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If you’re drawn to Hawaii’s waters in any way, then chances are that sharks have been on your mind over the past few weeks.

It can be tempting to think that there’s some rogue shark out there lurking in the water for its next prey. That’s pretty much a narrative that I’ve heard for most of my life.

However, applying the deviant label to a nonhuman animal is a highly problematic practice.

Humans have serial killers. But sharks, as much as they can paralyze us with fear, just aren’t as nefarious as the Ted Bundys of our world. And so whenever I talk to people about sharks, I’m embarrassed that in the very same waters where I grew up surfing.

I first learned how to surf in front of the Essex and Sussex Hotel in Spring Lake, New Jersey. Back then, the vacant building was a brick-and-stucco derelict left behind by the Jazz Age, its broken windows boarded up with “No Trespassing” signs. Whenever I was paddling out in front of that hotel, my paranoia would set in just beyond the water’s edge, knowing that a bellboy’s lower legs were ripped apart in 1916 as he swam only yards from where I’d soon be sitting on a surfboard, my feet dangling into the abyss below.

Charles Bruder, the 27-year-old bellhop who swam freely just off the Essex and Sussex Hotel that hot July day in 1916, couldn’t have known that on both sharks and humankind. Bruder was the second fatality of five shark attacks that summer, all of them occurring within a two-week period at the Jersey Shore.

At the time, there was little scientific research conducted on sharks, and thus the attacks became the kind of chum for a media frenzy. Major newspapers from New York to San Francisco sensationalized the country’s first documented shark attacks with national headlines about “The New Jersey Man-Eater,” or some rendition of the story.

The country was launched into a state of shark-induced panic. President Woodrow Wilson held cabinet meetings to discuss the attacks. Congress approved emergency funds for dealing with the sharks, as if they were posing a serious threat to national security. Thousands of fishermen took to the waters and began shark culling — reducing the population — using everything from harpoons to dynamite in the slaughter.

Michael Schleisser, a taxidermist and lion tamer with Barnum-Bailey Circus, caught a 350-pound great white only a few miles from where two of the attacks occurred. As he prepared the shark for mounting back at his shop, Schleisser found unidentifiable flesh and bones inside its digestive tract, which he sent to Dr. Frederic Lucas of the American Museum of Natural History. Lucas identified the remains as “what appeared to be part of a human rib.”

Because the attacks stopped after Schleisser’s catch, the vast majority of the nation became convinced that a single shark had been methodically preying on humans in the waters off of New Jersey. The “rogue shark” theory was thus born into the American imagination. From there, it spread to the rest of the developed world, where it remains a serious topic of discussion by politicians and the media — though completely dismissed by scientists — every time there’s a fatal shark attack.

Media Feed the Frenzy

Today, the media’s national coverage of shark attacks often contributes to our misunderstanding of this magnificent species. In the summer leading up to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the American media was so obsessed with the nation’s shark attacks, Time magazine dubbed it “.” Some hoteliers pulled the magazine from newsstands in their lobbies, worried about panicking their visitors. Many tourists preferred pools instead of beaches that season, worried, possibly, about another rogue shark roaming the Atlantic. Was this 1916 all over again?

The truth is that there wasn’t even a surge in shark attacks during the summer of 2001. In fact, there were more shark attacks and fatalities in 2000, though because that was an election year, the media had other, more substantive news to report on. When Wolf Blitzer, Katie Couric and Tom Brokaw, among many others, cowered over aerial footage of schooling sharks off Florida’s east coast that summer, viewers were merely witnessing the annual mullet run, a season wherein predatory fish roam closer to shore to feed on the mullet gathering to spawn.

I’m not downplaying the number of shark attacks in Florida. Statistically, New Smyrna Beach has earned its dubious title as “the shark attack capital of the world.” I’ve noticed the uptick in shark activity myself there and elsewhere in Florida during the mullet run, which happens to coincide with bathers escaping the season’s incessant heat while surfers take to the waves generated by tropical storms and hurricanes. I was once doing so with a friend in late August when he was nipped by a shark, the result of which was less than a dozen stitches.

