Well Said

While sharks are often cast as the villain in movies, sharks on the coast of North Carolina aren’t ill-intended — they’re just trying to find food while avoiding risk. With 50 species of sharks visiting the North Carolina coast throughout the year, they're typically foraging for meals in the same areas that tourists spend their summers in. But Joel Fodrie, an associate professor and researcher at the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences, explains that the likelihood of a shark encounter is incredibly low. Swimmers can be within 10 or 20 yards of a shark more often than they think, and while movies will tell us that this can spell disaster, Fodrie disagrees.“Sharks are highly evolved,” he explained. They can smell blood in the water much farther away than humans ever could, and also use electric fields and sound waves to sense injured animals closeby, but humans don’t put out the same cues as what sharks are foraging for, and these underwater visitors stay away from what they aren’t familiar with. On this epi