Sharks belong to the so-called cartilaginous fish and there are over 500 species.
Few animals are as perfectly adapted to an environment as sharks.
To take away the tension right at the start:
More people die from falling coconuts than surfers and swimmers are bitten by sharks.
In 2011, 150 tourists got seriously injured by falling coconuts and ZERO divers by sharks.
Sharks don’t have an air bladder to control how deep they are swimming, so they have to keep moving all the time. What is more, sharks can’t breathe normally like other fish. To prevent them from suffocating, they keep their mouths constantly open. When they do so, sharks are relaxed.
Once again, they show their teeth just because they have them and not because they immediately prepare to bite.
Sharks have been more than just misrepresented by the media and especially by films till this day. No shark will attack a person because he likes to eat them. On the contrary, for a shark man is the worst food he could get.
Just take a look at the contours of a shark’s potential prey and compare it to the contours of a surfer. Notice anything?
The most important thing:
Stay cool, take a close look at this animal, you just have the incredible privilege to meet a shark in the wild. Many a diver waits for this all his life.
Don’t run or dive away, stand up and sit weightlessly in the water. Thereby you “ask” the shark officially: “What do you want?
And he is not used to that. If the shark in front of you is the same size or smaller than you yourself, it doesn’t matter anyway, he won’t be interested in something that could be too strong and too powerful for him.
Sharks act according to a very specific and almost always identical scheme:
First they circle around the thing that has aroused their interest in this moment. They do so for quite a long time. Thereby, they check if what they are seeing really can’t be dangerous.
If the shark is too close for your comfort, just breathe very loudly through your regulator and it will disappear. No fish makes such noises underwater, which will irritate the shark and it will make the decision to leave you alone rather than take unnecessary risks. Even a shark has a self-preservation instinct.
If you have missed this situation, the shark will swim to you and feel if what he has in front of him is soft. Show him the bottle or the housing of your camera. He will assume that everything on you will be as hard as what you have put against him. Even a shark will not voluntarily want to bite into a steel bottle.
If you ever encounter a shark – which, if you are not explicitly diving at a site known for sharks, is really extremely rare and more like winning the lottery – there are some rules of conduct you should consider step by step. And as long as you follow them, absolutely nothing will happen to you.
A shark has a behavioral program from which he does not get out. And as curious as sharks are, they are at least equally shy.
A shark does not take any risks, he could lose his life in an encounter with something he does not know.
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