If animals are perceived as dangerous or not is mostly a matter of the amount of fear they provoke – mostly unjustified fear that an animal could attack for reasons such as evil, revenge or similar. Such unjustified emotions are normally assigned to animals such as shark, moray eel, stingray, alligator, barracuda, sea snake, orca, etc. Other animals with a potential to do harm, such as anemones, sea urchins, coral, cone shells and most nudibranchs do normally not provoke this fear. You will hardly hear anyone say –“the sea-urchin jumped right under my foot when I entered the water“.
Animals do not attack out of emotions such as evil or revenge. There are basically 4 real reasons for a potential attack:
- To defend them – for example when you put your hand in a hole, housed by a moray eel.
- To defend territory, a mate or a young – for example the cone shaped territory of a trigger fish.
- To obtain food – this does not affect divers, because we are not on the menu of any known creature in the water (except maybe salt water crocodiles).
- By mistake – the well-known example of a surfer being mistaken for a sea turtle by a shark looking for food.
To avoid an attack, the following solution applies:
- First you need to identify the animal correctly on first sight.
- Secondly your knowledge of the marine environment must be adequate to estimate the severity of an attack or of contact with the animal.
- Finally you have to know what your options are to take corrective measures.
Human perceptions can also be wrong and have consequences for themselves or the environment. Animals can be seen as non-living objects. A diver may see coral as rock and see no problem in walking on it or breaking it. A diver may see animals as a flower or a plant. On land, our attitude toward plants allows us to walk over and climb on them. Walking on the lawn or through a forest is done without any consideration for the grass or the plants. When we see an animal, such as anemones, underwater as a plant, we could approach them with that same attitude.
These perceptions are mainly dangerous for the environment. The danger for the diver comes when organisms are seen as harmless, or as having human characteristics. We are used to see lions in shows and in the zoo. If we think they behave the same in nature, we could approach them in a way that would cause them to defend themselves, which could do us a lot of harm.