So about a year and a half ago I entered a History Day competition at the insistence of my grade room teachers (in actuality, I was forced, considering I had no desire to join up with the science fair recruits, and that had been my only other choice for the "personal project" we were meant to be doing). I don't recall what the theme was - something about moments that changed history, or something - but I somehow connected it to Jaws well enough that I earned first place in the district competition. I lost at states, but... well, we don't dwell on that. Anyway, because of my rant yesterday, I was reminded of this, and how closely I hold this paper to my heart, so I thought I'd share it with you guys. Savvy?

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In the summer of 1975, the film Jaws was released in theaters and on an unsuspecting public for the first time. The film vilified sharks as a whole and spurred thousands of people to take action against the poorly portrayed creatures, drastically shrinking their populations. However, it also encouraged budding scientists to take a closer look at sharks and prove whether their film behavior was fact or fiction, giving us a better understanding of how they lead their lives. These scientists were aware that sharks had a right, as all animals do, to be portrayed correctly, and they readily acted on that responsibility.

Jaws began as a best-selling novel, written by Peter Benchley in 1974. It was, said Benchley, inspired by a 1964 fishing story from the legendary fisherman Frank Mundus, who has since passed away. The encounter was one prominent in Mundus' career. His description of the event used familiar words in the world of shark stories, such as "harpooned" and "killer". "I harpooned him and he took off for the horizon," Mundus told The Daily News in 1977, "Before I got him, I harpooned him five times. A white shark. A killer" (Dennis Hevesi). Such an encounter struck a chord with Benchley, who accompanied Mundus on many a fishing trip. He was noted to have expressed interest in Mundus' method of harpooning, the way he used barrels attached to lines to keep track of his prey while they were underwater. This method obviously parallels the famous scene in Jaws where the citizens attempt to hinder the "monster shark" plaguing the fictional beach-town of Amity using the same technique of using barrels to keep the shark close to the surface.

Months later, after the novel was met with considerable success, Peter Benchley was offered the chance to turn his best-seller into the world's first summer blockbuster. With Steven Spielberg as director, the film was set to be captured within fifty-five days. However, problems occurred; such as an uncooperative mechanical shark that disliked seawater, ships that passed by without understanding the importance of filming and other regrettable mishaps. The production time expanded to an astounding one hundred and fifty-nine days, swelling costs by three-hundred percent what had originally been given to the crew by the studio (The Monster That Ate Hollywood). Yet, despite these setbacks, Jaws still managed to outshine its competitors at the time and scare a generation of beachgoers out of the water. In the U.S. alone the film grossed over two-hundred-and-sixty million dollars. Jaws left an imprint not only on those who braved seeing it that opening summer, but the Hollywood society that had birthed it, changing how films were marketed and distributed.

As a result of the film Jaws, man felt his throne atop the highest link in the food chain shake, if only slightly. Retaliation, as history would tell us, was in order. Man took to the water, seeking to calm his quaking heart by wiping out what threatened him. The film's wrongful portrayal of sharks as heinous, murderous creatures who prefer the flesh of man to that of any ocean-dwelling creature instilled a fear in viewers and that certainly left its mark. In the time of Jaws' release, it was considered fact that sharks were maneaters, and though it was later proven untrue by inquisitive scientists, many sharks in the 1970s paid the ultimate price for this misrepresentation.

Jaws' release prompted an outbreak of shark-hunters, men who claimed bravery by needlessly slaughtering sharks. This outbreak has since caused a drastic decline in shark populations. In the waters east of the U.S. in particular, populations of various sharks have dropped by fifty percent, and some populations have declined by as much ninety percent among certain species (Charles Q. Choi).

The decline for sharks isn't solely Jaws' responsibility, though. A Chinese delicacy known as shark fin soup is another contributor. The practice of "finning", a process by which shark fins are obtained for the soup, requires mercilessly slicing off a shark's fins and then throwing the still-struggling body back into the sea, leaving it to either drown or be devoured by other predators (What is Shark Finning?). China's economic growth has resulted in this previously wealth-dominated dish becoming more popular among the middle-class (Shark Fin Soup Facts). Because shark meat consumption in China has grown, millions of sharks are needlessly slaughtered each year just to satisfy humans' hunger, which is considered a clear violation of basic animal rights, as this delicacy is not something necessary for human survival.

