Page 16 - World of Animals - Book of Sharks & Ocean Predators

Sharks & Ocean Predators
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50 incredible facts about the planet’s
most extreme underwater predator

Nearly every stereotype of the shark is wrong. They aren’t Sharks haven’t always been objects of fear. Victorian sailors
primitive animals, they aren’t mindless killing machines and they regarded them as entirely benign – like dolphins. Then in 1916,
don’t prey on humans. Sharks are elasmobranchs, meaning that along the coast of New Jersey, four people were killed and
they are fish with cartilage skeletons instead of bones. Far from one badly injured in a spate of unprovoked attacks by sharks.

being an evolutionary leftover, however, this evolved to save This sparked a media frenzy that inspired the famous 1974
weight so large sharks could still be fast and agile swimmers. novel Jaws by Peter Benchley, and its even more famous movie
Cartilage also lets sharks conserve calcium and phosphorous, adaptation, and sharks have been the villains of the sea ever
which is important because they need both for making teeth. since. Despite the fact that you are roughly twice as likely to die
And they get through a lot of those. Sharks treat their teeth from a coconut landing on your head than a shark bite, we still
as disposable weapons and can lose a couple with every bite. have a grossly inflated sense of the threat these creatures pose.

In fact, sharks go through so many teeth in their lifetime that Sharks are apex predators and very well adapted for hunting in
the availability of the mineral phosphorous was historically the the sea, but the fact remains that for every human eaten by a
biggest constraint on their spread around the world. shark, 20 million sharks are eaten by humans.

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