The Coolest Job on Earth: A Guest Post by Greg Skomal
Like most of us, Greg Skomal’s interest in sharks began with the movie Jaws — however, it didn’t exactly paint them in the best light. In Chasing Shadows, Skomal works to reintroduce the public to the sharks he knows and loves: magnificent creatures in need of our help. Read on to discover where Greg’s childhood fascination led him throughout his life and the conservationist career that followed.
Paperback $18.99
Chasing Shadows: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Great White Shark
Chasing Shadows: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Great White Shark
By Greg Skomal , Ret Talbot
In Stock Online
Paperback $18.99
The great white shark is one of the most fearsome predators on earth, and yet humans have managed to decimate their populations through overfishing, pollution, and climate change. This is the enlightening — and thrilling — story of Dr. Greg Skomal’s search for a peaceful coexistence.
The great white shark is one of the most fearsome predators on earth, and yet humans have managed to decimate their populations through overfishing, pollution, and climate change. This is the enlightening — and thrilling — story of Dr. Greg Skomal’s search for a peaceful coexistence.
In my childhood, like most kids, I loved sharks. My attraction to the ocean started with television shows like Jacques Cousteau, Flipper, and Sea Hunt. In 1975, I saw the movie Jaws in a local theater, and it changed the trajectory of my life. Yes, I was fascinated by the villainous great white shark (and even a little scared), but I was drawn to the marine biologist in the film, Matt Hooper. I thought he had the coolest job on earth—and I wanted to do that job. So, I went on to the University of Rhode Island to study marine biology, which really didn’t exist as a major in those days. In my third year, I started volunteering for the Cooperative Shark Tagging Program run by Jack Casey, a pioneer in shark research on the East Coast of the US. When an open position in his lab was offered to me, my life as a shark biologist truly began. In those days, fishing for sharks was becoming popular, but white sharks were rarely encountered. From the scant few that were landed by fishermen, we learned about their bodies through dissection, but their behavior as living creatures in the Atlantic Ocean remained a mystery.
In 1987, I moved to Martha’s Vineyard (where Jaws was filmed!) and started a shark research program for the state of Massachusetts. Over the next fifteen years, I researched the ecology, life history, and physiology of all kinds of sharks in New England and beyond. As my career developed over these years, so did the technologies we used. My work shifted from cutting up dead sharks to tagging live sharks with acoustic and satellite technology, revealing new secrets about their mysterious lives and behavior. Although my childhood quest was to work on the white shark, it was conspicuously absent from the region.
But in the early 2000s, changes were happening on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Seal populations, which had previously been driven to the brink of extinction, were starting to come back after fifty years of conservation efforts. And with the seals came the great white sharks—like customers to a reopened restaurant. For the first time in my career, we had predictable access to white sharks in the Atlantic, and we took advantage of this, deploying new technologies to reveal their secrets. Our research flourished and I had finally become my childhood idol, Matt Hooper. Ironically, what I hadn’t anticipated was dealing with shark attacks—we had three off Cape Cod from 2012 to 2018, including one that was fatal. As a premiere tourist destination, Cape Cod was not ready . . . and neither was I.
Chasing Shadows follows the trajectory of my destiny to become a shark biologist, and how my world became inextricably entwined with arguably the most charismatic and feared species on earth or underneath the sea: the great white shark. This book is for everyone who has felt that primal fear, childhood fascination, or desire to learn more about white sharks. To this day, far too many people associate sharks with the fictional monster in the movie Jaws. In Chasing Shadows, I share my personal adventure and aim to set the record straight about this incredible species.
