Once upon a time, Cassandra took a course in scuba diving from a well-qualified PADI instructor. In the very first lecture, this inestimable young man told the class, "Don't worry about sharks. Only one of ten thousand will ever bother you."
At which point Cassandra raised her hand and asked, "Will they come in numerical order?"
To Cassandra, the shark is only one - and one of the most beautiful and awe-inspiring - reminders that humans are land animals. Period. Always have been, must continue to be.
A shark attack that took place not so long ago in earth-history years simply confirms her wariness, even though the hunter's victim - this time - was not human. Only because humans at that time knew better than to venture into the oceans. Or because there weren't any humans yet.
"Scientists investigated a well-preserved 9-foot-long dolphin discovered in the Piedmont region of northern Italy. From the remains, the researchers not only finger-pointed the attacker but also how the thrashing went down, suggesting the shark took advantage of the dolphin's blind spot. "The skeleton lay unstudied in a museum in Torino for more than a century, but when I examined it, as part of a larger study of fossil dolphins, I noticed the bite marks on the ribs, vertebrae and jaws," recalled lead researcher Giovanni Bianucci at the University of Pisa in Italy."
Cassandra is convinced that this could happen again. And not just to dolphins. After all, there are still oceans, and there are still sharks. One cannot be too careful.
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