Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters (15 page)

So, with all of this in mind, if studies suggest that the threat presented by snakes has driven evolutionary forces to select for humans who notice and fear snakes instinctively, have hardwired fears of dangers in the sea similarly evolved as the result of historic shark attacks on humans? It seems a reasonable assumption to make, but there is a problem. If the fear of being eaten by sharks is deep-seated and has been selected for by evolution, why does the shark as a monster not emerge until the 1970s in
Jaws
?

Sharks attack unseen. The vast majority of modern attacks are on limbs sticking off surfboards or legs hanging down beneath the water. Some sharks bite and let go, allowing their prey to bleed to death so they can then eat without worrying about being harmed by a struggling animal. This is the case with great white shark attacks
against elephant seals on the California coast. However, some sharks attack by grabbing prey on the surface, crushing it with their jaws, and dragging it down deep so that it will drown. Witnesses of both types of attacks would see almost nothing other than some thrashing on the surface, blood in the water, and a screaming victim who would sometimes sink down into the depths and never be seen again. The details of the creature making the attack would largely be left up to the imagination. Moreover, sharks do not tend to beach themselves nearly as often as whales do, meaning ancient people would have had fewer opportunities to examine these predators from the safety of dry land. Really, the only reason people today have such a good understanding of what sharks are and how they attack is thanks to modern devices like scuba masks, goggles, and underwater cameras that allow shark activities to be widely seen.

So if sharks were making historic attacks on humans, and if these attacks were almost entirely invisible, did this lead people to instead point at the weird whirlpools, whales, reptiles, and fossils that they could easily see and use the traits of these things to shape their vision of what sea monsters were? It seems a reasonable possibility. Indeed, if this is so, the terror responsible for the creation of the monster in
Jaws
is really no different from the terror behind Leviathan. The fear is the same; the form that the fear takes is the only thing that has changed.

Where fear of sea monsters is headed is a challenge to predict. Marine biologists and conservation groups rightly point out there is little evidence that sharks can develop a taste for human flesh and become “man-eaters.” These same groups agree that shark attacks are mostly accidents where the shark does not actually intend to attack a human but instead mistakes a human for one of its typical prey species. This, in theory, should calm concerns and reduce shark fear. Even so, media events portraying sharks as dangerous, like the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, still gather a lot of interest. So too do thrill activities like shark diving, where food is intentionally thrown into the water to attract sharks while divers are
below the surface in a cage.
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But there is a notable reversal worth mentioning.

In 1989, the director James Cameron made
The Abyss,
a film about a military submarine that sank under puzzling circumstances and the presence of a mysterious form of life in the deep ocean. Although the creatures dwelling in the abyss are initially perceived as threatening, it is the people who ultimately prove to be the true danger. The film ends with the deepwater creatures saving the protagonists and the human villain being crushed by water pressure at depth. While not really a monster movie, the story is notable for its portrayal of the dark depths as places of wonder.

That this clashes with instinctive fears of dark or murky water and the predators hiding within is unmistakable. That it runs alongside some astounding recent research showing deep ocean environments to be special places with remarkable life-forms in need of protection makes such a story all the more worth telling. The critical question is if people can overcome the innate fears that may have helped keep their ancestors alive.

Whether fear or reason wins will ultimately depend upon what stories get told. For the sake of the animals in the deep oceans, hope for more tales like
The Abyss.

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 Remember how
Titanic
ends? Yeah, that’s what hypothermia-induced drowning looks like.

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 Of course, a counter argument can be made that many of the “vessels” used during the classical period would charitably be called floating fruit baskets today, so the whirlpool might not have needed to be that much bigger to have been viewed as dangerous.

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 Hanging out in the Mediterranean year-round sounds like the easy life, but in fact these whales are among the most threatened in the world. There are no Icelandic or Japanese whalers to hunt them, but they are effectively living in a giant fishbowl (or perhaps a better metaphor would be a giant toilet). The Mediterranean has only a very small opening connecting it to the Atlantic, and not much water circulates between the two. This means that any pollutants produced by the huge (and often not especially conservation-minded) populations living around the Mediterranean stay in the sea for decades before circulating out. Exactly what long-term effect these pollutants are having on the whales is not entirely known, but it can’t be good.

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National Geographic
sent an expedition to the loch in 1977 that overturned every rock, scanned every ripple, and monitored the entire ecosystem so closely that if a monster did exist, it would have been found. Nothing turned up. Years later it was revealed that the key monster photograph released decades earlier was a fraud.

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 Some marine biologists have taken on the task of studying the contents of dead sperm whale stomachs. It is a dreadful (and smelly) activity, but it has proved, without any doubt, that sperm whales do eat giant squid.

