generally regarded as a landmark in cinematic history, setting the template for blockbuster films to this day. Steven Spielberg’s direction, John Williams’ iconic score and an extensive marketing campaign all came together to make a film that still holds up today.

But while Jaws is rightly recognised as a tense thriller, the film’s depiction of sharks isn’t as laudable. While the great white is cast as a human killing machine in the movie, in reality they actually much prefer to eat seals than people.

The film’s popularity, however, set the image of sharks as man-eaters forever in our collective consciousness. Dr Diego Vaz, our Senior Curator of Fishes, says that the impact of Jaws still influences sharks’ reputations today.

“We can’t just blame Jaws for people’s impression of sharks, but the film was so successful that it had a big impact on what people think,” Diego says. “Unfortunately, as sharks are apex predators that live in a place that’s so different from us, they’re easy to vilify.”

“Jaws has made it difficult to shake off that reputation, even while shark populations are in trouble around the world.”

To mark Jaws’ fiftieth anniversary, it’s time for a deep dive into the movie’s misconceptions about sharks.

A great white shark breaches the ocean’s surface, having narrowly missed a seal.

Great white sharks don’t play with their food

In Jaws’ opening scene, the unfortunate Chrissie Watkins takes a late-night swim only to be dragged around before being pulled beneath the water. Chrissie’s remains are only discovered the next day, cementing her place as the first victim of Jaws’ shark.

While the scene is a portent of things to come, it doesn’t really reflect how great white sharks hunt in real life. Though Chrissie is attacked from below, similar to how these animals might attack a seal, sharks aren’t known for dragging or drowning their prey.

“Great whites hunt in a variety of ways that aim to guarantee their prey won’t harm them,” explains Diego. “One common hunting method for seals is to leap out of the water. The shark strikes the seal at high speed from below, aiming to grab the animal between its jaws.”

“In another, they bite chunks out of their prey and allow it to bleed to death. They then return to the animal and carry it away to feed on.”

The side of a great white shark, with its lateral line clearly visible.

Great white sharks rarely attack humans

The attack on Chrissie is also unlikely for another reason – it’s extremely rare for a shark to take anything more than a bite out of a human.

It’s not really known why this happens, but one of the leading theories is mistaken identity. Though sharks have finely tuned senses that enable them to detect everything from electrical signals to pressure changes, their eyesight isn’t actually that detailed.

Research suggests that sharks aren’t very good at seeing fine details or colour – in fact, they might be completely colourblind. Instead, their eyes are adapted for detecting contrast, which allows them to better pick out the movement of prey against the background.

While great whites have some adaptations to improve their vision near the surface, research suggests that juveniles, at least, can’t see the difference between surfers, swimming humans and seals.

Hungry sharks might have already taken a sample bite before their other senses kick in, and they realise that they’re biting a human. In most cases, sharks then release the person and don’t return.

Sharks may also bite in defence if humans stray into their home waters. Diego says that, in these cases, larger sharks are more likely to attack than their smaller relatives.

“There are two main factors that affect whether a shark will bite people – their size and the environment,” Diego says. “Larger sharks tend to have less to fear in the oceans, so they’re more likely to bite back when faced with the choice of fighting or swimming away.”

“This is particularly true in certain environments, such as shark feeding and breeding grounds, where sharks want to protect their territory.”

A tunnel with a shark mural surrounding it that references the 1916 New Jersey shark attacks.

Great white shark attacks are extremely rare

After the initial attack on Chrissie in Jaws, the shark subsequently eats Alex Kintner, fisherman Ben Gardner, an unnamed boater and eventually Captain Quint. These five deaths are spread across several days in the film, yet a great white doesn’t normally feed this often.

“After a large meal, great whites don’t need to eat again for some time,” remarks Diego. “They tend to feed every few days, rather than continuously.”

It’s estimated that a 30-kilogramme meal of blubber is enough to feed a great white for a week and a half to two weeks, depending on how active it’s being. Generally, however, they don’t go this long without food and feed on seals every few days to keep their strength up.

Humans are much less nutritious than seals, so a shark would need to eat more of them to meet its energy requirements, but the truth is that these animals just aren’t that interested in us. In 2024, only 47 people were injured in unprovoked attacks by all the world’s sharks, and just four died.

Nonetheless, there’s a slight ring of truth to the attacks on Amity Island. Jaws was partially inspired by a real-life series of shark attacks in New Jersey, USA, in 1916. Five people were attacked over the course of 12 days along the state’s coastline, leading to four deaths.

While it’s uncertain what species of shark caused the attacks, a great white caught nearby did contain human remains in its stomach. Debate continues, however, over whether this individual was the sole attacker or if a group of sharks might have been responsible.

In any case, the small number of people who are injured or killed by sharks each year is vastly outweighed by the sharks killed by humans. An estimated 80 million sharks are killed by fisheries alone every year, with shark populations as a whole declining by more than 70% since the release of Jaws in the 1970s.

This has had wider impacts on the entire ecosystem, as the loss of sharks has allowed their prey’s populations to grow. In South Africa, for example, rising numbers of seals and smaller sharks are eating fish and African penguins, unbalancing the wider marine food chain.

While bans on shark fishing have helped the animals to recover in some areas, the long reproduction time of these animals means that it will take decades, if not more, for populations to recover.

A robotic shark lunges out of the water at Universal Studios’ Jaws ride.

Great white sharks can't immediately smell blood

As the trio of Chief Brody, oceanographer Matt Hooper and Captain Quint set out to hunt down the shark, Brody starts throwing bloody bait into the water to try and draw it to them. The enormous shark appears almost immediately, leading him to deliver the immortal words – “you’re going to need a bigger boat”.

