Shark Trouble: True Stories and Lessons About the Sea Read online

  Three more sharks swam in from the gloom; other gray shadows began to appear in the distance.

  Soon there were thirteen sharks circling us, expectant but calm … at least for the time being.

  We had no food to give them. We couldn’t hold up our end of the implicit bargain.

  How long would it take the first shark to understand that it had been betrayed, that the rules had been broken? How would it react?

  Were they all well fed? Had one or two perhaps not gotten their share during the feeding?

  Were all of these thoughts—tripping over one another to crowd into the chaos of my head—nothing more than ludicrous anthropomorphizing?

  All I knew for certain was that we had no time to wait for answers. Already a couple of the sharks were exhibiting signs of … not agitation, not excitement … the only word that came to me was impatience.

  One shark shivered visibly; a ripple traveled the length of its hard, sleek, steel gray body. Another began to swim in spurts, speeding up and slowing down.

  I couldn’t tell what Clayton was feeling. He knelt motionless, now and then turning his head to watch a particular shark but mostly letting the parade pass before his eyes. Wendy and I had a hand on each of his arms, as one of us always did in any remotely scary circumstance, to ensure that he wouldn’t, in panic, suddenly rush for the surface, forgetting his training, and risk becoming a victim of any one of several unhappy accidents.

  I looked up at the boat, which was clearly visible directly overhead some thirty feet above us. Then I made contact with Wendy’s eyes and told her (as best I could) that I had come to a decision and that she should do exactly as I did. She seemed to—and indeed, she did—understand.

  I tapped Clayton to get his attention. He looked up at me, obviously excited, obviously afraid. His eyes, seen through the distortion of mask and water, were the size of extra-large eggs. I made the “okay” sign to him—a circle formed by thumb and forefinger—then touched his mask and mine, saying, Watch me, do as I do. He shot me the “okay” sign.

  Together, we three rose off our knees and stood on the sand.

  The sharks took notice of our movement. Though they didn’t change their pace, they closed ranks just a bit, shrinking the diameter of the circle.

  Wendy and I faced each other and surrounded Clayton. My right hand held her left. With my left hand, I mimed counting down from three to zero. She closed her eyes for a second, then nodded.

  I counted down, and at zero we filled our lungs with compressed air, pressed the purge valves on our regulator mouthpieces, and kicked off the bottom.

  A thick, noisy column of bubbles filled the space between us as, shielding Clayton with our bodies, we rose toward the boat, exhaling slowly, fighting the urge to hurry, staying always beneath the last of our bubbles, to prevent any rogue air bubble from being trapped in some tiny space in our lungs, whence it might burst free and become an embolus.

  The ploy was elementary and by no means guaranteed to succeed. In general, sharks dislike bubbles. In general, they stay away from loud, erratic bursts of bubbles. Engineers have built bubble “curtains” in attempts to protect beaches, but they’ve proven to be unreliable.

  My hope was that by huddling together and blasting bubbles from our regulators, we would appear to the sharks as an infernal machine worthy of not even a close inspection, let alone an exploratory bite.

  Not once did I look down, but Clayton did, and later he told me that the circle of sharks had broken apart as soon as we left and that individual sharks had begun to follow us upward.

  We broke through the surface, and in a single motion Wendy and I propelled Clayton up onto the swim step. Next Wendy hauled herself onto the little platform, while I hung off, prepared to kick at any shark that made a run at her legs.

  One shark had followed us nearly to the surface. Now it circled tightly just below my feet. I couldn’t turn away to climb aboard the boat; I had to keep watching it, in case it should lunge for me.

  I hoped that hands would reach down from above and haul me aboard, and Wendy did, in fact, grab the neck of my tank to keep me from drifting away. But she didn’t have the strength to lift me and tank and weights and wetsuit clear of the water.

  After perhaps a minute, the shark turned away and swam off, and I shucked my tank and pulled myself into the boat.

  Wendy and I looked at our son. He had taken off his tank and was shedding his wetsuit. He was trembling, and his lips were blue, from cold or fear or …

  We had no words for each other. We had almost lost … we could have lost … we were both guilty of … how could we have …?

  “Wow!” Clayton shouted. “I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

  “I know,” I began. “I—”

  “Can I go again? Can I? Please?”

  At eleven years old, he was immortal.

  We said no.

  12

  Teach Your Children Well

  Some Shark Facts and a Story

  You may already have discovered that your children, especially your male children, know more about sharks than you do.

  As a corollary to my conviction that all kids are fascinated by sharks or dinosaurs, I believe that sharks have one particular advantage over dinosaurs: they still exist; they’re still visible in the wild, still photographable, filmable, and videotapeable. The Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week” has become a popular and successful institution. Most broadcast and cable-TV channels have access to a huge archive of shark footage, and digital technology has so quickly become so good and so inexpensive that nowadays, as soon as discoveries of any kind are made—whether of new species or new behaviors—they’re recorded and broadcast, with ratings success all but guaranteed.

  The movie Jaws appears on television somewhere in the world nearly every day of the year, and it continues to draw audiences.

  The eternal verity endures: kids love sharks.