Animal rights are, by definition, "rights believed to belong to animals to live free from use in medical research, hunting, and other services to humans". Clearly, the process of shark finning for a dish that serves no significant purpose in either bettering humanity or the world is something that reduces these rights to nothing more than hollow words.

With fear of sharks currently at large, many argue that we'd simply be better off without them, that they're mindless beings who have no right to feed off us as they please. That's simply not the case. Sharks do not have the capability to track certain individuals and remember them as favorite snack they'd like to partake in on a later date. And shark attacks are comparatively rare. In actuality, "it's estimated that 150 people around the world die annually from falling coconuts. That's more than double the estimated 62 annual shark attacks worldwide" (Tara Parker-Pope). In addition to this, you're sixteen times more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to be attacked by a shark (Shark Fin Soup Facts).

Despite this rationale, Jaws and its villains continue to frighten countless individuals witless."Still, there are some people who don't want to put their feet in the water as a result of seeing Jaws," said George Burgess, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research in Gainesville. This remains true. Jaws will forever be a staple in both the world of cinema as well as the entirety of the Earth. In the same context, though, Jaws' legacy is not entirely bitter.

After the film's initial release, there was a surge in public fascination with sharks. Scientists found a reason to take a closer look at sharks because of Jaws' misguided portrayal of sharks, allowing them to disprove the malicious and cunning behavior of sharks that the film put forth as fact over the next few decades. Discovery, the channel that produced the documentary How Jaws Changed the World, has said, "public fascination with sharks led to a golden age of shark science that completely changed our view of the ocean and how it works. And as the science began showing us how real sharks behave, it spurred a worldwide conservation effort whose earliest champion was Jaws author Peter Benchley" (Jaymi Heimbuch). This conservation effort has been taken up by countless organizations with the goal of protecting the ocean's apex predator. Undoubtedly, without the inspiration Jaws provided to budding marine biologists who felt a responsibility to discover whether sharks' on-screen behavior matched that of that real-life counterparts, conservation on this scale would not have taken place.

While the movie did create a hostile environment for sharks, it only deepened the innate problem the human race had already been facing. WWII, in particular, cast a harsh spotlight over sharks, as many soldiers who crash-landed in the ocean brought home with them terrifying tales of man-eating sharks. Jaws reiterated what was considered to be fact and sharpened the focus on the subject, spreading fear en masse with its own ghastly depictions of shark attacks.

Matt Hooper, fictional oceanographer of the Jaws world, spelled out science's view of sharks at the time with his famous line, "Mr. Vaughn, what we are dealing with here is a perfect engine, an eating machine. It's really a miracle of evolution. All this machine does is swim and eat and make little sharks, and that's all" (Jaws). In the modern realm of science, however, we now know that sharks are a much more important component in the balance of Earth's oceans than this description makes them out to be.

Peter Benchley, the man who inadvertently set this situation into place, admitted his perception of sharks at the time of writing Jaws was skewed, that he didn't portray them accurately as he himself learned first-hand how they behave by diving with them on numerous occasions. "When Peter wrote Jaws, our knowledge of sharks was really minimal," said Wendy Benchley, Peter's wife (The Inspiration for Jaws). It's also been noted that wherever Benchley came across a gap in factual information concerning sharks, he filled it with what he thought was probable at the time. However, after writing Jaws and seeing the aftereffects Benchley famously committed himself to both ocean conservation and shark conservation, which he continued to do until his death in 2006.

It goes without saying that Jaws success inevitably doomed sharks with the paralyzing fear it unleashed on the public. But it's also worth noting just how much it inspired change for the better. Jaws was both the final arc of the executioner's blade and sharks' saving grace. The film produced a legacy very few can match, boasting phenomenal box office sales, a firm standing in even modern American society, and a worldwide impact that still continues to this day.

Today, we can definitively say that Jaws caused the decline of sharks as well as the renewed effort to better understand them, as people both feared them and were fascinated by them. Jaws truly did change the world.