It seems that the shark was able to sense the blood from a long way away, and swim rapidly towards it. However, a shark’s ability to detect blood is often greatly exaggerated.

While tests haven’t been carried out on great whites, studies on smaller species suggest that the average shark can detect a drop of odour in a billion drops of water. While this sounds impressive, it’s about the same as any other fish.

That said, a great white shark’s sense of smell is probably better than any of its relatives. The area of the brain used to process smell, the olfactory bulb, is the largest of any shark species and represents around a fifth of the mass of its whole brain.

Even then, the idea that the shark would be able to detect the blood and swim so quickly towards it is another example of Jaws’ dramatic license.

An open great white shark jaw, seen from the front and both sides, is next to a metre-long ruler that it is almost the same size as.

Great white sharks aren’t that big

After the film’s protagonists lure the shark to their boat, named the Orca, Hooper estimates that it must be at least 20 feet, which would be six metres long. Quint disagrees, saying it’s 25 feet, which is about 7.6 metres. In reality, Hooper is probably right.

“Generally, most great white males are 3.5–4 metres long, while females are longer, often measuring 4.5–5 metres long,” Diego says. “However, the largest great white sharks are estimated to be as long as six metres or more.”

While this means Hooper’s estimate is within the range of real sharks, there’s a catch! All the largest great white sharks are female. However, real-life footage used in Jaws clearly shows that the shark has sex organs known as claspers, which are only found in males. As a result, Jaws’ shark is much longer than any known male great white.

In the same scene, Quint also estimates that the shark weighs three tonnes, but this is also another exaggeration of a great white shark’s true size. The heaviest great whites are believed to weigh around two tonnes, but males are again much smaller – probably around 800 kilogrammes at their heaviest.

When the novel Jaws was based on was being written, however, such enormous shark sizes were thought to be possible. In fact, the jaws of a shark now in the Natural History Museum are partly to blame for this misconception.

The half-metre wide Port Fairy jaws belonged to a shark caught from near an Australian town of that name. They were recorded as coming from an enormous shark measuring more than 11 metres in length. Shortly before the novel was published, however, the shark’s length was re-estimated at around 5.5 metres – a much more realistic size.

Three colourful boats on a beach, including one with a shark design.

Great white sharks don’t sink boats

Later in the film, Quint manages to harpoon the shark and attaches the line to the back of the boat. As the shark begins to pull the boat backwards, water floods into the engine and Hooper shouts, “it’s impossible!” It turns out he’s right!

“While great white sharks are capable of swimming at speeds of up to 40 kilometres an hour, this is only possible in short bursts,” explains Diego. “Like a cheetah, they spend most of their lives moving at a much slower pace and only move to their top speed for short bursts during a hunt.”

So, even if a great white was somehow able to pull such a large fishing boat, it wouldn’t be able to do it for as long as it does in Jaws.

Having dragged the boat around, the shark subsequently starts to attack the vessel itself. After its sides are breached, the boat starts sinking, coming to rest on its side in shallow water.

Once again, however, this is an example of fiction overtaking fact. To begin with, reported shark attacks on boats are extremely rare, with just three recorded in 2024. It’s likely that these were caused by sharks mistaking the vessels for their prey.

Plus, even if a great white did want to sink a ship the size of the boat in Jaws, it’s extremely unlikely that it would be able to do so. While surfboards and kayaks are vulnerable to a great white, larger vessels are just too sturdy for a shark to make any significant damage or to capsize them. In fact, large sharks are much more likely to be hurt or killed by ships colliding with them.

In reality, the only larger boats that seem to be more at risk of shark damage are inflatables. Back in 2023 three sailors had to be rescued after a group of cookiecutter sharks punctured their catamaran’s inflatable hull.

A type of small shark known as a rig swims underwater.

Great white sharks don’t make noise

As the shark bears down on Brody, he manages to wedge an oxygen cylinder in its mouth and later shoot it with a rifle. The resulting explosion kills the shark, leaving Brody alive to fight giant sharks again in the sequel Jaws 2.

During the shark’s death throes, a distinctive growl can be heard as it sinks. While Steven Spielberg fans might recognise the sound effect as the same one used in his previous film Duel, it doesn’t excuse the fact that great whites, as far as we’re aware, don’t growl. They certainly don’t roar either, as the fourth film in the franchise, Jaws: The Revenge, suggests.

In fact, the vast majority of sharks don’t seem to make any sounds at all. While many fish can make a drumming sound using their swim bladder, sharks don’t have one of these organs, let alone any vocal chords.

The only sharks that are currently known to actively produce noises are rigs, a species of houndshark that lives off the coast of New Zealand. When handled underwater, they snap their teeth together to make a clicking sound, which may be a response to distress.

While research continues to see if other sharks make sound, the great white is not currently among those being investigated.

Four small sharks, with the skin removed from their bodies, lying on ice.

Resetting our relationship with sharks

Even 50 years after its release, Jaws still sets the tone for public opinion about sharks. But these animals shouldn’t be feared! They’re an important part of life in the sea and deserve our help.

“Sharks can be dangerous, it’s true,” muses Diego. “As someone who used to surf in areas with great white sharks, I was scared but I accepted the risk when I entered their world.”

“But we need to remember that we’re much more of a danger to sharks than they are to us. Industrial fishing is decimating their populations and harming the diversity and functioning of marine ecosystems as a result.”

“Learning to respect sharks is the first step towards giving them the protections they desperately need.”

No catch areas, trawling restrictions and quotas are all ways that fisheries can be made more sustainable to give sharks a chance to recover. In turn, more resilient shark populations will be better able to support the livelihoods of people involved in fishing all over the world.

If we don’t take action to protect sharks now, the health of our oceans will be in far greater peril than Amity Island ever was.

hammerhead shark swims with mouth open

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