Shortly after Jacques Cousteau died in 1997, I remember hearing somewhere that he had staged, Steve Zissou-style, a lot of the behavior and confrontations that made his nature films about the oceans so famous. I don’t suppose it takes away from how interesting the films were or how much awareness they raised for marine conservation, but if they were staged, they seem to lose some intangible “wild” quality.

I was thinking about this on Saturday on the way to the Beqa Lagoon in southern Fiji to go diving. Once known for its colorful soft corals, the area has since been eclipsed in that respect by the Rainbow Reef off the smaller Fijian island of Taveuni. While there are still beautiful soft corals in Beqa, the area is now known as Fiji’s shark-feeding capital. A shark feeding. Feels a bit like tying a goat to a stake so you can watch a lion hunt. But then again, you stop worrying about whether your wildlife encounter is staged when a bull shark larger than you are swims toward you with a jagged, toothy grin.

Even though shark attacks are ridiculously overblown as a risk to human life, there is a pretty primal fear of sharks--the scudding torpedoes with teeth in the shark week promos. This particular shark-feeding operation appears pretty well run and has a strong conservation component to it. Each diver on one of these shark dives pays a $10 fee that goes to a local village. In return, the villagers treat the area of the feedings as a no-catch zone and patrol the waters to prevent illegal fishing. From what the divemaster tells me, it’s an all-around successful arrangement--the fishing has improved, the reef is more diverse, the villagers make a little money and other villages have approached him to try to set up similar arrangements. Also, the divemaster cycles the specific site of the feedings every few years.

After a 10-minute boat ride out into the lagoon, we tied off and descended a couple of lines to about 70 feet, where all the divers settled in behind another line, with a wall of rubble behind us. It felt like a viewing gallery in a zoo or aquarium, except for the obvious difference that there was nothing between us and the thousands of fish attracted by the two sacks of fish-sicles and thawing chum the divemaster got from a local fish processing plant. It was a while before the sharks arrived and they were mostly smallish (3-4 feet) gray reef sharks. The cloud of fish of all sizes surrounding the food would burst apart as the sharks thrashed through. By the second dive we did at the same location, the drifting scent of blood in the water had attracted a half-dozen larger bull sharks, which seemed to have chased away many of the smaller sharks and were given a wide berth by the other fish. The man-sized bulls came probably within 10 feet of me, ripping apart a hunk of frozen fish, as I lingered at the bottom of the descent line while most of the other divers had started back for the boat. While the sharks pay the divers little mind, the guides still carry pointed poles--you know, just in case.

While the scripted wildlife encounter is certainly different than seeing an animal under more natural circumstances, there are several side benefits to this particular form of interaction. In addition to the arrangement the divemaster made with the local villagers, the regularity of the shark feedings also gives scientists access to the elusive sharks, and this particular operation has helped scientists with tagging efforts so the fish can be tracked when they go out to sea. Also, encounters with sharks like this--bulls are among the handful of species recorded to have attacked humans--also hopefully show that the fear of sharks is largely unreasonable. Shark attacks seem to get so much attention that it gives the impression that they are a serious risk to beachgoers, divers and surfers. But very few people are killed by sharks each year. Between 1959 and 2003, of the millions of people who pour into the oceans every year, 22 people in the US were killed by sharks--about one every two years. Compare this with the 18 people killed each year by dogs, 41 each year from lightning strikes and 130 each year from crashes with deer. Globally in 2004, seven people were killed by sharks. Seven! Twenty times more people were killed by falling coconuts (a non-trivial risk here--when the wind blows I find myself looking up). So the hysteria that often surrounds shark attacks is an overreaction to sad, but incredibly rare, events, and may in some way hamper efforts to study and protect them.