by Matt Kaplan
So Leviathan looks to have arisen from a mix of fears. Some sailors must have encountered large marine or river-dwelling reptiles and had no idea what they were. Others must have seen whales and been utterly terrified by their size, breaching behaviors, and misty exhalations. The result was the creation of a monster with mixed traits that blended features of animals that nobody could make sense of.
And Leviathan was only the first of many. In Greek mythology, the princess Andromeda was to be sacrificed to a flesh-and-blood sea monster named Cetus and saved only at the last moment by Perseus, who held up the severed head of Medusa to turn the monster to stone (in the film versions of this tale, Clash of the Titans, Cetus is renamed Kraken, but the monster is effectively the same). Artistic renditions of this vary, and many focus only on the curvaceous Andromeda with Cetus either in the distance or out of sight completely. One piece of art that does give the monster a lot of attention is a ceramic jar made around 510 BC. On it, the figure of a hero, probably Perseus, prepares to do battle with an enormous sea monster, probably Cetus (some suggest this is Hercules preparing to battle a sea monster, but nobody is sure). What is remarkable about this art is that there are so many sea animals drawn with such accuracy. The dolphins above and below Cetus, the octopus in the lower left corner, and the seal in the far left are all immediately recognizable. Cetus, on the other hand, is a mess. The monster has the highly maneuverable pectoral fins (the ones in the front left and front right of the body) that a whale has. However, the snakelike undulating body and the spinal frill clash with the idea of this beast being a whale. It also has large gill slits behind the jaw and an anal fin sticking out from the base of its body just a bit in front of the tail. These are not whale traits at all; they are fish characteristics that are easily seen on sharks, hinting that the artist had seen a shark at some point in time. Given the artist’s superb drawings of the dolphins, seal, and octopus, it seems doubtful the drawing of Cetus was just the result of an animal like a sperm whale being drawn incorrectly. This is more likely to be an artistic attempt at creating something truly scary by combining the characteristics of multiple animals.
Hercules or Perseus and Sea Monster. Greek Caeretan black-figure clay vase, c. 530–520 BC. Stavros S. Niarchos Collection, Athens. Photo by Silvia Hertig.
And such mixed sea monsters did not stop being drawn with the end of the Classical era. In 1554, the Renaissance artist Titian painted this scene and again presented Cetus as a monstrous mélange.
In Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda, Andromeda is fair, chained to a rock, and (as always) naked. Perseus, wearing winged sandals, is diving almost vertically through the air ready to do battle with the approaching monster. Cetus’s cavernous mouth is open wide, and his body is covered in thick scales. The mouth could be inspired by whales, the scales by crocodiles or turtles, and the long, coiled serpentine body by eels or snakes.
While it is not clear exactly which animals inspired the beast in Titian’s work, the scene is meant to convey great tension. With Perseus diving through the air and Cetus ready to strike, we fear for Andromeda. And this is important, because it points out that even in AD 1550, more than a thousand years after Leviathan and Charybdis took form, people still feared monsters of the sea.
The fear seems to have been ongoing because medieval maps of the ocean are littered with drawings of strange and frightening creatures living far beyond the coast. Many of these resemble—at least partially—whales or snakes. But there are other beasts alongside these monsters that are truly foreign-looking things with long necks, toothy mouths, and large paddlelike flippers. There are no known animals that look like this in the oceans today, but this doesn’t mean medieval sailors were just making things up. They may have been looking at fossils.
Perseus and Andromeda, by Titian. Oil on canvas, 1554–1556. By kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London. Art Resource, NY.
During the days of the dinosaurs, there were marine reptiles of huge size. Some were dolphin-like in morphology, but others had long necks and paddle-like fins. All had sharp teeth and must have puzzled those who found them. As the bones of these obviously aquatic animals turned up, assigning them to the category of “sea monster” was probably the most logical option that people had.
Although plesiosaurs have maintained a meager existence as monsters in Scotland, where the Loch Ness monster charade has persisted for decades, elsewhere, fear of them has waned alongside fears of whalelike and aquatic serpentine creatures. Little by little, maps of the oceans show ever fewer monsters until finally, by the twentieth century, sea monsters cease to feature on them at all.40
A big part of this sea monster extinction is probably linked to believability and human domination of the seas. With major steps forward in marine biology and paleontology during the Victorian era, whales started being identified as the docile animals that they are and plesiosaurs started being identified as extinct (except among the Scots). But these developments in science did not bring an end to sea monsters; they just forced them to evolve into more acceptable forms and move to more believable environments.
Still beneath the waves
In Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, published (in French) in 1870, the sea monster that attacks Captain Nemo’s submarine is a huge squid or octopus (depending upon how the French is translated). Compared to plesiosaurs and Leviathan-like creatures, here was a monster that many believed really could exist. Giant tentacles of seemingly enormous squid have occasionally washed up on beaches alongside the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans for centuries. Further evidence can be seen on sperm whales that are now known to eat enormous squid and sometimes get huge sucker marks scarred across their bodies.41 Yet because squid do not breathe air, as whales do, and seem to live their entire lives in the deepest depths of the ocean, exactly what they looked like and how they behaved were left to the imagination.