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 Here’s the logic. Shark attacks are rare to begin with. If they did take place in ancient times, the body would not have been recovered by terrified viewers of the attack but rather be left as fish food. In either case, human bones are extremely unlikely to fossilize under such conditions. Incidentally, in 2009, a paleontology team discovered shark teeth wedged into the bones of a plesiosaur (one of the huge marine reptiles discussed earlier that are often associated with Loch Ness). The teeth were of different sizes, indicating that the enormous reptile was attacked by numerous sharks. They argued that it was quite possibly the earliest evidence ever found of sharks entering a feeding frenzy. And because the attacks were made on an animal with big bones that did not break easily, the evidence actually got recorded. The bones of a human caught in a shark feeding frenzy would likely be obliterated.

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 There is a chance that this tourist activity is actually teaching sharks to associate human divers with food and potentially increasing the number of shark attacks in regions where this activity is happening. Whether sharks are smart enough to make this association remains to be determined, but it is an idea that should at least give would-be shark divers pause.

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Of Flame and Claw—Dragons

“They’re seriously misunderstood creatures.”

—Rubeus Hagrid,
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Dragons are among the world’s most enduring monsters. They appear early in Babylonian myths about the great wars fought between their gods, then crop up again in tales of the Greek hero Jason and the witch Medea. Later, they appear in medieval lore and are famous for doing battle with the likes of Saint George and Saint Margaret and for breathing blasts of deadly fire upon warriors like Sigfried and Beowulf. Dragons have even made it to the modern day, attacking Bilbo Baggins and chasing after Harry Potter on his broomstick. Yet in spite of their long life span as monsters, and the widely varied stories that they have appeared in throughout the ages, dragons are remarkably consistent in form.

No fuzzy or remotely mammal-like dragons have ever been described. Even the most ancient of these monsters are covered in reptilian scales. According to Babylonian mythology, there was an ancient conflict between the great gods Apsu and Tiamat and their children. This conflict led to Apsu being killed and Tiamat growing very angry. To avenge her partner’s murder, Tiamat transformed herself into a serpentine creature with horns and a wriggling body. Exactly what this creature looked like is not clear from ancient writings, but artwork offers a hint. A cylinder seal at the British Museum shows Tiamat with a horned head, a lengthy tongue, tiny forelimbs, and a very long body.

The similarity to a serpent is obvious, and it seems fair to ask if snake fear was playing a role in inspiring the form Tiamat took. The Babylonians certainly would have had some exposure to venomous snakes and, when they were trying to come up with a frightening form for their god to take, simply settled on one belonging to a dangerous animal in their environment. Yet the horns are a bit of a mystery. Goats have horns, and there were certainly goats around Babylon, but goats do not traditionally qualify as scary animals. However, a look at venomous snakes provides a possible answer.

One of the most dangerous snakes in southern Europe and the Middle East is a species known as
Vipera ammodytes,
commonly
known as the sand viper. It has long fangs that can readily puncture human skin, a foul temper, and potent venom. Whether this specific snake is related to the dragon that Tiamat transformed into is, at first, disputable. Yet if the scales on its head are taken into account, they hint at a connection, since scales just behind the sand viper’s eyes grow larger than those on the rest of its head and look like horns.

In other parts of the world, the connection between snakes and dragons is also strong. In the story of the Golden Fleece, the hero Jason goes with the witch Medea to collect the fleece from a dangerous creature. What this creature is exactly is also not obvious. The Greek poet Pindar, who lived during the fifth century BC, wrote, “For the fleece was laid in a deep thicket, held within the fierce jaws of a ravenous dragon, far surpassing in length and breadth a ship of fifty oars.” Yet according to the poet and scholar Apollonius Rhodius, “The fleece is spread on top of an oak, watched over by a serpent, a formidable beast who peers all round and never, night or day, allows sweet sleep to conquer his unblinking eyes.”

The Greek texts call the monster
dracos.
This is the word from which the Anglo-Saxon word “drakan” and the modern words “drake” and “dragon” are thought to come, but the ancient Greek term is ambiguous. It was also the word for snake. This is why some English translations of the various historical accounts call the creature Jason tangled with a serpent.

To complicate matters, the art associated with Jason and his quest is also inconsistent. On one iconic Greek jar (made at an unknown date during the Classical period, 500–300 BC), Jason is reaching for the Golden Fleece as a snake rears up from behind the treasure preparing to strike. Yet on a Greek plate made sometime between 500 and 450 BC, the monster guarding the fleece dwarfs Jason as it vomits him up after grabbing him with its rows of sharp teeth.
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It
has a noticeably snakelike body but otherwise looks a lot like what modern audiences would consider a dragon.