Wars are not new to shark-gods. On some Pacific islands, such as the Marshalls, tribes fought religious wars over sharks centuries ago. These battles were caused by members of one tribe defying the shark or sting ray taboos of another. What usually happened was that a member of a tribe which did not worship a certain kind of shark or sting ray would catch one of the sacred creatures. When word of the sacrilege reached the tribe that did worship that specific shark or sting ray, a delegation would be sent to the tribe whose member had committed the sacrilege. If that tribe refused to heed the worshipers' pleas to desist from the desecration, a holy war would begin.

One of Japan's mythological deities is a god of storm, known as the 
Shark Man. In fact, the shark is so terrifying in Japanese legends that 
when the Chinese sought a talisman to be painted on war planes raiding 
the Japanese, they chose the evilly leering face of the Tiger shark. 

The 
American pilots who flew these 

shark-invoking planes were known 
throughout the world as the "Flying Tigers," but actually they should 
have been called the "

Flying Sharks.