  Still, it’s possible that there are children who don’t know much about sharks. So for them, and for their parents, here is a brief primer on sharks, “true facts,” if you will, absent hype, gore, and sensation:

  • Sharks are fish, but they’re not like other fish, because they have no real bones. Sharks and the other members of the elasmobranch family of sea creatures, including skates and rays, have skeletons made of cartilage, the same stuff we have in our knees and other joints and in our noses and ears.

  • Sharks are some of the oldest animals on earth. They’ve been around much longer than man or any other mammals—probably as much as four hundred million years—and they haven’t changed very much in at least the last thirty million.

  • Sharks have always been among nature’s most perfect creations, efficiently performing the functions nature programmed them to do: eat, swim, and reproduce.

  • There are hundreds of different kinds of sharks. Nobody knows exactly how many because (1) new species are being discovered all the time, and (2) we have explored so very little of the oceans that cover 70 percent of our planet’s surface that we really have no notion of the true nature and variety of all that lives down there.

  • Sharks range over all extremes of size, looks, and appetites. They include the whale shark—the biggest fish in the sea, which can grow to fifty feet long and weigh many tons but is completely harmless to people and eats only the tiniest of sea creatures—and the cookie-cutter shark, which grows to only about a foot and a half but inflicts terrible wounds on much bigger animals, like other sharks and dolphins, by using its razor-sharp teeth to remove large chunks of flesh.

  • Sharks include the largest meat-eating fish in the sea—the great white, which has attacked and eaten human beings—and some of the smallest meat eaters, too, like the so-called cigar shark, which fits in the palm of your hand, and the dwarf shark, which only grows to ten inches long.

  • Sharks also include some of the weirdest-looking fish in the sea. The horn shark, which grows to roughly three feet long, has a face that
resembles a pig’s and teeth that are flat, not pointed, that it uses to crush the animals it eats. The wobbegong shark is camouflaged to be invisible against a coral reef. It never bothers people … unless people bother it. A friend of mine was bitten by a wobbegong when she put her finger on it to show me how well it was hidden.

  • Sharks are very important to maintaining the balance of nature in the sea. As apex predators, those at the very top of the food chain, they keep the numbers of other animals in check and healthy, culling populations of the old, the weak, and the sick.

  • Scientists suspect that sharks perform several other important functions in the sea, but they don’t know exactly what those functions are because they’ve had so little time and money with which to study sharks. Unlike whales, with which people can identify because they do a lot of humanlike things, sharks do not breathe air, do not nurse their young, do not communicate with one another in an audible “language,” and do not interrelate with humans at all. Consequently, there has not been much popular effort to get to know them.

  • Since the first human ventured onto the sea thousands of years ago, sharks have always been perceived as dangerous, sometimes even evil, and so there hasn’t been much pressure on governments to spend money to study them. Most people believe that the best way to deal with sharks is to stay away from them. Some even believe that “the only good shark is a dead shark,” a belief that springs from a combination of fear and ignorance.

  • Unfortunately, sharks have turned out to be very vulnerable to destruction, and possibly even extinction, by man. Prized for their fins (for soup), their meat (especially makos), their skins (for leather), their teeth (for jewelry), and their organs and cartilage (for medicines), sharks have in recent years been so heavily overfished that some species may never recover.

  • The downfall of sharks may, ironically, be hastened by the same qualities for which nature created them. Because apex predators are, by definition, at the top of the food chain, nothing preys on them except larger versions of themselves and, sometimes, killer whales. To maintain ecological balance, the numbers of each species of apex predator—be it grizzly bear, lion, tiger, or shark—must remain low; nature assured this by designing these animals to breed relatively late in life and relatively seldom and to produce relatively few young that will survive to adulthood. Great white sharks, for example, have small litters (often only one or two), but each pup is born large (four or five feet long), fully formed, fully armed, and ready to rumble. In other species there is cannibalism in utero, so few young are born alive; still others pup many live young, but they’re so small and vulnerable to being eaten by other creatures that only the fittest (and the luckiest) survive.

  • Finally, in their appearance, their efficiency, and the striking evidence that they’re living examples of Charles Darwin’s concept of adaptive radiation, sharks are—to me, anyway—among the most beautiful of all the creatures on earth.

  Here is a story I wrote about sharks, to explain how they function in the complex chain of life by which we are all—each and every living thing on planet Earth—inextricably linked together.

  * * *

  The Day All the Sharks Died

  Once upon a time, there was a seaside village whose people lived in harmony with nature.

  They made their living from the sea. They caught fish on the reef that protected the village from the full fury of ocean storms.

  They gathered clams and oysters, mussels and scallops from the bays and coves and inlets. Some they ate themselves; some they sold to people in other towns and villages, from whom they bought necessities like lightbulbs and clothing and radios and refrigerators and fuel for their boats and cars.

  Their biggest business, which employed the most people and brought in the most money, was lobster fishing. Professional lobstermen owned special boats and had special licenses that permitted them to set a certain number of pots or traps to catch lobsters. The law permitted the fishermen to catch only lobsters that were too big to pass through a special ring, which meant that they were old enough to have bred and had young of their own. Smaller lobsters were put back in the sea to live and grow, as were female lobsters carrying eggs.

