So Who’s the Deadly Species Here? : Humans are far more lethal to sharks than they are to us. An image makeover should emphasize their value.

It’s shark-panic time again. The irrational fear that possesses most of mankind crests every few years in pinnacles of hysteria that keep swimmers trembling on the edge of the ocean and film producers licking their chops.

In recent weeks, the most visible alarmists have been windsurfers in the general area of Astoria, Ore. Local charter captains, forbidden by state law to take salmon on Fridays and Saturdays, scheduled a shark-fishing tournament this week. Windsurfers protested that fishermen would be “chumming”--throwing fish offal into the water to attract sharks--and it would be “Jaws”-time all over again. The tournament planners kept to their schedule.

The windsurfers actually didn’t have much of a case. Given the amount of fear they generate, sharks injure or kill amazingly few people. They cause bodily harm to about 100 humans worldwide each year, killing about 25. Bees kill more. So do elephants.

In all the disputes raging through the Oregon marinas and surf shops, no one seems to have pointed out that a shark-fishing tournament is a bad idea for reasons other than the menace posed to windsurfers. No one these days organizes elephant hunts, or if they do they keep very quiet about it. People, aside from poachers, think elephants should be left alone. But outside of some intelligent islanders in the South Pacific who hold them in high religious esteem, people detest sharks. They lurk as monsters in the great sea of the unconscious. The very word comes from the German Schurke or “villain.”

For every human killed by a shark, about a million sharks are killed by humans, making an annual shark slaughter of about 25 million. This not only tells us once again that homo sapiens is the meanest guy on the block (or, if you prefer, bloke on the Gaia) but suggests something that chondrophiles are quick to confirm. Even though there are about as many sharks on the planet as humans, various of the 350 species of shark are dwindling rapidly and may soon be extinct.

The sharks’ problems is that they are what ecologists call “k-selected”: They are slow-growing, late-maturing and produce a few well-formed young in which the mother invests a lot of resources. Remind you of anyone? Over-fished species of shark can’t bounce back like the prolific mullet.

Biologists Samuel Gruber and Charles Manire of the University of Miami found recently that lemon sharks have almost disappeared off the Florida Keys. Manire told me that the porbeagle shark, “exquisite, warm-bodied, speedy and powerful”--and, alas, also considered a delicacy by Italians--had, by 1968, been almost wiped out by the Norwegian fishing fleet. The Californian and Australian soupfin shark, the Scottish-Norwegian dogfish, the Californian thresher-mako, the Virginian sandbar shark and the Florida pelagic shark are similarly in trouble.

Right now the Asian economic boom poses yet another menace to sharks already enduring the worst pressures from commercial and recreational fishing in their 400-million-year evolution. Asians prize their fins as soup flavoring or as an aphrodisiac and are happy to spend $40 to $85 a pound at the market for dried fin. Fishermen often just hack the fin off a shark and throw the living fish back to die.

We need a shark management plan, with limits on commercial and recreational catches. Here, the United States has led the way. But we also need a better image for sharks. As Gruber and Manire write wistfully in the newsletter Chondros, “Sharks must be seen as good, not evil; sensitive and delicate, not indestructible ‘eating machines.’ ”

The shark, like the lion or the wolf, is an “apex predator,” up at the top of its food chain. Wipe it out and mark what discord follows.

The South African government tried to protect white bathers by killing sharks. After 15 years of slaughter, Gruber and Manire report, “The diversity of the shark fauna was reduced, accompanied by the veritable explosion of one species, the dusky shark, to the exclusion of most of the others.”

Science and medicine have much to learn from sharks. They are highly resistant to cancer; serious wounds heal within 24 hours; a lacerated cornea remains clear and functional and soon heals. And they’re not only smart but relatively safe. It’s far more dangerous to get in your car than wallow about with a chondrichthyan. Think of it this way: More people probably have died of heart attacks watching Pat Buchanan on “Crossfire” than have been killed in the entire recorded history of shark attacks.