Believe it or not, sharks are a lot like us. But we still don't know very much about them

Look in the mirror, cue up the Jaws theme. Then chew on this thought: you are way more like a shark than you think.

Sharks had the first jaws, from where yours evolved. Their immune systems look like a road map to yours. In some ways, they think and act like you. Brain size aside, sharks are showing scientists way more smarts and complex social dynamics these days than previously thought: Great white sharks even have long-term 'friends.'

We are just beginning to unravel how much sharks are like us and can help lead to cures for cancer, more accurate hurricane predictions, better biohazard suits and who knows what else. But despite the huge popularity of sharks, the research money to figure them out is as endangered these days as many of the species scientists say we ought to know much more about.

"There's very little funding for sharks out there," said Toby Daly-Engel, an associate professor at Florida Institute of Technology and director of FIT's Shark Conservation Lab. "There's not a fishery for sharks, because they can't really withstand normal fishing pressure. They take longer than we do to have babies."

Even long pregnancies and live births evolved from sharks. "We can thank them for that," Daly-Engel said in jest. "Thanks for nothing sharks."

But the lack of big research bucks aside, we at least know enough about sharks to understand they are far from their Hollywood image as mindless killers.

"They don't live hundreds of years by being dumb," Daly-Engel said.

They've been around way longer than us — millions of years. Like other fish, they were the precursors of our skeletons. Their inner ears hint at a common ancestor. Their nose and eyes also have curious similarities to ours.

And like us, they weigh risks, especially during hurricanes.

Should we listen to sharks on hurricanes?

Like humans, sharks mentally measure multiple risk-benefits of evacuation during hurricanes, research shows. Millions of years of evolution showed them how.

We fly expensive planes and drones into hurricanes, deploy 16-inch tubes called dropsondes equipped to measure temperature, pressure and humidity or send underwater "glider" drones to try and keep up with or buck the storm's powerful currents. But sharks and other fish already in or around the storm can be better sentinels of disaster. They can sense the danger and gather the data safer, cheaper and faster — in real-time via satellites, researchers say. And they can outswim the best of underwater weather drones.

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In many instances sharks seem to know where the hurricane is going well before the meteorologists do.

But more so, sharks' supersensory powers could help find one of the holy grails in hurricane prediction: more precise predictions of storm severity.

We get five-day cone warnings. Sharks sense dips in air pressure surrounding hurricanes as much as two weeks ahead of time and swim to deeper water when the storm is still some 100 miles away.

So researchers fasten satellite tagging devices to sharks to gather meteorological data during hurricanes.

In 2017, University of Miami and Canadian researchers tagged sharks with acoustic telemetry devices during Hurricane Irma. They found the sharks swam to deeper waters before Irma made landfall. 

While most efforts have only included a dozen or so tagged sharks, scientists say the concept could be scaled up with a fleet of thousands of roving shark forecasters, with varying surfacing habits, to fill data gaps in places expensive planes and drones can't cover.

Sharks as 'coal-mine canaries' of climate change

Research at Florida Institute of Technology also shows sharks as good bellwethers of climate change. They are finding the nursery habitat for bull sharks has been shifting farther north.

"They're like birds, it's the temperature change and the amount of daylight available that will cue them to move," Daly-Engel said.

Using genetics, the Florida Tech researchers are finding the current baby bull sharks in the Indian River Lagoon and the ones from the 1990s are totally different and not closely related. But the baby bull sharks in North Carolina now have the same genetic profile as the population that was in the Indian River Lagoon three decades ago. And the baby bull sharks in the lagoon now have the same profile as the population that lived in South Florida three decades earlier.

"They are simply moving up. This is exactly what we expect under the influence of global warming," Daly-Engel said.

"This is the first-ever genetic evidence," she added. "This is the first time we've actually seen the kind of change that leads to potential new species. It's showing us too that the IRL may not be great habitat for them right now."

Scientists such as Daly-Engel are looking at how sharks' immune systems are reacting on a genetic level to such geographic shifts.

Amazing healing powers

Their immune systems are among a shark's most exceptional traits. Their wounds heal much faster than ours. Cancer is almost unheard of in their kind.

Could sharks harbor compounds with essential clues for curing cancer, other diseases, or rapidly healing human wounds — infection free? Maybe what we learn from the awesome immunity of sharks could one day save millions of lives.

Within hours of a shark being wounded, a coating of cells begins to grow over the wound, faster than anything that mammals can do, and that cell coating is complete within a day. The immune cells of sharks and rays also create substances that selectively kill human tumor cells in culture.

Research at the Center for Shark Research at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, has looked into that healing ability to develop better antibiotics. Compounds in the mucus layer of rays and sharks might yield new medicines to heal wounds on the battlefield and elsewhere.

Sharks as 'soldiers?'

Among the shark's most uncanny traits is its sensory perception. Their ability to smell, feel or otherwise hone in on targets from afar stands unparalleled at sea. Using a series of sensory pores in their snouts — called ampullae of Lorenzini — sharks can sense extremely weak electric fields, as small as 1 millionth of a volt per centimeter of seawater.

A 2007 Scientific American article likened this to sensing the field created by a 1.5-volt AA battery, with one pole dipped in waters off Jacksonville and the other into the Long Island Sound. A shark swimming between the two could, in theory, easily sense whether the battery was on or off.

Sharks can sense the electric activity that moves muscles and makes hearts beat in prey.

Researchers are studying shark brains to see what their amazing sensory abilities could teach us about human brains or about improving how undersea robots navigate.

Theoretically, once scientists figure out what makes sharks' minds tick, they could mimic certain stimuli to control them.

Could brain implants in sharks one day enable the military to remotely control sharks or train them to secretly track enemy vessels? DARPA wanted to know. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency funded experiments attempting such tactics in 2006. They put neural implants in sharks brains to learn more about how they navigate to their targets. The idea was to stimulate the parts of the brain triggered by the odor plumes that sharks sense from their usual prey, turning the shark left or right at will.

Scientists say it went nowhere, but similar research into how sharks navigate continues.

Mote conducted similar research in the 1960s and early 1970s for the Office of Naval Research, exploring the possible use of sharks for military applications. The work was classified, though, so the specific intent remains uncertain.

More recently, DARPA also has been looking at the inherent antifouling properties of shark skin to inspire better suits for those responding to chemical and biological warfare attacks.

'Friendly' great white sharks?

Great white sharks gather seasonally around Mexico’s Guadalupe Island. Some prefer to hang out and hunt together, according to 2022 research led by Florida International University. FIU uses a “super social tag” equipped with a video camera, sensors and receivers that can detect other tagged sharks nearby. They found sharks, even after long spans of separation, formed "non-random social associations and tended to spend time together when patrolling for food."

“Most associations were short, but there were sharks where we found considerably longer associations, much more likely to be social associations,” FIU marine scientist Yannis Papastamatiou, lead author of the study, said in a press release. “Seventy minutes is a long time to be swimming around with another white shark.”

Added Daly-Engel, "We were kind of surprised. Yeah, they hang out with each other."

They learn like dolphins that it's better to hunt in packs. That and other shark behaviors have plenty more to teach us, and warn us about, scientists such as Daly-Engel say.

"They kind of behave like canaries in the coal mine," Daly-Engel said. "If you see a shark, it probably means the ocean around you is probably pretty healthy ... We need to protect them better."

Contact Waymer at (321) 261-5903 or jwaymer@floridatoday.com. Follow him on X (Twitter) at @JWayEnviro.