<P> Humans are not appropriate prey because the shark's digestion is too slow to cope with a human's high ratio of bone to muscle and fat . Accordingly, in most recorded shark bite incidents, great whites broke off contact after the first bite . Fatalities are usually caused by blood loss from the initial bite rather than from critical organ loss or from whole consumption . From 1990 to 2011 there have been a total of 139 unprovoked great white shark bite incidents, 29 fatal . </P> <P> However, some researchers have hypothesized that the reason the proportion of fatalities is low is not because sharks do not like human flesh, but because humans are often able to escape after the first bite . In the 1980s, John McCosker, Chair of Aquatic Biology at the California Academy of Sciences, noted that divers who dove solo and were bitten by great whites were generally at least partially consumed, while divers who followed the buddy system were generally rescued by their companion . McCosker and Timothy C. Tricas, an author and professor at the University of Hawaii, suggest that a standard pattern for great whites is to make an initial devastating attack and then wait for the prey to weaken before consuming the wounded animal . Humans' ability to move out of reach with the help of others, thus foiling the attack, is unusual for a great white's prey . </P> <P> In 2014 the state government of Western Australia led by Premier Colin Barnett implemented a policy of killing large sharks . The policy, colloquially referred to as the Western Australian shark cull, was intended to protect users of the marine environment from shark bite incidents, following the deaths of seven people on the Western Australian coastline in the years 2010--2013 . Baited drum lines were deployed near popular beaches using hooks designed to catch great white sharks, as well as bull and tiger sharks . Large sharks found hooked but still alive were shot and their bodies discarded at sea . The government claimed they were not culling the sharks, but were using a "targeted, localised, hazard mitigation strategy". Barnett described opposition as "ludicrous" and "extreme", and said that nothing could change his mind . This policy was met with widespread condemnation from the scientific community, which showed that species responsible for bite incidents were notoriously hard to identify, that the drum lines failed to capture white sharks, as intended, and that the government also failed to show any correlation between their drum line policy and a decrease in shark bite incidents in the region . </P> <P> Great white sharks infrequently bite and sometimes even sink boats . Only five of the 108 authenticated unprovoked shark bite incidents reported from the Pacific Coast during the 20th century involved kayakers . In a few cases they have bitten boats up to 10 meters (33 ft) in length . They have bumped or knocked people overboard, usually biting the boat from the stern . In one case in 1936, a large shark leapt completely into the South African fishing boat Lucky Jim, knocking a crewman into the sea . Tricas and McCosker's underwater observations suggest that sharks are attracted to boats by the electrical fields they generate, which are picked up by the ampullae of Lorenzini and confuse the shark about whether or not wounded prey might be near - by . </P>

How did the great white sharks get their name