We now know more about giant squid because several full-bodied individuals have been found and studied. From the ends of their wickedly barbed tentacles to the tops of their heads, giant squid really are giant, measuring 43 feet (13 meters) in length. Moreover, there appears to be a second, even larger, species in need of study, that of the colossal squid that some estimates suggest can reach 49 feet (15 meters) in length. Yet how these species behave remains a mystery, since they live in such isolated environments and are rarely seen alive.
Of course, not having easy viewing access of giant and colossal squid has hardly stopped scientists from trying to better understand them using other methods. In 2010, a team of a researchers published a paper in the Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom in which they calculated the metabolic activity of other, better-known, squid species and scaled this information up to apply to an animal of the colossal squid’s size dwelling in the extreme cold of the deep ocean.
Based upon their numbers, the team, led by Rui Rosa at the University of Lisbon, worked out that the colossal squid used far less energy than similarly sized animals of the deep ocean, like sperm whales. With such low energy demands, the researchers argued that the squid were probably not functioning as pursuit predators that chased their prey around but instead as ambush predators that would just snatch the occasional (large) fish out of the water.
The media took this finding to indicate the colossal squid did not deserve its reputation as a monster, but that opinion may have been made without properly digesting the research. Does an animal need to be a pursuit predator to be worth fearing? Sure, some great cats are frightening hunters that will chase people down and eat them given the right conditions. But crocodiles and pythons are ambush predators with low energy demands that rush out from hidden locations to grab prey. If anything, the ability to hide and strike without warning is what makes these animals so inherently terrifying. So if this is true of reptiles, why not also of squid?
To date, there have been no trustworthy accounts of giant or colossal squid attacking humans or ships, but t
here are accounts of smaller squid attacks. While making a documentary film for the Public Broadcasting Service in 1997, five-foot (two-meter)-long Humboldt squid in the Sea of Cortez “mugged” a diver. The account, described on the PBS website by the cinematographer, is startling: “Three squid had taken his collecting bags and bottles, his dive computer and the gold chain from around his neck. These squid had quarter-sized suckers, lined with teeth for tearing apart their prey, and Alex was left with a series of round, red scars circling his neck. Adding insult to injury, the squid dragged him down very deep before letting him go.” Certainly, if the Humboldt squid in the Pacific Ocean is any indicator, it appears reasonable to argue that giant and colossal squid present at least some danger to divers. Even so, the remoteness of the environments that these squid live in and the fact that so few documented attacks are associated with these animals keeps their monster status meager at best. To be threatened by them, people have to really work hard at getting close. Sharks, however, are another matter entirely.
Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws and Steven Spielberg’s movie based on the novel presented the great white shark as the stuff of nightmares. A big part of this monster’s creation was inspired by a series of real shark attacks that took place off the coast of New Jersey during the summer of 1916. Between July 1 and 12, five people were attacked by a shark and four died. On July 14, shortly after the surge of deaths, a 7-foot (2.4-meter) great white shark was killed nearby and the attacks stopped. Whether the attacks were those of a single rogue shark or a sudden burst of attacks from multiple sharks driven to feed upon humans because of changing environmental conditions was never determined, but the result was the birth of a new sea monster. Or at least that is how it would appear.
Jaws spawned a series of financially successful sequels and cultivated a major industry based upon scaring the hell out of people with shark footage, but for the popular reaction to Jaws to be so powerful, there had to be something more to the fear than just the 1916 shark attacks. Shark attacks taking place around the world have been recorded by the Florida Museum of Natural History for more than a hundred years and the records hint at a disturbing trend. From 1900 to 1910, only 25 shark attacks are recorded as having taken place around the world. During the 1970s, the decade when Jaws was published, the number was around 140. From 1990 to 2000, the number was close to 500.
It is doubtful that these figures accurately represent an increasing hunger for human flesh among sharks. Reporting of shark attacks has improved, and an attack in a remote location is much more likely to find its way to the Florida Museum’s records today than it would have been in 1905. In addition, the human population has dramatically increased in size, and with more people around, there are more swimming bodies to be attacked. Finally, the popularity of beach holidays has exploded alongside activities that draw people to the water. Surfing, scuba diving, kayaking, and snorkeling were not widely popular (or in some cases even invented) when the Florida Museum started collecting data. Their spread around the world has simply put more humans in the water and led to more chances of encounters with sharks.
Whatever the reason(s) for the increased reporting of shark attacks, there is a snowball effect at work too. With increased reports there is increased media coverage, and with increased media coverage there is increased fear. Between the 1950s and 1960s, the Florida Museum reports reveal that shark attacks made one of their biggest leaps of the century, jumping from roughly 150 reported during a decade to 250. Even though Peter Benchley explained during interviews that Jaws was inspired by the 1916 attacks, one has to wonder if a pulse of shark fear during the decade when he wrote the book also played a role.
