"Still, there are some people who don't want to put their feet into the water as a result of seeing 'Jaws,'" he added.“I've got tremendous regard for Kevin Sheedy as a person and he's an icon in the game of Australian rules with an incredible track record in that code and its growth,” Gorman told Fairfax Media. "I think nowadays that there is a more enlightened view that sharks are part of the environment, and that you have to look out for sharks as you would for anything else in a wilderness experience," Burgess said. "Our medical capabilities are also far better than 100 years ago, so even when shark attacks occur, the consequences are not as severe - if bitten, the fatality rate was 40 to 50 percent in the early part of the 20th century, and now it's down to 10 percent." Now researchers know more about contributing factors to shark attacks, "so we're smarter when it comes to avoiding certain situations, and have minimized the number of attacks over the years," Burgess said. "Up until that point, there was virtually no funding for sharks, because they were not thought particularly interesting to humans, not being a major food fish - they were regularly regarded as a pest or nuisance that ate the baits or catches of commercial fishermen," Burgess said. This resulted in increased funding for shark research, improving our understanding of shark biology. One inadvertent benefit linked with this calamitous drop in shark numbers was that scientists became aware of the need to learn more about sharks. "The movie helped initiate that decline by making it sexy to go catch sharks," Burgess said.
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