50 years after Jaws, will B.C. ever see more great white sharks?

Yahoo

2 days ago

Fifty years after Steven Spielberg's Jaws set the template for the Hollywood summer blockbuster movie, the spectre of a great white shark attack still looms over anyone who goes swimming in the sea.
Jaws was released on June 20, 1975, and the film is set in New England as a vicious great white shark kills summer beachgoers, and a police chief takes on the scary task of tackling it.
Scientists say B.C.'s waters are still too cold for the great white shark to proliferate on Canada's West Coast, but that they could become more common as the Pacific Ocean warms due to climate change.
Still, they say over a dozen sharks call B.C.'s waters home, and measures to protect them from hunting are resulting in more of them recovering in population.
"Sharks are part of what brings natural balance to ecosystems by exerting this top down predation pressure, so species never get out of control," said Andrew Trites, a professor at the University of B.C. Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries.
"We are seeing a recovery of sharks, I would say probably worldwide, but particularly in North America."
Among the most common sharks that call B.C. home is the spiny dogfish, which Trites says many fishermen have accidentally caught in the Salish Sea.
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Danny Kent, curator of fishes at the Vancouver Aquarium, says another common shark is the sixgill shark, which divers may have encountered in the Howe Sound region. But the curator says many sharks in B.C. waters thrive on the open ocean, and not close to land.
"I think most people would be lucky to see [a shark] just cause they're not often seen," he said. "They might be common, but not commonly seen."
Other sharks that inhabit B.C. waters, according to Kent, include the salmon shark, the mako shark and the thresher shark.
Another is the basking shark, a 12-metre long shark that is one of the largest fish in the world.
Kent said basking sharks used to be plentiful in B.C. waters, feeding on plankton.
"They were almost completely eradicated and ... almost nobody ever sees them anymore," he said.
"And, you know, if we started seeing them coming back, I think that would be a good sign, just like we're seeing other marine mammals coming back that haven't been around for a while."
Trites said the great white is very uncommon in B.C. waters, and even though their prey of seals and sea lions are recovering in population, the ocean on Canada's West Coast is simply too cold for them to become a regular feature.
"The great white is really, really rare — although maybe it'll become more common in another 50 years when we do another anniversary for the movie Jaws," he said. "Maybe [then], we can talk about great whites, because what is changing is the waters are warming."