Shark Life: True Stories About Sharks & the Sea Page 10

  The eels live in small caves, crannies, and holes in reefs. A diver who goes poking around—searching for lobsters, perhaps—risks having a probing hand mistaken for a fish, seized, gnawed on, and shredded.

  Another risky business involves morays that have been conditioned to accept and be fed by humans. As dive masters and other sea-savvy folks know, conditioning is not the same as taming. Eels, fish, sharks, and other marine creatures (except for some of the mammals) cannot be tamed. No one should ever try to treat a moray eel like a pet.

  The danger in conditioning morays is rarely to the conditioner or the conditioner's customers. They, after all, play by established rules. They arrive at the dive site, bringing fish scraps or other tasty dead things for the eel. The eel emerges from its hole, expecting to be fed. It is fed, and it permits itself to be touched and handled. Sometimes it will hunt for morsels concealed on the diver's body. Then it will slither in and out of the diver's buoyancy-compensator vest, between his legs, or around his neck.

  For the paying customer, the performance looks truly impressive, and, in fact, it is.

  The most remarkable morays I've ever seen lived on a reef off Grand Cayman. They had been conditioned by Wayne and Ann Hasson, who at the time ran a successful diving operation in the Cayman Islands. (You'll have noticed by now that I keep using the word conditioned instead of trained. It's because I'm not certain that what the eels are taught to do is really training. They don't jump through hoops or play volleyball or do anything else they're not used to doing. They eat—though, granted, in an unnatural way. That is, they eat from the hands of humans, whom they have been taught to tolerate and, to an extent, trust. Is that training? I don't think so. I think it's conditioning.)

  Wayne and Ann worked with the two green morays they named Waldo and Waldeen. Both were enormous: six and a half or seven feet long (longer than I am tall, that much I know for sure). They were at least a foot high, and as thick as a large honeydew or a small watermelon.

  David Doubilet and I were doing a story on the Caymans for National Geographic. Wendy and our then fourteen-year-old daughter, Tracy—both certified divers—had come along to enjoy a couple of weeks of the best diving in the Caribbean.

  Tracy has always had a mystical, almost spooky, ability to communicate with animals. I don't mean “communicate” in the Dr. Dolittle sense; she doesn't talk to animals. She and animals merely appear to trust each other.

  That kind of trust isn't uncommon for humans to have with dogs, cats, horses, and other mammals. But with fish? I have seen big groupers come to Tracy—while avoiding every other human in the area—and almost snuggle up to her. I'll forever remember seeing her in the Caymans, walking slowly along the bottom, with two groupers swimming beside her, one under each arm.

  Valerie Taylor is the only person I know with a greater affinity than Tracy for marine creatures. Valerie is the legendary Australian photographer, diver, and marine conservationist. She truly is spooky—off the scale. I believe that Valerie could wordlessly convince any fish, eel, or dolphin to fetch her newspaper, pick up her laundry, and wash her car.

  One day, Ann Hasson introduced Tracy to one of the giant green morays—Waldeen, I think. When the eel had been fed and stroked by Ann, it took immediately to Tracy. It snaked all around her, in and out of her buoyancy-compensator vest, seeming not to be seeking food so much as getting acquainted. Tracy never moved, except to raise her arms slowly to give Waldeen another platform to slither around.

  After a few moments, the eel calmly slid away from Tracy and returned to its home in the reef. We all puttered around for another minute or two, then prepared to move on. When I signaled to Tracy to follow us, however, she shook her head, calmly but definitely saying no.

  I was bewildered: what did she mean, no? What did she plan to do, stand there all day? Then I saw her point downward with one index finger, and I looked at her feet. There was Waldeen, halfway out of the reef, with its huge, gaping jaws around Tracy's ankle. The eel's head was moving gently back and forth, its jaws throbbing open and closed on my daughter's bare flesh.

  Waldeen was mouthing Tracy, the way a Labrador retriever will mouth your hand to get you to play with it. Labradors, though, are known for having a “soft mouth.” Moray eels aren't.

  Tracy's expression was serene. Clearly, she was neither hurt nor afraid. She stayed still. I stayed still, too, paralyzed with fear and wondering what I'd do if I suddenly vomited into my mask.

  The eel played with Tracy's ankle for perhaps another thirty seconds, then withdrew into the reef.

  We moved on.

  When we returned to the Cayman Islands a couple of years later, I learned that both Waldo and Waldeen were gone. One had been caught and killed by local fishermen— illegally, of course—and the other was said to have vanished. I'd bet that he or she, whichever it was, had been killed, too. For the biggest danger in conditioning eels to trust humans is not to the humans but to the eels. Their fate is familiar and almost inevitable. I've seen it happen all over the world, from the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean to the Tuamotu Islands in French Polynesia.

  An eel is conditioned to associate humans with food. Sometimes the betrayal is simple. A spearfisher will descend to the reef, maybe carrying food, maybe not. The eel will emerge from its den. The fisher kills it. More often, though, the eel's death is more complex.

  Once there lived a big moray eel in a large coral head inside the lagoon of the Rangiroa Atoll in the Tuamotus. When our son Christopher was nine, he used to like to visit the eel, to watch it as it waited in ambush in the shelter of the coral. Now and then he'd see the eel dart out of its hole and, with blurring speed, snatch and kill a passing fish. Christopher kept his distance from the eel. Even though local laws forbade the feeding of morays, it was common knowledge that glass-bottom-boat operators from cruise ships would send snorkelers down with food. They would draw eels out of their holes for the entertainment of their passengers. Christopher didn't carry food with him, and he didn't want the eel to make any false assumptions about him.

  News came one afternoon that a swimmer had been badly bitten by a moray eel and had had to be evacuated by air to a hospital in Tahiti. By coincidence, we were scheduled to go out into the lagoon that day. When we reached the coral head, Christopher put on mask, fins, and snorkel and dove down to see his friend the eel.

  The eel had been speared, just behind the head. It was still alive, struggling to retreat into its hole. But the steel shaft that had gone clean through its body now stuck out a foot or more from either side, stopping the eel from retreating.

  Christopher hung in the water, helpless, and watched the eel die.

  We heard later what had happened. A snorkeler had happened by and seen the eel waiting in the opening of its hole. She had approached very close to the eel. The eel—thinking she was bringing food, like other humans who came so near—came out of its hole prepared to feed.

  When the woman gave it nothing, the eel pursued her. It was conditioned to associate humans with food. The flesh the eel saw looked like food but was, in fact, the woman's hand.

  I'm sure you can finish the story yourself. The eel was deemed too dangerous to live, and a diver was sent to kill it. In truth, of course, the eel had only been obeying the conditioning imprinted upon it by humans.

  The single strangest experience I've ever had with moray eels occurred in the Galápagos Islands. I first went there in 1987 to appear in a television show for John Wilcox. Stan Waterman was one of two underwater cameramen. The other was Howard Hall, one of the finest wildlife filmmakers working anywhere in the world today. My “co-talent” was Paul Humann. Paul is the author of many fish-identification books and an expert still photographer who had spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours underwater in the Galápagos. He would act as my guide and teacher for the cameras.

  Before the simple two-week shoot was over, all three of them would escape death and serious injury by the narrowest of margins. Stan and Paul were lost in t
he open ocean at twilight and, another day, were set upon suddenly by a large school of very aggressive small sharks. One day Howard and Paul, after Stan and I had left, were in the boat we had chartered when it crashed into an island and sank in the middle of the night. (The boat had been running on automatic pilot, and the crewman on duty had only to watch the radar screen. He had been taught everything about the radar—except what it was for. He had gazed serenely as the blip indicating the island drew ever closer to the center of the screen, until finally the boat slammed head-on into the rocky shore.)

  We had filmed sharks of several kinds, in situations both controlled and hairy. We had filmed tiny Galápagos penguins (the northernmost penguins in the world), which swam like miniature rockets in pursuit of their prey. We'd filmed exotic critters like red-lipped batfish, which looked like a medical experiment gone wrong, as if the body of a frog had been grafted onto the mouth of Mick Jagger. We had also filmed seals and iguanas, Sally Lightfoot crabs and blue-footed boobies.

