Junk Food
The movie Jaws turned 50 years old this summer. As fun summer entertainment, it has held up well. And it gave us some very useful lines: “We need a bigger boat” and “This was no boat accident.”
What it did for sharks is not so good. Jaws turned an endangered animal into a monster that people are terrified of. Shark attacks on humans are rare, deadly ones even rarer. (And if that doesn’t convince you, then don’t go in the water. Land sharks exist only in old SNL sketches.) Sharks have far more to fear from us than we do from them. But I’m not going to rant about outsized fear of sharks today. Instead I’m going to share one of my favorite shark facts.
Sharks eat a lot of garbage. Here’s a partial list of trash that has been found in sharks’ stomachs: shoes, tin cans, wine bottles (in at least one case, an unopened bottle of wine), a barrel of nails, a pair of tom-toms, a chair, a partial suit of armor, an engine block.
Sharks have pretty impressive digestive systems, but they can’t digest all that junk. After a while it’s bound to get uncomfortable, cruising the oceans like some kind of swimming dumpster. Some sharks have a neat trick to take care of it, though. They do something scientists call “stomach eversion” but you and I might call “extreme vomiting.” They literally puke their guts out. They turn their stomachs inside out, sort of like taking off a t-shirt or a sock, pushing their stomachs completely out of their mouths. The unwanted gunk is dumped back into the sea, and then the shark sucks its guts back in and gets on with finding more rubbish to eat.
It’s not as gross as some of the scenes in Jaws, but I still don’t think I’d want to watch.
Stay curious,
Avery