Lth pitch of Under the Seine, scheduled for release on Netflix on June 5, is tantalizing: a killer shark attacks athletes competing in the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. The film recently made headlines due to a controversy: its producers were sued by French director Vincent Dietschy, who accused of having copied the script of his project Catfish. One thing is certain, shark or catfish, the image of the sea monster that attacks humans has been anchored in the collective imagination since Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Jaws (1975), which traumatized generations of moviegoers… and swimmers. But what about the real risks of having a bad encounter in the waters of the Seine?
To find out, we asked Sébastien Brosse, researcher at the CNRS and professor of animal biology at the University of Toulouse. From the outset, he reassures us: the shark strolling nonchalantly under the Pont des Arts definitely belongs to fiction. “In general, sharks do not swim up rivers. The exception is the bull shark, which can travel thousands of kilometers up the Amazon, but this is a species that lives in tropical areas.he specifies.
Not so long ago, the Seine was home to animals of impressive size. “Cetaceans populated the Seine until the end of the 19th centurye century. The porpoises arrived without difficulty as far as Paris. There were also very large fish, such as sturgeons. », recalls Sébastien Brosse. Among the miraculous catches that remain in people’s minds, let us cite, in 1856, that of a 140 kg sturgeon near Mantes-la-Jolie. Subsequently, during the XXe century, these large animals gradually disappeared, in particular due to the decline of their prey (smaller fish), itself due to industrialization and pollution.
Nile crocodile and alligator turtle
So what about the unusual animals found in the river that regularly make the headlines? In bulk, the Seine river brigade has fished out in recent years: a python, a Nile crocodile, an alligator turtle and even a pacu (a cousin of the piranha). But, far from having traveled thousands of kilometers to come to us, these animals were in reality released into the Seine by unscrupulous owners. The opportunity to dismantle a myth: even if piranhas are sometimes released into the Seine, they are in reality harmless to humans. “The piranha can bite humans to defend itself, if it feels threatened, says Sébastien Brosse. But he almost never attacks. In addition, it cannot stand cold water, so it ends up dying. » So no more disaster scenario like in the film Piranha 3D.
You have 62.07% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.