The Matawan Man Eater: The Real Life Man Eating Shark



The shark that terrified a community more than people at the cinema.

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50 thoughts on “The Matawan Man Eater: The Real Life Man Eating Shark”

  1. @Into the Shadows, I'd love a video on alligator gar that talks about how they got the blame for attacks that were in all likelihood actual alligators. The measures the government and private citizens took are chilling. Especially because an alligator gar's only sin is being enormous and weird looking. It's ridiculously gentle.

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  2. OK, the theory about sharks getting a taste for human flesh after feasting on the crews of ships does not hold water. It is true that people finding themselves in the water after a shipwreck have been devoured, but attacks in the deep ocean have mostly been ascribed to atlantic whitetips, which never venture so close to the coast.

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  3. Funny how all the live ocean views are of the Pacific, and not the Atlantic. Then again, there's nothing all that pretty about New Jersey in that area, even back then. Flat as a pancake and already suffering from 'urban sprawl', and with an ocean that's kinda' dull murky green and far from clear, the Mid-Atlantic coastal geography isn't much to look at…

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  4. A phenomenon known as El Niño creates perfect conditions that increase the likelihood of shark attacks in coastal waters

    It’s happened in Mexico and the USA several times

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  5. You've got to understand that Florida is one of the few places that has on official system in place for recording shark "attacks". This includes every little nibble by mostly very small specimens.. Attacks haven't really increased so much as record keeping has increased, at least as far as Florida being a "hotbed" of attacks is concerned.

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  6. To get the definitive account of the New Jersey shark attacks I highly recommend reading the book: 12 Days Of Terror by Richard Fernicola. It is incredibly detailed and very enlightening. And by the way I'm not sure where Simon did his research but there was no dog involved in the attack on Lester Stillwell.

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  7. The measurements of the 'great whites' mentioned in the Guinness book of records are incorrect. The length of the Port Fairy shark was not measured correctly, or even over exaggerated for the sake of sensation. A follow up study of its jaws in 1970 found that the shark was more in the 5 meter range. The New Brunswick shark was a misidentified basking shark.

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  8. They know it was a great white because they actually CAUGHT the thing! It was a juvenile they had taxidermied, but tragically it went missing, it might be destroyed now. I saw the hour-long documentary on the 1912 attacks, and the picture of the shark after it was caught and stuffed

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  9. As for the shark responsible for this incident, it was just a kid (great white) that got lost. It didn’t know any better, and it was just trying to keep from starving to death in the creek

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  10. A "Ferocious Maneater of 10 feet". And one that swims in fresh water rivers and creeks. That's a Bull Shark. I imagine at the mouth where the creek meets the oceans it's likely salty or semi-salty for a ways upstream. But not as far as that shark went. The White gets all the bad press. And a 10 foot White….eh, I'm on the fence. Juveniles usually do not attack humans. A 10 footer is on the backend of adolescence, but still. Point is, I think it was a Bull. Will we ever know ? No.

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  11. Great Whites are nicknamed 'Noah' in Australia because they gobble up the animals 'two by two'. A lot of people (myself included) thought it was a misconception where the biblically illiterate were confusing Noah with Jonah, but the legend stands.

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  12. Sharks swim up river at certain times of the year to delouse. There is a river near where I live where great whites and others swim up for three months a year and you are warned not to swim in the river between the ocean and a bend in the river around 30ks upriver.

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  13. Something that always annoy me is that we humans are LAND animals so why are we treating sharks as though they are the villains who have it out for us we again as a collective basically invade there house and sometimes inadvertly acting like dinner then shock when these creatures you know eat

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  14. Gotta love the old days, when after being attacked by a shark you are taken, not to a hospital but to a hotel and dumped on the manager’s desk. I really want to know the thinking behind that one.

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  15. The claims of Great Whites over 33 ft are almost certainly false? The very largest specimens caught off Malta were around 20 ft and there is a theory that the liver would not allow them to reach anything over 25 ft.

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  16. Can you imagine how sad that shark was after he bit that guy's leg? Imagine yourself sitting down about to start eating your meal, when suddenly two dudes come and take it away from you.

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  17. I like to think the International Shark Attack File is a international black budget organization with hundreds of agents all over the world. Waiting to classify shark attacks then fade into the background, until next time…

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  18. Interesting video! Only thing- it was Roy Scheider, not Schneider. And the conversation about the 1916 attacks was with the mayor, trying to convince him to close the beaches.

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  19. Lol at the narrator stating that "measurements" of Dunn's bite wound conclude that he was attacked by a Bull Shark.
    So they can tell by "measurements" and not Forensic bite analysis?

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  20. Imagine how many sharks there must have been before people started commercial fishing, hunting sharks for fins, and all the pollution that probably helped populations decline. There had to be sharks just everywhere, love em but scared every time I swim in ocean.

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  21. As someone local to the area, both Matawan and the larger coast, and a generational fisherman there is so much more to it, the conclusions some have drawn and public perception of the marine environment.
    I've shark fished for decades and never caught a bull shark once in thousands of fish. I have seen old photos of pound nets in the bay that were loaded with juvenile white sharks and it supports the shared belief that they come into the bay to birth their pups. I've also caught many sharks of all kinds on the ocean side. From the beach to the edge of the continental shelf, makos and blues and browns, threshers and even whites, I've seen whites so big we pulled our baits in and had a bluefish bitten in half just a few hundred yards from the Spring Lake attack site. There are sharks in the ocean, this shouldn't be a surprise. Theres nothing but timing that relates the attacks which were fairly distant from each other, nothing that says one shark did it all.
    The guiness book may not recognize the catches because the IGFA didn't but two of the largest great whites ever caught were brought into Montauk NY by Captain Frank Mundus who also was supposedly Benchley's model for Quint tho they denied it, he absolutely is to the clothes, education and even abrasive manner. The catches were disqualified because the sharks were feeding on dead whale carcasses and was considered using mammal for baiting which is disallowed by official rules but those sharks, which could be described using tons as a unit of weight, were landed. Sharks that were absolutely in the same size range as Spielberg's Bruce.

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