The man who created Jaws, the icon of the dangerous deep, was actually quite fond of sharks, according to his wife.

Peter Benchley, who wrote Jaws in 1974, died on Saturday at the age of 65 from pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive scarring of the lungs, after a distinguished career as a journalist and spokesman for the enviroment.

Speaking after his death, Benchley's wife, Wendy, said her husband was an advocate for sharks who had stressed the need for mankind to understand them better.

"He cared very much about sharks. He spent most of his life trying to explain to people that if you are in the ocean, you’re in the shark’s territory, so it behoves you to take precautions," she told the Associated Press.

Jaws stayed for 40 weeks in the bestseller charts of The New York Times, eventually selling 20 million copies and spawning the film of the same name, which, in 1975, became America's first true summer blockbuster, and Steven Spielberg's first big-budget smash.

Benchley famously disagreed with the writing of the screenplay but the film reflected the violence and terror of his first novel.

"Spielberg certainly made the most superb movie, Peter was very pleased," Mrs Benchley said. "But Peter kept telling people the book was fiction, it was a novel, and that he no more took responsibility for the fear of sharks than Mario Puzo (the author of The Godfather) took responsibility for the Mafia."

Benchley once said that his voice was carried in the film by Hooper, the marine biologist played by Richard Dreyfuss: "The voice... was my voice urging the populace not to embark on some mad vendetta against an animal that was just doing what nature programmed it to do," he said.

Living on the proceeds of his monster, Benchley, a journalist for Newsweek, The Washington Post and National Geographic, spent thirty years writing and filming the sea. He was a spokesman for the Environmental Defense Fund and for the now defunct Center for Sustainable Fisheries at the University of Miami.

For five years, he wrote a daily Ocean Report that was syndicated by more than 200 public radio stations across the US. In an interview for his website, Benchley said: "Without the oceans there would be no life on Earth. So water is the be-all and end-all of life as we know it. If we kill everything in the ocean, and if we pollute the ocean to a point where it can't sustain life, we're committing suicide.

"It's my hope that somehow we'll find a way to make people connect with the need to preserve the oceans and the creatures in them. It's to that end that I'm doing these films, programs, radio shows and other stories."

Benchley proudly maintained that he was never hurt by a sea creature, "except for jellyfish and sea urchins", although he did admit to being frightened by them. And he recounted one incident, during filming in the Caribbean, when his inner Jaws came close to the surface.

"An oceanic white-tip shark made a run at me because I was bleeding from my leg, having been caught in a fisherman's line," he said. "The shark tried to bite me and I tried to hit him in the eye with a stick, but instead I hit him in the mouth. He grabbed the stick, which was attached to my wrist, and ran away with it, shooting through the water and dragging me like a puppet behind him."

• Swimmers have been told to keep out of the water in Queensland, eastern Australia, because of a feeding frenzy that has brought hundreds of hammerhead, gray nurse and bronze whaler sharks close into shore. An 18-year-old man was bitten today standing in just 30cm (12in) of water. A 21-year-old woman was mauled to death by three sharks last month.

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