Jane Stevens in Berkeley, CA. Sometimes reporters do stupid things. Take Rodney Hartman, for example. He's a reporter with The Star, one of 14 newspapers owned by Independent News & Media in South Africa. He wrote a story about a series of shark attacks that occured 50 years ago. Here's a PDF that Submerge Magazine put on its site. We can't link to the story in The Star, because only subscribers to the print edition have access to the story on the news organization's Web site. (Maybe restricting access to stories works for them....most US news organizations gave up that practice a while ago.)

Back to Rodney's story: With what scientists like to call "purple prose", he recounted the shark attacks that took place over four months and resulted in five deaths off eastern coast of South Africa, in KwaZulu Natal province. The attacks led to the founding of the Natal Sharks Board, which put shark nets along the most popular beaches. There's no information about what type of sharks attacked the bathers. For humans in those areas, the most dangerous sharks are the white, tiger and Zambezi (AKA bull).

Unfortunately, the photo used in the story was a ragged-tooth shark, also known as a sandtiger or grey nurse shark (not to be confused with a plain old nurse shark). A little scary-looking, sure, as you can see in this beautiful photo that Joe Lencioni took of one at the Minnesota Zoo.

But it's not dangerous to humans unless threatened or cornered. It eats fish, crustaceans, squid and octopus. Members of Sharklife, a conservation group, were furious, and started a letter-writing campaign. They objected to Hartman's sensational approach and the use of the ragged-tooth shark as the representative. Point of fact: Sharks kill a few humans. Humans kill millions of sharks, many species to the point of being endangered, i.e., in dire straits as to their survival on this planet.

News and documentary organizations typically depict sharks as mindless human-killing machines. But they're no more mindless predators than we humans are....how many of us think about how that cow or pig we ate today was killed? Oh, wait. We call that ranching. Or farming. Hey, I'm a beef-eater, too. But in the spirit of showing the kinder, gentler side of white sharks, the shark we love to hate in the U.S., here's a very short, but different take on a white shark in the waters around the Farallon Islands off San Francisco after TOPP researcher Sal Jorgensen attached a microphone-size satellite tag to it.