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'Jaws' fear grips Russians
20/08/2007 14:08 - (SA)
Moscow - Residents in Russia's far east have been warned to use caution in the sea after the capture of a Great White shark like that made famous in the 1975 horror film Jaws, a newspaper said on Monday.
"Great White sharks have appeared off southern Sakhalin" island, the popular daily Novye Izvestiya said in a report from the far eastern port city of Vladivostok.
"Fishermen and holidaymakers have been advised to watch the sea carefully and to run out of the water on the appearance of large, triangular fins above the surface," the front-page article said.
The story carried a photograph of a dead Great White shark - mostly black in colour - of around five metres lying on the beach that it said had become ensnared in fishing nets off the Sakhalin coast.
It claimed that at least two other Great White sharks of larger size had also been spotted and photographed near the shores of Sakhalin island.
Although Jaws depicted the Great White shark as a vengeful monster relentlessly on the hunt for a meal of human flesh, experts say this portrayal has wrongly maligned the animal, now considered an endangered species.
The newspaper story did quote one scientist, Anatoly Velikanov, as saying that the giant sharks usually do not go after humans. But he added: "Unfortunately, sometimes people become 'fodder' for Great Whites".
It did not say when the shark was caught, but one report late last month said fishermen off Sakhalin had "for the first time" caught a Great White in the area.
Great Whites are known to inhabit cold waters in northern and southern latitudes, but are also occasionally spotted in warmer tropical areas.
Experts however had previously treated reported sightings of Great White sharks off Sakhalin with scepticism, Novye Izvestiya said.
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