The Great White Shark – Friend or Foe?
Two people were fiercely attacked last year by a great white or great whites. How come two different guys, both surfing on the ocean waves, they had nothing in common with each other, and both bitten in half by a great white? What are we doing to provoke them to kill us? Do they have a taste for our flesh, or do they just like to hunt us? Nobody really knows the answers to these questions, they can only guess.
Great whites are one of the largest hunters in the ocean. They are carnivores just like every other shark out there, but they seem to attack us more and more. So this brings us back to the question “Do they hunger for our flesh or do they just like to hunt us?” The best guess that can be thought up right now is the fact that they’re hungry, and they see us swimming or surfing, so they attack. When a person swims they tend to kick their legs and swing their arms underwater even when their staying in one spot. When a great white sees this it automatically thinks “Food!” Normally when an animal, a seal for instance, is injured they flop all around and stay in one spot. A great white does not understand what is doing this until they get their one bite in. All sharks take a bite out of their prey for a taste test, but unfortunately, the great white has a rather large mouth and when it takes a bite that person usually dies.
A couple years ago there was a thirteen year old girl surfing, and while she lay on her board and paddled with her arms she was bit by a shark. Now look at this from a shark’s point of view: here’s a creature surfacing up on the top of the water relaxing, it’s unsuspecting, it’s rather large, and it’ll be an easy meal. What the shark could see was a large slender body (the surfboard) and arms flapping (the thirteen year olds.) This shark couldn’t see the actual girl; it just saw a body (the board) and the arms. When the shark attacked it clamed one of her arms and it left. This means that the shark does not like the actual taste of human flesh, it was hungry and hunting for food, mistook her as food, and its one bite took her arm off.
If the great white is actually hunting us and wanting us as its food then that leaves us with the question “Why is it eating us now and no longer eating its natural diet?” What about we are depleting its food source? We’re taking its natural diet from it, leaving it to develop new taste buds (whatever it can get a hold of.) Since we fish so much we’re killing off a lot of the oceans fish and depleting the carnivores of their foods. We’re forcing more and more predators to the shore toward us.
This could only being getting worse. It may seem that there are a lot of fish in the oceans still, but there are also still a lot of carnivores. The great white has the ability to launch itself onto the beaches for food; this ability is part of its nature. When the great white was designed, it was designed for hunting and everything that would be needed for hunting. Harbor seals are another part of the great white’s diet, so in order for the great white to get the seal it has to launch itself out of the water to grab it off of the beach. The great white will grab anything and everything that gets in its way, even if it already has what it came for, the more the better. If the great white is left to hunt whatever it can, then we could be in big trouble, but we’re doing this to ourselves. We shouldn’t blame the sharks, they didn’t tell us to take their food sources leaving them to fend for themselves. If the great white starts picking us off of the beaches there’ll be nothing we can do for one another. We’re endangering ourselves.
So is the great white our friend or foe? I say neither. The great white is not designed to be our friends, there made to help the oceans from becoming over populated in creatures. They’re not our foes either, and we should not start killing them off. The great white is here for a specific reason or it wouldn’t have been created.
