"I'm not going to stand here and see that thing cut open and see that little Kintner boy spill out all over the dock." - Mayor Vaughn

     Sharks are some of my favorite animals. They look awesome, some of them are scary as all hell, and they're miracles of evolution. Some of them are unchanged since the time there were dinosaurs wandering around. They are perfect machines. All they do is swim, and eat, and make little sharks.
     Since that's two Jaws references now, I'll also point out that Jaws is my favorite movie of all time. It's not my favorite movie because there's a monster shark in it... but it helps. Since I've got my dinosaur tattoos, I need a shark one now. Probably go for something from Jaws, and that way it will be dual purpose, like how my dinosaur tattoos are also Calvin and Hobbes tattoos. Here are my favorite sharks, in no particular order.

 Great White Shark - Look at that thing. That would scare Pennywise the Clown. Jaws actually does appear in IT, as one of IT's shape shifts. A kid sees Jaws in the canal and he tell Bill Denbrough the fin was nine feet tall. ("Do you understand what I'm saying? Just the fin was that big.") In short: Great Whites are the scariest things on Earth. They are majestic, monstrous animals, in the full sense of those words. They are truly awesome, and not like a hot dog, I mean they fill me with awe.

Great whites fill me with a complex stew of emotions that I rarely feel towards anything else. Awe, respect and fear almost equally. I love their eyes. ("Black," as Quint says "like a doll's eye.") Great whites are Azathoth, the Blind Idiot God. In truth, great whites actually are pretty intelligent, and socially sophisticated, but holy shit, they're just... primal.

I would love to do a cage dive with great whites. My heart would be in my throat the entire time and I'd be operating on pretty much pure adrenalin, but that's why I want to do it. To be able to get in close with an animal I have such strong feelings about. The apex predator of apex predators (well, that would actually be man. But you know what I mean).

 

Mako Shark - Makos are raptors to the Great White's T-Rex (In Spielbergian terms, I know that's totally inaccurate scientifically). They're quick, athletic little bastards. Well, not really all that little, more like ten feet long. They're the fastest shark. They can swim 31mph consistently and do short bursts of up to 46mph. They can jump 30 feet in the air.

"Jordan!"

 

Come to think of it, I don't want to sell great whites short, since they're also amazing jumpers.

 

"Shaq!"

 

Makos are strong and fast. They have killed a few people, but sadly they have much more to fear from us than we do from them. That's true of all sharks, but especially makos because they're highly prized game fish. That's because they'll fight you. Sometimes if you hook a mako, he'll even get pissed and jump right into the boat.

I think Deep Blue Sea was genius to make super Makos (more or less a melding of Makos and Great Whites). Pound for pound, they're probably the nastiest shark you'd ever want to deal with. Sort of a fishy version of Kevin from Sin City. Also worth noting: most sharks don't do well in captivity, but Makos do the worst. The longest anyone has been able to keep one alive is five days.

Hammerhead Shark - Hammerheads are actually a group of several species of shark, but this blog is hardly a scientific journal, so we'll keep it simple. Easily the most famous of the freak sharks, I think a hammerhead is probably one of the most recognizable fish in the sea. It's that head! It gives them total vision both above and below them at all times.

That's the other thing I love hammerheads for. They school, which most sharks don't. It's one of my favorite images in nature. They will only school during the day time, in groups of up to 100, and during the evening return to solitary hunting.

Three of the over twenty species of hammerhead have attacked humans, but no one has ever been killed by a hammerhead.

Thresher Shark - Look at that tail. They whip that thing around, slap fish with it, and stun them before eating. Incredible. Threshers are very solitary, heavily migratory sharks. They're not dangerous to humans at all, although some instances of divers being accidentally cut by a tail whip have happened. There is one story, almost certainly false, of a fisherman being decapitated by a breaching thresher's tail whip. I wish so badly that it were true.

Since great whites, makos and threshers can all completely clear the water, I may be creating the impression that this is common behavior for sharks. It isn't. Very few of them can, it's just that three of those few happen to be some of my favorites. Threshers are also at risk from humans, which is too bad, because if you actually get a good look at their face, they're really cute.

They look like little Precious Moments sharks.

Goblin Shark - Another cutie! I like the Goblin Shark because look at that fucking thing. It looks like something from Lovecraft's aquarium. The goblin shark is rare and little is known about it, but it's a good example of the fact that there are some very, very weird sharks.

They have been caught alive, but goblin sharks live in such deep waters that they and humans pose no danger to each other. They're pretty big, bigger than a human diver, so we should probably be grateful they live so deep that nobody would ever run across one. Whether they'd attack a human is kind of a moot point. I'd probably just have heart attack. Life in the very deep ocean might as well be from another dimension, and I'm sure there's plenty of sharks down there we've never even seen.

The goblin shark is something from a nightmare, but he's probably just a small sample of what's really going on down there. They aren't even from the true fathomless depths (they bottom out around 4,000 ft, although there's some evidence they can live as far as 5,000 feet down), and they have lived in aquariums as long as a week.

Basking Shark - The basking shark is one of three filter feeding sharks (the other two are the whale shark and the very rare megamouth shark). It's a pretty freaky animal. For one thing, they are enormous, up to forty feet long and nineteen tons. That makes them the second biggest fish, after their cousins the whale shark, and it's pretty close. They physically resemble some of the dangerous shark species, so there's been many instances of an "Everybody out of the water!" situation, because from the surface (particularly if their dorsal fin is sticking out), it looks like you're seeing a double size Jaws. And that huge, gaping mouth is pretty strange looking.

It's certainly big enough to fit in, but basking sharks only eat plankton, and they're very slow moving, so no danger of getting sucked in like a bird into a jet engine. They're found all over the world. They're very commercially important, but are being overfished (common theme here). I would love to swim with basking sharks one day, and unless we fish them to extinction, that's a pretty reasonable goal. A great place to do it is around the British Isles. I'd be a little freaked out just by their appearance and huge size, and the fact that the waters there are so murky, but nothing on the level of cage diving with great whites.

Some interesting cultural notes about basking sharks: they are featured prominently in Robert J. Flaherty's 1934 psuedo-documentary Man of Aran, about life on Ireland's Aran Islands. It shows islanders fishing for basking sharks using premodern techniques, and although these scenes were fabricated, it was a representation of the way basking sharks had been fished by Aran islanders in the past, and very interesting for that reason. Basking sharks got their name because of the way they appear to "bask" in warm water, but I must have heard about them around the same time I saw the Tom Hanks/Penny Marshall classic Big, because I've always associated Hanks' character Josh Baskin with basking sharks, and for a long time assumed they had been named by a scientist named Basking.
     Basking sharks are also responsible for a lot of sea monster legends. Both by being big, fuck-off fish, and because of the fact that when they die, they tend to rot in a way that makes them look like monsters. Ever seen this one?

That was a basking shark.

Those are my favorite sharks, but one last note before I go. Since I love movies, and I love sharks, and Jaws is my favorite movie, I want to mention one other shark movie.

 Open Water - This movie is scary. Not scary like Jaws, which is just a great film, Open Water is a pure horror film, and a pure shark film, with the sharks filling the role of oblivion. Open Water is troubling, on a psychological level. It was made for almost no money, with minimal cast and crew. It's just frightening and disturbing. So much so that I would say don't watch it if you only watch movies to be entertained. It goes somewhere in the human psyche that, thankfully, most of us never have to confront. It's one of my favorites.

The sharks in Open Water are totally real, by the way. They're Caribbean Reef Sharks.

Pretty.