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Indeed, you might as well. Shark Expert H. David Baldridge insists that the notion that sharks are completely unpredictable is nonsense. "Of course their actions are predictable," he maintains. The problem is that "we are still so totally ignorant of shark behavior that we cannot do it yet." He may very well be right, but just to deal with the crucial part of the shark problem—attacks on human beings—requires confrontation with a bewildering set of data. The files of shark-research panels in the U.S., Australia and South Africa record attacks in cold water and warm, deep seas and shallow, at high noon and midnight and all the hours in between, when the ocean was calm and when it was rough, in all seven seas and miles up the rivers that lead to them. One can scare oneself with the notion that there is no body of salt water anywhere in the world where one can feel entirely safe from sharks. One can console oneself with the notion that the chances of being killed by a shark are about the same as being struck dead by lightning. Each year there are 40 or 50 recorded attacks worldwide. If a shark does strike, statistics give a human about a 65% chance of surviving the encounter, though possibly with fewer appendages than when he began it.
Still, a sensible individual does not carry a steel-shafted golf club on high down a fairway in a thunderstorm, and enough has been learned about sharks to put to rest the once common notion that sharks are lazy, cowardly, clumsy scavengers. It is true that you can hold the brain of a 20-ft.-long great white in your cupped hands, but it is not true that the sensorium transmitting information to that primitive organ is feeble. Experiments have revealed that sharks can smell out one part of human blood in 10 million parts of water, some actually see better in dim light than in bright (which gives them the edge on deep-plunging human divers), and their hearing is just fine, thank you.