Monsters of the deep, or one of the most unjustly maligned creatures on the planet?

Shark expert Christopher G. Lowe firmly believes the fearful reputation of the Great White Shark basically boils down to the bad public relations that followed in the wake of Peter Benchley and Steven Spielberg joining forces on "Jaws" 40 years ago.

The best-selling 1974 novel and the blockbuster 1975 film turned sharks into monster movie fare on a par with Godzilla or King Kong, causing several generations of moviegoers to think twice about taking a dip in the ocean -- especially at night.

Lowe is one of the marine biologists who contributed to the IMAX movie, "Great White Shark," playing at the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk, and he hopes the film will dispel some of the "Jaws" horror movie myths.

"People have always felt more comfortable on land. ... Part of the (shark problem) is we are not aquatic creatures and we are scared by what we can't see," Lowe said in a phone interview last week.

The scientist came naturally to his occupation, having grown up fishing and diving off Martha's Vineyard.

"There wasn't much else to do," he said, adding that his grandfather was a commercial fisherman and his great-great uncle Charles W. Morgan was the captain of the whaling ship on display at Mystic Seaport.

"It was just the natural thing for me to do," Lowe said of his love of the sea and marine biology, which eventually led to his current position as professor of marine biology at California State University Long Beach, where he runs the Shark Lab.

Lowe and his students have been studying baby white sharks for the past decade and he is developing robots that would track sharks.

The increased number of Great White sightings on Cape Cod recently, he said, are actually signs that the ocean environment is much healthier than it was a few decades ago.

"They show that coastal systems can come back -- there have been remarkable and amazing improvements," he said. The fact that Great Whites have returned means that the food chain below them is healthy again.

"Top predators are like canaries in the coal mine," he said of the way their presence is a sign that once depleted and over-fished regions have started to recover.

"This is good news, which I know can be hard to accept ... because we now live in a day and age of doom and gloom science," Lowe said.

Great White Sharks also have become a protected species over the past two decades. In California, legislation was passed in 1994 that demands any Great Whites caught by fishermen must be released back into the sea.

Lowe is halfway through writing a book about sharks -- aimed at a general readership -- that will, among other things, examine the fear factor of the post-"Jaws" era.

"One hundred years ago, people were deathly afraid of whales because all they knew was that they killed people. Most people never saw whales, but they would hear about fishermen who died ... when they were trying to kill whales," he said.

The marine biologist chuckled at the thought of one of his whale-fearing ancestors in Mystic seeing today's packed whale-watching cruises that have sprung up in so many coastal areas.

"Somewhere along the line, the PR for whales went from them being dangerous to having to protect them. If we could that with whales, why not with sharks?," Lowe asked.; Twitter: