|
?:reviewBody
|
-
Back in 2003, a photograph seemingly displaying a surfer engaged in a close encounter with a shark hit the online world big time (although the photo in question was later proved to have actually captured an image of a dolphin, not a shark.) That phenomenon repeated itself ten years later in another case that saw the viral circulation of a similar surfer vs. shark image which, although it was a real picture, also much more likely pictured a dolphin rather than a shark. Example: On the early afternoon of 27 December 2013, June Emerson was snapping photos of her 12-year-old twins surfing at Manhattan Beach, California. On the way home, she noticed something unusual in one of those pictures: a snapshot of her surfing twins had seemingly been photobombed by a lurking shark. That photograph of a close encounter of the marine kind was spread widely online after it was posted on Facebook with the comment Another beautiful day at the beach. Big waves and apparently Big Fish! (Look into wave to right of Quinn Emerson, who's out catching a few!) Emerson told a Los Angeles television news station that I'm not sure what it was, but it definitely scared me when I thought it might be a shark. The possibility of encountering sharks in those waters was certainly a plausible one, as the Los Angeles Times had noted just a few weeks earlier that Manhattan Beach is one of the California coastal areas that has seen a significant increase in shark sightings in the last few years: However, opinion on Facebook and elsewhere was highly divided over whether the finned sea creature captured gliding through the nearby wave was actually a deadly shark or a much more innocuous dolphin: David Shiffman told us that 100% of shark biologists and dolphin biologists that I spoke with identified this animal as a dolphin, and he has published a blog entry detailing why the animal in question was much more likely a dolphin than a shark.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}