# Defending yourself from a scaled-up shark attack



## Jabrosky (May 18, 2014)

I have a story in mind where the heroine is headed for another country to warn a local politician about assassins. On the way there, she experiences a severe delay when a Megalodon attacks the galley she's boarded. For those of you who don't know, the Megalodon was a prehistoric shark that grew big enough to prey on whales. Below is a size comparison chart to give you an idea of how big this shark grew:








What I have planned out is that even though the Megalodon destroys her boat and delays her progress (which has dire consequences towards the story's end), my heroine does injure the beast and escape. She has a bronze spear and African-style throwing knives at her disposal.

Do you think it would be possible for a human to gravely injure a shark as big as a Megalodon? I know that the gill, snout, and eye areas are vulnerable spots for modern sharks. Furthermore, if you could get the shark to bleed, it might attract other sharks who could gang up and cannibalize it. On the other hand I've heard that shark's skin is quite tough, and I imagine it might be even worse for a giant whale-eating one.


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## psychotick (May 18, 2014)

Hi,

My thought, it would be hard to swim with weapons on you. They'd weigh you down and where do you hold them while you're trying to swim? It would be harder still to use those weapons in the water. Best bet - get her out of the water, on a piece of flotsam etc, and let her play dead. Maybe shark boy surfaces to take a look and she tosses the spear at him - but considering its size her chances of doing significant damage are very small.

Cheers, Greg.


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## Jabrosky (May 18, 2014)

psychotick said:


> Hi,
> 
> My thought, it would be hard to swim with weapons on you. They'd weigh you down and where do you hold them while you're trying to swim? It would be harder still to use those weapons in the water. Best bet - get her out of the water, on a piece of flotsam etc, and let her play dead. Maybe shark boy surfaces to take a look and she tosses the spear at him - but considering its size her chances of doing significant damage are very small.
> 
> Cheers, Greg.


I dunno. My heroine has undergone athletic and martial training from childhood (she actually once belonged to the assassins' order, but left them out of conscience), so she might be strong enough to carry those weapons on her with something like a belt or sash while swimming. Though now that I think more about it, it might be hard for her to see underwater without goggles.


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## TWErvin2 (May 18, 2014)

You're looking at a creature (on the larger end) roughly 8 times the size of a large Tyrannosaurus Rex. Beyond the size, how difficult would it be to penetrate the shark's skin, and actually reach something vital with the weapons on hand? Add to that the disadvantage of the woman being in the water...

Would she have the force enough to strike the snout hard enough to make a difference, considering that the creature is roughly 800+ times her size/weight?  Maybe she could damage the shark's eye.

A better tactic might be to dive behind some part of the broken up ship and the shark gets it temporarily stuck in its maw/throat, giving her time to make it onto some other part of the broken up ship, and stay above the water until the shark feasts on other crewmen and eventually wanders off.


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## Penpilot (May 18, 2014)

Seems like the eyes are the weak spot that's most easily damaged. I don't know about anyone else but if I something as small as a bee stung me in the eye, I'd get the hell out of Dodge quick.


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## ascanius (May 19, 2014)

I doubt she, or anyone for that matter, would be able to fight of such a creature.  People very rarely manage to fight off the modern day sharks which are much smaller.  Seems like a lot to swallow to have a person fight of a shark the size of a bus in its element.  Heck out doesn't even need to bite, just open and swallow.

Unless there is magic  involved I wouldn't find it believable.


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## monyo (May 19, 2014)

I vaguely remembering hearing once that sharks, being large predators with few natural enemies, tend to get discouraged easily when their prey fights back. Sort of like how criminals tend to look for the easiest targets, so might sharks. So it's possible the thing would run easily after being wounded with a knife to the eye or some such. You might fact check this first though. If you aren't particularly going for realism you could also have a Jonah and the whale type situation - get swallowed, survive, and tear your way out from the inside. I'm not up on the specifics of the megalodon digestive system and how long something could survive in it.


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## ink. (May 20, 2014)

This is becoming even more far-fetched, but is there any way she could get hold of strong magnets (possibly in the cargo?)or a strong electrical current? Sharks have a 6th sense in that they are able to detect the electrical impulse generated by the body of their prey, completely indetecable to you and I but they can actually feel the electrical impulse which is given off as the heart beats. So when you throw a magnet in the mix it completely screws with this mechanism and drives the sharks crazy, so much so that they want to move away from the magnet. 

More unrealistic still, you could try and induce tonic immobility in the shark. This is a phenomenon whereby if you manage to somehow get a shark on its back, it goes into a dreamlike state of no movement, and this technique is actually used by some specialised Killer Whales which actively hunt Great Whites, they flip the shark onto its back, the shark stops moving and the killer whales attack. Now, I realise it could be hard to flip over a megalodon, but one tactic that is very common with sharks is to breach the water as they attack, swimming up from below where their prey cannot see them coming. Since this is fantasy, you might be able to extrapolate that somehow this breaching behemoth lands on a huge chunk of the wreckage, or gets stuck of a reef or something which ends up with the shark being stuck upside down and so unable to move. Or you could think of another way for it to get stuck, idk.


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## Smith (May 20, 2014)

My biggest problem is not the fight itself (though I really doubt even an armed human stands any chance against a megalodon given their size and the thickness of their skin), but I think first you have to ask yourself why the shark is attacking the ship. If it's a case of mistaken identity, it would probably take one bite of wood and swim away, as many sharks do today when they get a bite of surfboard. Then you could focus solely on the sinking ship as the stage for heroic actions, instead of a fight against a prehistoric megashark. Great white sharks, which I believe - until recently - were considered to be the closest living thing to a megalodon, don't typically hunt humans because they don't have the fat ratio they require from typical prey, like seals. For a megalodon that's used to hunting big blubbery whales, it would be even less likely to target humans, and I wonder if it would even look at us twice as a meal. You probably wouldn't have to defend yourself at all, it needs much larger prey.

I had to research something very similiar when dealing with a whale attack on a ship in my novel. This is somewhat easier to stage, because whales have capsized ships in the past (the  Essex being a notable example), and their reasons can be fabricated more easily (with the Essex, it was theorised the tapping of a hammer inside the hull sounded like whale clicking and the bull sperm whale attacked thinking it was a rival). Still, the danger would be the sinking ship, not the whale itself.

Your other option is maybe deciding that the megalodon is driven by an unnatural/supernatural impulse into attacking the ship and its passengers.


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## wordwalker (May 20, 2014)

I'm with Smith. It's the old question of how big a dragon or anything else can get before it stops wasting time eating human-sized crumbs, especially since sharks (unlike land monsters) really do have whales and other full-course meals on the table instead. 

Of course that's not what many people think of as fantasy. But you can get a certain amount of realistic thrill by saying it's only the midsized beasts that really hunt people, while the biggest ones are rarer and dangerous more because you got in their way-- or if there's Something Worse in their nature or manipulating them.


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