Today marks the 50th anniversary of Jaws, Steven Spielberg's blockbuster horror movie based on the bestselling novel by Peter Benchley. We're marking the occasion with a tribute to this classic film and its enduring impact on the popular perception of sharks, shark conservation efforts, and our culture at large. //

A lot of folks in both the marine science world and the ocean conservation communities have reported that Jaws in a lot of ways changed our world. It's not that people used to think that sharks were cute, cuddly, adorable animals, and then after Jaws, they thought that they were bloodthirsty killing machines. They just weren't on people's minds. Fishermen knew about them, surfers thought about them, but that was about it. Most people who went to the beach didn't pay much mind to what could be there. Jaws absolutely shattered that. My parents both reported that the summer that Jaws came out, they were afraid to go swimming in their community swimming pools. //

The movie also was the first time that a scientist was the hero. People half a generation above me have reported that seeing Richard Dreyfuss' Hooper on the big screen as the one who saves the day changed their career trajectory. "You can be a scientist who studies fish. Cool. I want to do that." In the time since Jaws came out, a lot of major changes have happened. One is that shark populations have declined globally by about 50 percent, and many species are now critically endangered. //

And then, from a cultural standpoint, we now have a whole genre of bad shark movies.

Ars Technica: Sharknado!

David Shiffman: Yes! Sharknado is one of the better of the bunch. Sitting on my desk here, we've got Sharkenstein, Raiders of the Lost Shark, and, of course, Shark Exorcist, all from the 2010s. I've been quoted as saying there's two types of shark movie: There's Jaws and there's bad shark movies. //

Ars Technica: People have a tendency to think that sharks are simply brutal killing machines. Why are they so important to the ecosystem?

David Shiffman: The title of my book is Why Sharks Matter because sharks do matter and people don't think about them that way. These are food chains that provide billions of humans with food, including some of the poorest humans on Earth. They provide tens of millions of humans with jobs. When those food chains are disrupted, that's bad for coastal communities, bad for food security and livelihoods. If we want to have healthy ocean food chains, we need a healthy top of the food chain, because when you lose the top of the food chain, the whole thing can unravel in unpredictable, but often quite devastating ways.

So sharks play important ecological roles by holding the food chain that we all depend on in place. They're also not a significant threat to you and your family. More people in a typical year die from flower pots falling on their head when they walk down the street. More people in a typical year die falling off a cliff when they're trying to take a selfie of the scenery behind them, than are killed by sharks. Any human death or injury is a tragedy, and I don't want to minimize that. But when we're talking about global-scale policy responses, the relative risk versus reward needs to be considered. //

In all of recorded human history, there is proof that exactly one shark bit more than one human. That was the Sharm el-Sheikh attacks around Christmas in Egypt a few years ago. Generally speaking, a lot of times it's hard to predict why wild animals do or don't do anything. But if this was a behavior that was real, there would be evidence that it happens and there isn't any, despite a lot of people looking. //

One of my favorite professional experiences is the American Alasdair Rank Society conference. One year it was in Austin, Texas, near the original Alamo Drafthouse. Coincidentally, while we were there, the cinema held a "Jaws on the Water" event. They had a giant projector screen, and we were sitting in a lake in inner tubes while there were scuba divers in the water messing with us from below. I did that with 75 professional shark scientists. It was absolutely amazing. It helped knowing that it was a lake.

Ars Technica: If you wanted to make another really good shark movie, what would that look like today?

David Shiffman: I often say that there are now three main movie plots: a man goes on a quest, a stranger comes to town, or there's a shark somewhere you would not expect a shark to be. It depends if you want to make a movie that's actually good, or one of the more fun "bad" movies like Sharknado or Sharktopus or Avalanche Sharks—the tagline of which is "snow is just frozen water." These movies are just off the rails and absolutely incredible. The ones that don't take themselves too seriously and are in on the joke tend to be very fun.