Research shows that tiger sharks can move up to 60 miles in one day and rarely return to the same place.

These attacks are still rare and almost always cases of mistaken identity, when small, docile species of sharks mistake feet for food. It’s a taste their palates understandably don’t enjoy, which explains why fatalities and serious bodily injuries are miniscule. Yet, when the national press covers a shark attack in Florida’s waters, their newsreels often make mention of Jaws, pandering to our macabre fascination with the possibility of a rogue shark quietly stalking its next victim.

Hawaii, too, has fallen prey to this preposterous rogue shark theory in the past. In 1991, Marti Morell, a beloved wife and mother of three, while she was snorkeling with a friend outside her West Maui home. Morell’s attack was the first fatality in Hawaii in 33 years.

The Discovery Channel, famous for its annual Shark Week series, once aired a special on Morell’s attack titled Tiger Shark Attack: Beyond Fear. In this film, Bill Paty, former director of the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources, explains: “The thinking at the time seemed to be that sharks were territorial, and we had one big, rogue animal out there. You could go out and hopefully set the lines for him and take him out.”

Under intense public pressure, Paty formed the Hawaii Shark Task Force, recruiting a diverse group of community leaders: politicians, scientists, business-owners, educators, fishermen, and religious leaders.

The task force immediately devised a plan to quell public fear. They called for a temporary period of culling, wherein all tiger sharks larger than eight feet were slaughtered. Only days after Morell’s death, three one-ton tiger sharks were killed. Though only hired members of the task force were permitted to do the culling, some local fisherman took matters into their own hands, killing another 10 large tigers over the months that followed. Some proudly displayed their catch in Lahaina Town, hanging the sharks from hooks, their blood dripping and pooling on the wooden planks below as tourists lined the docks to pose for pictures with the slain.

For a short while, the task force believed the culling probably caught the culprit. However, Hawaii had two additional shark attack fatalities within a year of Morell’s death. Many Native Hawaiians opposed the culling from the beginning, voicing their firmly held belief that the mano (shark) is an aumakua (a deified ancestor from their past). Native activists ramped up their opposition, threatening the cullers with physical harm, believing that the sharks must be protected, not slain, for their place in Hawaiian history.

Shortly after the culling efforts, Dr. Kim Holland, who heads the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology’s shark research group, conducted one of the first studies in Hawaii that tracked the movement of large predatory sharks. Research revealed that tiger sharks can move up to 60 miles in one day and rarely return to the same place. After reviewing Holland’s research, The Hawaii Shark Task Force ended their culling, which had resulted in the slaughter of 43 large tiger sharks. In Hawaii at least, the myth of the rogue shark was put to death.

While this theory of rogue sharks comes from the place I was born, I’m glad that I’ve moved far away from it. I’m happy to be living and teaching in community that has an intricate understanding and appreciation of these complex species. Unfortunately, though, not all places have such critical insight.

Shark finning kills tens of millions of sharks each year for the primary ingredient in shark fin soup, a delicacy in many Asian countries. For Dr. Ralph Collier, director of the Global Shark Attack File, shark finning is the most pressing environmental threat of our time. “This is a devastating practice with disastrous consequences,” he explains.

Collier believes that the increase in shark finning over the last half century — which coincides with the growth of Asian economies — has decreased some shark species’ populations by up to 90 percent. Sharks are apex predators; any decline in their population throws off the entire underwater ecosystem.

Shark finning carries far deadlier consequences for humankind than some imaginary rogue shark. After their fins are removed, sharks are thrown back into the sea to die, where they release ammonia during decomposition, contaminating both fish populations and coral reefs. Seventy percent of our oxygen comes from the oceans.

“Each time we kill a shark,” Collier warns, “we suffocate ourselves a little more.”

Until there is greater global political will to limit or ban shark finning in international waters, this detriment to our environment will continue to have grave impacts on our own specie’s survival.

The world has a lot to learn from Hawaii’s calm and collected reaction to the recent string of attacks in our waters, as well its unique cultural and scientific insight into these magnificent creatures.