Yet it would be wrong to argue that the past century of increasing shark attacks is solely responsible for the creation of the shark as a modern monster. While psychological literature on human fear of water predators is nowhere near as extensive as it is on human fear of snakes, humans evolved in Africa and there are many sharks along some sections of the African coast. Were interactions taking place?
A 2007 archaeological study led by Curtis Marean at Arizona State University and published in Nature revealed the discovery of 160,000-year-old shells and stone tools at the South African coastal site of Pinnacle Point. It is located roughly halfway between where Cape Town and Port Elizabeth are today and is believed to be one of the earliest locations where humans were regularly turning to the ocean for food. Why they were suddenly seeking out shellfish is a matter of debate. One argument is that as the climate became cooler and drier at that time in history, food on land became more scarce, and other food sources needed to be found. Whatever the reason, it is clear from the archaeological evidence that the species Perna perna, better known as the brown mussel, was collected quite a lot by the humans who lived at this location.
We don’t know the extent to which humans were actually entering the water, but they were spending a good deal of time next to an area that the Florida Museum database shows to be one of the shark attack capitals of the world. Compared to nearby Mozambique, Tanzania, and Madagascar, which have recorded 11, 4, and 3 attacks respectively since 1828, South Africa has logged 223. That is a big difference. And if modern humans are easily attacked in the area, why not also shellfish collectors seeking to get a particularly large animal sitting on a rock just a short distance offshore?
The reality is that the brown mussel, which was being collected so intensely 160,000 years ago, is found at the very top of the rocky intertidal zone, and sharks rarely swim into such shallow waters. But Marean points out that by 110,000 years ago, humans were foraging lower down in the rocky intertidal zone and also in sandy beach areas where sharks would have been more common and had the opportunity to attack. It is impossible to know for certain if such attacks were frequent, since fossil evidence of shark attacks on people (human bones with shark teeth stuck in them) are extremely rare in the fossil record.42 Even so, the evidence hints that human ancestors who tried collecting food along the coast might have sometimes ended up as shark bait. It would seem that as civilizations graduated from just collecting shellfish to fishing with spears, humans and sharks came into even closer contact, since sharks are strongly attracted to the presence of blood in water and would most certainly attack a human who tried to keep them away from a freshly speared fish.
So, with all of this in mind, if studies suggest that the threat presented by snakes has driven evolutionary forces to select for humans who notice and fear snakes instinctively, have hardwired fears of dangers in the sea similarly evolved as the result of historic shark attacks on humans? It seems a reasonable assumption to make, but there is a problem. If the fear of being eaten by sharks is deep-seated and has been selected for by evolution, why does the shark as a monster not emerge until the 1970s in Jaws?
Sharks attack unseen. The vast majority of modern attacks are on limbs sticking off surfboards or legs hanging down beneath the water. Some sharks bite and let go, allowing their prey to bleed to death so they can then eat without worrying about being harmed by a struggling animal. This is the case with great white shark attacks against elephant seals on the California coast. However, some sharks attack by grabbing prey on the surface, crushing it with their jaws, and dragging it down deep so that it will drown. Witnesses of both types of attacks would see almost nothing other than some thrashing on the surface, blood in the water, and a screaming victim who would sometimes sink down into the depths and never be seen again. The details of the creature making the attack would largely be left up to the imagination. Moreover, sharks do not tend to beach themselves nearly as often as whales do, meaning ancient people would have had fewer opportunities to examine these predators from the safety of dry land. Really, the only reason people today have such a good understanding of what sharks are and how they attack is thanks to modern devices like scuba masks, goggles, and underwater cameras that allow shark activities to be widely seen.
So if sharks were making historic attacks on humans, and if these atta
cks were almost entirely invisible, did this lead people to instead point at the weird whirlpools, whales, reptiles, and fossils that they could easily see and use the traits of these things to shape their vision of what sea monsters were? It seems a reasonable possibility. Indeed, if this is so, the terror responsible for the creation of the monster in Jaws is really no different from the terror behind Leviathan. The fear is the same; the form that the fear takes is the only thing that has changed.
Where fear of sea monsters is headed is a challenge to predict. Marine biologists and conservation groups rightly point out there is little evidence that sharks can develop a taste for human flesh and become “man-eaters.” These same groups agree that shark attacks are mostly accidents where the shark does not actually intend to attack a human but instead mistakes a human for one of its typical prey species. This, in theory, should calm concerns and reduce shark fear. Even so, media events portraying sharks as dangerous, like the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, still gather a lot of interest. So too do thrill activities like shark diving, where food is intentionally thrown into the water to attract sharks while divers are below the surface in a cage.43 But there is a notable reversal worth mentioning.
In 1989, the director James Cameron made The Abyss, a film about a military submarine that sank under puzzling circumstances and the presence of a mysterious form of life in the deep ocean. Although the creatures dwelling in the abyss are initially perceived as threatening, it is the people who ultimately prove to be the true danger. The film ends with the deepwater creatures saving the protagonists and the human villain being crushed by water pressure at depth. While not really a monster movie, the story is notable for its portrayal of the dark depths as places of wonder.
