What makes sharks more disconcerting than bears or other species that occasionally attack humans, he added, is that the ocean hinders our ability to see the danger coming and to escape from it.

"The shark, on the other hand, is the master predator of its domain," he wrote.

FEAR LIGHTNING, NOT SHARKS

Few experts would dispute that the chances of becoming prey for a shark are so small as to be statistically insignificant.

George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida, says the odds of the average beachgoer drowning in the ocean are one in two million, while the odds of being attacked by a shark are one in 11.5 million. The chance that an attack will be fatal is zero in 264 million.

Put another way, you are literally more likely to be killed by lightning. Between 1959 and 2005, 1,916 people died as the result of lightning strikes in the coastal United States, according to government weather data compiled by researchers at the University of Florida. In that same 46-year period, there were 852 documented shark attacks and 23 resulting deaths.

DisneyAbove, "Bruce" was a parody in the movie Finding Nemo. Below, Jaws broke box office records and sparked a national fear of sharks in 1975. Moreover, of the 400 or so species of sharks, only three –white, bull and tiger sharks – are generally associated with human confrontation. Experts say most attacks take place in warmer waters with large human populations, and are often a case of mistaken identity.

Yet fear persists. Roughly 7 out of 10 people who responded to a 2003 survey conducted by the National Aquarium in Baltimore said that sharks were something to be feared.

THE JAWS EFFECT

Most people trace the popular fear and fascination with sharks to the 1975 release of Jaws, the Steven Spielberg thriller that broke all box office records to become the highest-grossing movie of all time (it was toppled two years later by Star Wars).

The movie was based on the novel by the late Peter Benchley, which itself was inspired by much of the American shark lore to be found at that time. A large part of that lore was a string of five attacks – four of them fatal – that took place in just 12 days off the New Jersey coast in 1916. The incidents, chronicled in Fernicola's book Twelve Days of Terror, sparked a media frenzy and widespread public fear.

Earlier this decade, a similar phenomenon took place. The number of shark attacks in the United States dopubled from 24 with no fatalities in 1990 to 53 with two fatalities in 2000, according to the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida. Though the numbers have fallen in recent years – there were 39 attacks and no fatalities in 2006 – a spike earlier in the decade again sparked media attention and public fear.

In 2000 and 2001, the combined number of attacks increased to include more than 100 attacks and five fatalities, including several gruesome accounts. In one, an 8-year-old boy swimming in shallow water near Pensacola, Florida, was mauled by a bull shark, which bit off his arm. The boy's uncle, who was swimming nearby, wrestled the shark to shore, where it was shot by rangers in order to retrieve the arm, and the boy survived the encounter.

With ghastly true stories like that being reported, and Time Magazine dubbing it the "Summer of the Shark" on its cover, there was little that experts could do to comfort people with statistics or the fact that many shark species are actually endangered.

As Burgess put it, "They are among the few animals left on earth that has an advantage over us."

"˜ALL AROUND THE BOAT'

Indeed, there seems to be a non-stop stream of stories that stoke that fear. Most human-versus-shark encounters now receive some sort of news coverage, which is then amplified as news gets passed on the Internet. Savage imagery – both photos and video – of sharks tearing into boats, kayaks, surfboards and sometimes people is no longer uncommon.

In the last week alone, press accounts detailed several such incidents. A surfer was attacked in Monterey Bay, California, and dragged below the water before re-emerging to be rescued by his friends, with blood gushing from his torso. A boy who encountered a shark while riding on a body board off Oahu in Hawaii was not bit, but kicked the shark's mouth and cut his foot on its teeth in his attempt to escape. In New Smyrna Beach, a stretch of Florida sand famous for attracting both surfers and sharks, two attacks took place, marking the 11th and 12th for that area this year.

On Tuesday, the Associated Press was moved to write about a lifeguard on New York's Coney Island who rescued a small shark washed up on the beach from a menacing crowd of swimmers (yes, it tried to bite him as he swam it out). "The rescue ended a holiday weekend that began with another city shark scare Saturday, when a 5-foot thresher shark washed up on

Rockaway Beach, scaring hundreds of swimmers out of the water," the AP story said.