  Everyone worked together to maintain a healthy, stable population of lobsters, for many people’s livelihoods depended on them: not only the fishermen who caught them and the mates who worked on the boats but the wholesalers on the docks who bought the lobsters, processed them, and packed them up for shipping; the truckers who took the lobsters to stores and restaurants up and down the coast; the men and women who worked at the restaurants where lobsters were served; the businesses that cleaned the linen used in the restaurants; the bankers who financed the businesses; and so on, like ripples spreading from the splash of a stone dropped in a pond.

  So valuable were the lobsters to the people of the village that very few of the villagers ate lobster themselves. Eating lobster, they said, made them feel as if they were eating the money in their pockets. That may not make sense to you or me, but it was the way the people felt. They’d eat clams they caught themselves, or fish they caught themselves, but not lobsters.

  The villagers grew vegetables in their gardens and fruit on the trees planted many years ago on the hillsides behind the village.

  A small colony of sea lions lived on a rocky point of land that joined the breakwater at the mouth of the harbor, and in the springtime tourists from other towns would come to the village and have lunch at one of the restaurants on the harbor, just for the fun of watching the newborn sea lion pups playing with one another, or learning how to swim and hunt for food, or sunning themselves on the warm rocks.

  There always seemed to be exactly enough sea lions to keep the colony healthy, never so many that they had to fight for food with one another or with the village fishermen, never so few that inbreeding became a problem and pups were born dead or deformed.

  The villagers’ garbage was collected by big trucks that took it away to dumps somewhere far inland. The sewage from their showers, toilets, and washing machines ran into pipes buried along the road in front of the village and was carried to treatment plants that removed the sludge and cleansed the water.

  They did not think much, or worry at all, about the great numbers and variety of creatures that lived in the sea. The sea and all its living things seemed infinite, indestructible, eternal.

  Nor did they worry about the predators that lived in the sea. They knew that sharks patrolled the reef and the deep water beyond, but never—not in living memory or in village lore—had anyone ever been bitten, let alone killed, by a shark.

  The villagers had, of course, been taught from birth to respect the sea and the animals in it, so they took sensible precautions. Even on the scorching-hot days of summer no one swam at dawn or at dusk, when sharks were known to feed on the reef and when, once in a great while, a dorsal fin could be spotted slicing the flat-calm surface of the water in the harbor.

  They never swam near fishermen, or wherever bait was in the water. They never swam if they saw fish feeding or birds feeding on fish. No one swam or snorkeled or dove or scalloped with a fresh cut or an open sore.

  Nobody fished for sharks because none of the locals liked shark meat and there wasn’t a market for it anywhere nearby, and if a fisherman caught a shark by accident, on a line or in a net, he’d let it go. Nobody in the village ever killed anything just for the sake of killing. Except bugs. And spiders, now and then, although the elementary-school teacher had made it a personal crusade to teach every child in her care how important spiders were in keeping down the numbers of, among other things, bugs.

  One day people noticed a big boat—big enough, in fact, to be considered a ship—lingering not far offshore. Smaller boats were put overboard from the ship, and they cruised up and down the reef, doing something or other.

  Village fishermen who had gotten close enough to the ship to read its name couldn’t remember it or pronounce it, because it was stenciled on the
ship’s bow and fantail not only in a foreign language but in an alphabet nobody could decipher.

  The one peculiar thing about the ship that fishermen could describe was that on her stern were two very, very big—gigantic, even—spools, each of which looked like it could hold at least a mile’s worth of thick, strong fishing line. And visible in the coils of line were baited hooks, too many to count.

  When the people in the village awoke on the morning of the third day, the ship was gone. Everything seemed to be okay; nothing looked different.

  There was no way anyone could know that, over the past two days, their village had been murdered.

  The first sign that something was wrong was discovered by fishermen who went out to the reef. Scattered over the bottom, in the reef and on the sand, they saw the dead bodies of sharks. (Because sharks do not have swim bladders like other fish, when they die they do not float. They sink to the bottom.) They saw that the sharks had not only been killed, they had been mutilated: their fins had been slashed off—dorsal fins from their backs, caudal fins from their tails, pectoral fins from their sides—and the sharks had been thrown back into the sea to bleed to death or drown.

  The fishermen’s first reaction was anger: so this was what the foreign ship had been doing offshore, killing our sharks and taking their fins to sell to the people who make shark-fin soup, an expensive delicacy.

  Their second reaction was frustration: what could they do about this thievery? They knew the answer: nothing. The ship had come from a foreign land, and from experience the villagers knew that their local police and wardens and marshals had no power over foreign vessels.

  Their third reaction was resignation: well, the shark populations will rebound. Sharks from other regions up and down the coast will come here. Nature will stay in balance.

  What they didn’t know was that there were no sharks in other regions up and down the coast. The big ship and the boats it carried had worked the entire coastline, taking all the sharks from all the reefs and using the long lines on the huge spools that sat on the stern of the big boat to catch the open-water sharks, the big ones that fed on sea lions.