This week, a battle for the ages. Megalodon vs the great white shark.
[Bruce Buffer voice] “IIIIIIT’S TIME!”
The largest shark ever vs today’s apex predator of the oceans. Major publications went mad for this story. But it’s a story, at its core, about… zinc isotopes in teeth!? Why was this ancient war between cartilaginous fish so popular last week?
Here’s what happened.
A little background, first.
Most of the popular science stories you read in both mainstream and niche press publications comes to you via big, highly-regarded journals and their press teams. In my day job, I go hunting for these press releases to try and find the stories I think the public are interested in each week and make sure I can cover them.
One of the biggest journals in the world is Nature, which has been running since the 1860s. Every week, Nature publishes hundreds of scientific articles across its portfolio of journals, most of which never go beyond the journal’s (mostly paywalled) pages.
But some do! And, for the most part, the research which makes it to your eyeballs was first surfaced to journalists by the journal itself.
The Megalodon vs Great White Shark stories from last week present a perfect case study in how science moves from the lab bench, to a journal and eventually, to a publication.
So let’s start there.
The original paper, published on May 31 in the journal Nature Communications, is titled as so:
Trophic position of Otodus megalodon and great white sharks through time revealed by zinc isotopes
I don’t want to poo-poo the study here, because it’s a good study and makes a significant technological advance for paleontologists to try and understand diets and ecology of long-extinct species. But the scientific jargon that headlines the paper will never make the front page of a newspaper, right?
What if I sold it to you like this:
Great white sharks may have contributed to megalodon extinction
That headline comes direct from the Nature Press office, which highlighted the paper to journalists last week under embargo. And that’s a headline that’s more like whooaaaa duuuude.
Immediately it conjures up images of great whites and megalodons in some kind of fight for survival and, indeed, that’s how many outlets pitched the pieces to their audience this week.
Take for instance, the New York Times:
Firstly, stop. We know which predator won because there are no megalodons in the ocean and there haven’t been any for millions of years. Clearly, great whites won because I still shit myself when I see people get into tiny bird cages in the water and feed them on YouTube in 2022?? (Insane)
But this headline pits the two creatures against each other in a way that’s really not supported by the underlying science or what the study was about. We have no data to show megalodons and great whites faced off, competed, fought, scrapped, battled — whatever! — because the study itself isn’t designed to reveal this.
The study can (and elegantly does) show via the fossil record the two creatures occupied the same “trophic level” — or, position in the food chain. Scientists already kind of knew this was the case, but this paper is important in showing that zinc isotopes can be used to come to that conclusion.
These isotopes can reveal the kind of diet a creature has, with low levels of the isotope corresponding to a higher spot in the food chain (roughly). Researchers use this when study modern-day mammals, for instance, but the new study extended the use of these isotopes to fossil teeth from different shark species.
That’s a finding that’s really interesting for palaeontologists because it may help reconstruct diets of other extinct species using zinc isotopes from fossils, allowing us to understand why ancient beasts went extinct in the first place.
But that means the actual story from the scientific paper is:
Researchers analyzed the ratio of heavy and light zinc isotopes in teeth from Megalodon and great whites (and a couple of other shark species).
The researchers showed zinc isotopes are stable over millions of years in teeth.
The researchers showed great whites and Megalodon had similar zinc isotope ratios in their teeth.
The researchers concluded they likely had similar diets.
And, it kind of stops there. The researchers can hypothesize that occupying the same trophic level could mean the great white may have contributed to megalodon extinction but that’s all they can do: hypothesize.
The key message from the paper isn’t about shark-on-shark violence or competition. It’s about… zinc isotopes being used as a tool to investigate marine vertebrate extinctions.
That’s pretty boring stuff for the average reader, of course.
The reason I highlight this isn’t to be critical of coverage from places like the Times or ScienceAlert or Gizmodo. In fact, all of the stories I link in the intro reconcile with the study’s conclusions that other factors — climate change, thermal limitations, collapse of prey populations — likely contributed to the extinction of the megalodon. And it’s great to get this relatively in-the-weeds chemistry study out to the world with a catchy headline hook about shark versus shark.
But it’s valuable in showing how much getting a press release from a major journal press office can influence the stories that eventually make it to print and their overall messaging.
Audiences should get a peek behind the curtain and understand this process — because what is extremely interesting is the stories Nature Communications didn’t highlight as a press release and, thus, didn’t receive any coverage last week.
For instance, on the same day as the shark study, scientists published about:
Non-selective distribution of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis is more effective than distributing PrEP based on risks! Interesting!
Creating a genome engineering tool for Gram-negative bacteria! Wild!
A potential therapeutic target for high blood pressure affecting the heart! Cool!
And while it might be easy to say PRESS OFFICE RELEASE = COVERAGE, even that is complicated.
For one, science journalists are looking to write stories that readers are interested in. A Megalodon story is always going to perform much better than a story about HIV PrEP. The press office at Nature knows this as well as the journalists do. Even if there was a press release for the HIV study, I’d bet coverage wouldn’t be too extensive.
Two, the journalists and editors have to compete with Google search. Megalodon wins here, every time. It’s a shark. Sharks are big business.
Lastly, the other studies are quite complex and deal with some scientifically dense medical topics. While the Megalodon study is about chemistry, it gets boiled down to SHARK V SHARK. That’s an easy sell.
So, the battle was never between Megalodon and the great white. It was a battle for the public’s eyeballs. There’s so much to consider in that battle. That’s complex. Dense. Sometimes ugly. And that battle is an ancient one… stretching back to, like, 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee helped create this godforsaken world wide web thing.
Who ultimately wins that battle?
Probably whoever has the best headline.