Apparently Steven Spielberg – and Peter Benchley, who wrote the book the movie was based upon – is sorry that Jaws lead to the decimation of the shark population.

Though what I’m wondering is what did they think would happen? Both the film and book spent an inordinate amount of time treating sharks as if they were monsters that would kill us if we didn’t kill them first, when the truth is that sharks just don’t find people particularly appealing as a food source (which isn’t the same thing as saying that sharks don’t attack people. According to the ISAF – the International Shark Attack File of The Florida Museum of Natural History – there were 137 alleged shark-human interactions in 2021)

By way of comparison, there were 444 deaths in the United States alone due to lightning strikes.

Decades of people have been inculcated with a fear of sharks for decades, is it any wonder that shark populations sooner or later would pay the price?