Pre-industrial emblem
48Heraldry, materia medica or first-fish law met the great white shark before film.
Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
Speed79
Intelligence42
Range82
Resilience33
Cultural impact73
Ecological role85
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Last reviewed Sources & creditsMedia creditsMethodology
Quick answers
Did Jaws change great-white numbers or only stories?
The 1975 film increased trophy interest and beach fear. Later decline drivers are fins, bycatch and slow life history. Benchley later argued the fiction had been taken as a brief.
What is the White Shark Cafe?
A mid-Pacific patch where California-tagged whites linger. Foraging on midwater squid and fish is the working hypothesis, not a seal colony.
Are great whites warm-blooded?
They are regional endotherms. Countercurrent heat exchangers keep muscle and stomach above ambient -- not mammalian homeothermy.
Why Gansbaai and the Farallones?
Cape fur seals and elephant seals create predictable prey. Cage tourism and research boats stacked on those same reefs.
Who is Deep Blue?
A very large female photographed at Guadalupe and later Hawaii -- a media name, not a stock assessment.
When did CITES list the species?
Appendix II in 2004. Papers still move; the listing forces permits and data, not a zero quota.
IUCN: Vulnerable
Great white shark culture is local: the same silhouette is a licence in one country and a logo in another.
Status bars are editorial -- they track how loudly this type spoke in English-language media and law, not a best-species score.
Status through time
Industrial take
62Canneries, ivory, longlines or shikar scaled the take.
Cinema and logo
65A film, book or NGO mark often outran the field paper.
Statute and listing
72ESA, CITES, IWC or national parks made the type a legal object.
Live-cam and tourism
55Streams, jeeps and auctions are the present tense of attention.
Portrayals
Novel1974
Benchley Jaws invented a revenge animal the field did not recognise.
Film1975
The mechanical shark set beach-policy weather for a generation.
Tag map2012-
OCEARCH made individuals into browser characters.
Magazine still2000s
False Bay breach photos became the default hunt image.
Obituary activism1990s-2006
Benchley later essays treated the novel as a debt.
Town news2010s
Cape Cod closures treated a returning predator as a novel emergency.
Rituals
Cage-dive briefings
Gansbaai and Guadalupe operators script a safety talk that is also a brand.
Seal-count dawns
Farallon observers still time whites to elephant-seal seasons.
App-track fandom
Named-tag followers treat pings as a serial, not a paper.
Sayings
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