  What we hadn't yet filmed were moray eels. In the Galápagos they tend to congregate in large numbers in tight quarters. We had been told to expect to see four or five, or maybe more, eels poking out of a single hole, their heads jammed together, their jaws opening and closing as they breathed. We hadn't seen any yet, but we kept looking. We all knew it would make a wonderful image.

  One day we found some—not once but several times— and it was wonderful and we filmed till we ran out of film. Then, as we turned away, we noticed something curious: the eels were following us. We were on a rough, open lava plain. From hidden holes all over the bottom, moray eels large and small, green and spotted, had come all the way out into the open and were chasing us.

  Impossible. Morays never left the safety of their holes.

  Oh, really?

  We knew there was no point trying to flee. The morays could catch us in a wink. And they did. And once they had us at their mercy, they … did nothing. They chased us, caught up with us, and passed us by.

  It was frightening and—once we knew they didn't intend to bite us—fascinating. None of us had ever seen anything like it before, and I haven't since.

  KILLER WHALES (ORCAS)

  If there's an animal in the sea that great white sharks are afraid of, it's the killer whale. Among meat eaters, it is the apex predator in the ocean. (Sperm whales, which are much bigger, are—technically—meat eaters, too, but their diet consists mostly of squid.) Though killer whales are officially members of the dolphin family, they make most dolphins seem like house pets. Males can grow to thirty feet long and weigh several tons.

  Killer whales do eat mammals, and they have attacked and sunk boats. But there is not one recorded instance of an orca in the wild attacking a human being. There are, though, a couple of instances of captive killer whales turning on and wounding their trainers.

  I was aware of all the facts and statistics when, in the 1980s, I was asked to go scuba diving in the wild with killer whales. But the facts were cold comfort. I didn't know anybody who had ever gone into the water with wild killer whales on purpose, so there was no one to call for advice. I thought that perhaps the reason nobody had ever been attacked was that nobody had ever been in the water with one. Maybe I'd be the test case, the first one, the late, lucky loser.

  The first protective measure I took was to have a wet suit custom-made. It was puke green with yellow piping on the arms and legs and a broad yellow stripe across the chest. I wanted to broadcast to any and all killer whales, I am not a seal! I considered having the actual words stenciled within the yellow stripe. But even I knew that, smart as they are, killer whales can't read.

  Killer whales exist in all the oceans of the world, in warm water and cold. According to Richard Ellis, they're the most widely distributed of all cetaceans (dolphins and whales). Their common name comes from the documented fact that they kill other whales. Pods of killer whales will gang up on one of the great whales—a blue whale, say—and kill it and eat it.

  I was to dive with them in the cold Canadian waters of the Johnstone Strait, off Vancouver Island. Several pods that lived there were being studied by scientists. Specifically, there was a stony beach where killer whales were known to come to rub themselves on the round rocks, called rubbing rocks. The whales do it either to rid themselves of minute parasites or, more likely, just for the fun of it. The plan was for Stan Waterman and me to lie on the rocky bottom, using oxygen re-breathers so as not to generate bubbles (whales hear bubbles, know that they mean people, and stay away). We were supposed to wait for the whales to arrive. Then, with ABC's primitive videocamera hardwired to a monitor on the beach, we would capture images of them rubbing. (This has been done a thousand times since, but up till then it had never been done.)

  I met my first killer whale before I even got wet. A local scientist and I were traveling across the Johnstone Strait in a rubber boat when we came upon a pod of orcas cruising easily in open water. We stopped the engine and drifted. Within five minutes the whales surrounded us, clicking and tweeping and chattering among themselves. There was a big male— easily identifiable by his five- or six-foot-high dorsal fin— along with a couple of females and a few youngsters.

  Without warning, one of the youngsters—twelve or thirteen feet long and as big around as a barrel—surged out of the water. It plopped its head on the side of the rubber boat. It opened its mouth, displaying its pink tongue and its huge conical teeth.

  Shocked, I flinched and backed away.

  “He wants you to scratch his tongue,” the scientist said.

  “Right,” I replied, thinking that at this moment jokes were in rather bad taste.

  “I'm serious. Go ahead.”

  I stared at him and at the whale, which was waiting patiently, mouth open, emitting an occasional click or cheep. Then I decided that a one-armed writer could still be a writer. So I very gingerly touched the whale's tongue and gave it a scratch.

  “All the way back,” the scientist said. “Right at the base. And really scratch it.”

  I took a deep breath and plunged my arm into the whale's mouth up to my shoulder. With my hand out of sight in the back of the dark cavern, I scratched for all I was worth.

  The whale purred. I'm not kidding—it purred, just like a happy cat. And I—from the pit of my stomach to the back of my neck, where the hairs stood on end and tingled—felt overwhelmed. It was as if I was communicating not only with this young whale but also with nature itself. I'd never experienced anything like it.

  I looked at the scientist and grinned, and he grinned back. I scratched some more; the whale purred some more. I would've kept scratching all day. But after a while the scientist said, “That'll do,” and I withdrew my arm. The whale closed its mouth and slid gently back into the sea.

  The rest of our experiment with the killer whales of the Johnstone Strait was pretty uneventful. The water was wickedly cold, so we began by using dry suits. Dry suits, as the name implies, are intended to keep the diver dry and warm instead of, as in the case of a wet suit, wet and clammy. But I have never gotten the hang of maneuvering inside what amounts to a gigantic space suit. I didn't know how to adjust my buoyancy. Air pockets formed and shifted, so I hung crookedly, then shot to the surface upside down and backward. I gave up warmth in favor of balance and switched back to my wet suit. It allowed me ten or fifteen minutes of feeling in my hands and feet and approximately half an hour of consciousness.

  The water over the rubbing rocks was only five or six feet deep but very murky (visibility between five and ten feet). Stan and I lay on the bottom and waited for a pod of whales to come along for a rub.

  We heard them long before we saw them. The clicks, whistles, and tweeps, I learned later, were the whales discussing us. Their supersensitive sonar picked us up from half a mile away, but they couldn't decide what we were. They knew we were alive and not fish, warm-blooded but not seals or sea lions. We gave off no bubbles. Evidently, we were worth investigating, for the whales continued
toward us. Their conversation grew louder and more excited. (Stan and I were each convinced that the whales’ discussion was about which of them would have the privilege of deciding which of us to eat first.)

  The whale sounds grew louder and louder as they came closer and closer. Still we could see nothing but thick gray murk.

  Suddenly, like a flash-cut in a movie, the frame of our vision was filled with an enormous black-and-white head rushing at us. The jaws were open; each cone of sharp white ivory shone like a blade.

  And then the whale actually saw us. It recognized us for what we were, and immediately—impossibly quickly— veered away. It let out a loud, long blaaat, the whale equivalent of booing. I thought its meaning was vividly clear: disgust and dismay at being fooled by two dumb, clumsy, and decidedly inferior beings.

  The immense body vanished, and no other whales appeared. As the pod pulled away from us, the tone of their discussion returned to a level of calm, dull conversation.

  POISONOUS ANIMALS

  The oceans are full of creatures that depend on poison as a weapon of defense or offense. They range from anemones to corals to jellyfish, cone shells, bony fish, and air-breathing snakes.

  Swimmers, in general, don't have to worry about any but the jellyfish. But there are many kinds of jellyfish, some far more poisonous than others. It makes sense for a swimmer to seek the advice of locals before galloping willy-nilly into the water.

  In Australia, for example, there are box jellyfish, called sea wasps. Their poison can, and occasionally does, kill a human being. At certain times of the year some beaches along Australia's northeast coast are closed to swimmers and surfers because of the seasonal invasion of sea wasps.

  One of the most common dangerous jellyfish in the Atlantic is the Portuguese man-of-war. Its tentacles deliver a toxin that, while not usually fatal, causes excruciating pain and can be debilitating. The best thing that can be said about men-of-war is that you can see them coming. They are wind-and-current-driven jellies with “sails” like purple balloons that extend several inches above the surface. Even though they are visible, it's best to give them a wide berth. Their stinging tentacles can stretch as much as a hundred feet below and, depending on the current, to the side.