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

  Once there lived a big moray eel in a large coral head inside the lagoon of the Rangiroa Atoll in the Tuamotus. Our son Christopher 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, for 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, to 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 protruded 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, which—thinking she was bearing 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, 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 dispatched to dispatch 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, where I first went 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. Paul Humann, author of many fish-identification books and an expert still photographer who had spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours under water in the Galápagos, was “co-talent” with me; he would act as my guide and docent for the cameras.

  Before the simple two-week shoot was over, all three of them were to escape death and serious injury by the narrowest of margins: Stan and Paul by being lost in the open ocean at twilight and, another day, by being set upon suddenly by a large school of very aggressive small sharks; Howard and Paul, after Stan and I had departed, when the boat we had chartered 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—and 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: tiny Galápagos penguins (the northernmost penguins in the world), which swam like miniature rockets in pursuit of their prey; exotic critters like red-lipped batfish, which looked like a medical experiment gone awry, as if the body of a frog had been grafted onto the mouth of Carol Channing; seals and iguanas; Sally Lightfoot crabs and blue-footed boobies.

  What we hadn’t yet filmed were moray eels, which in the Galápagos (for reasons I know not) 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 respired in ragged synchrony. We hadn’t seen it yet, but we kept looking, for we all knew it would make a wonderful image.

  One day we found it—not once but several times—and it was wonderful and we filmed it 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, and 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 up 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 and utterly inexplicable. 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 of which great white sharks have good reason to be afraid, 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 church mice. Males can grow to thirty feet long and weigh several tons.

  Killer whales do eat mammals, and they have attacked and sunk boats—one celebrated incident was recounted in the book Survive the Savage Sea—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 knowledge was 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 index case, the first and foremost, the late, lucky loser.

  The first protective measure I took was to have a wetsuit made, puke green with yellow piping on the arms and legs and a broad yellow stripe across the chest, designed 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 were, killer whales couldn’t read English.

  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, where several pods were resident and being studied by scientists. Specifically, there was a particular stony beach where killer whales were known to come to rub themselves on the round rocks—called “rubbing rocks,” in fact—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 rebreathers so as not to generate bubbles (whales hear them, know that they mean people, and stay away), and wait for the whales to arrive, at which point, with ABC’s primitive video camera hard-wired to a monitor on the beach, we would capture images of them in an orgy of 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, and 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.

  Wi
thout warning, one of the youngsters—twelve or thirteen feet long and as big around as a barrel—surged out of the water and 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 agape, emitting an occasional click or cheep. Then, having concluded that a one-armed writer could still be a writer, very gingerly I 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 contented 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 by an almost celestial sense of awe, a conviction of communication not only with this young whale but with … I don’t know … 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 relatively uneventful. The water was wickedly cold, so we began by using dry suits, which, as the name implies, are intended to keep the diver dry and warm instead of, as in the case of a wetsuit, 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 askew, then shot to the surface upside down and backward. Forsaking warmth in favor of equilibrium, I switched back to my wetsuit, which 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), and 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 cheeps, 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 exuded no bubbles. Evidently, we were worth investigating, for the whales continued toward us. Their conversation grew louder and more excited. (Stan and I later confessed that each of us had been convinced that the whales’ discussion had been about which of them would have the privilege of deciding which of us to consume first.)

  Louder and louder grew the whale sounds as closer and closer they came, and 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 agape; each cone of sharp white ivory shone like a blade.

  And then the whale actually saw us, recognized us for what we were, and immediately—impossibly quickly—veered away, emitting a loud, long blaaat, the cetacean equivalent of a Bronx cheer, whose meaning (to me, at least) was vividly clear: disgust and dismay at being gulled by two dumb, clumsy, and decidedly inferior beings.

  The immense body vanished; no other appeared, and as the pod pulled away from us, the tone of their discourse returned to a level of calm, desultory 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 so many kinds of jellyfish, with toxins of such a great variety of virulence, that it behooves 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, whose 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, whose 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. Visible though they may be, however, it’s best to give them a wide berth; their stinging tentacles can extend as much as a hundred feet below and, depending on the current, to the side.

  There are dozens of other stinging jellyfish that are more nuisance than menace, and almost all of them (including the sea wasps and the men-of-war) share a fascinating technology of attack. Their tentacles shoot microscopic harpoons, called nematocysts, into their victims, and the harpoons inject potent neurotoxins, or nerve poisons.

  Humans are never any jellyfish’s intended victim. A small fish stung to death by, say, a man-of-war is drawn up under the body—actually what Ellis calls “a colony of differentiated cells associated to form a functioning ‘animal’”—and eaten with “feeding polyps.”

  There are almost as many proposed remedies for jellyfish stings as there are kinds of jellyfish—vinegar, urine, meat tenderizer, alcohol, seawater, and shampoo, to name a few—and many of them work, more or less, depending on the kind of jellyfish that has stung you, the amount of tentacle matter that has made contact with your skin, and the degree to which you are or aren’t sensitive to the particular poison that has been injected. A woman I know swam face-on into one of the notorious “red jellies” that infest the Northeast every August, and she had to be hospitalized for a couple of days; at the same time a cousin of hers dove through a crowd of the same jellies and was stung all over her torso, and all she felt was an annoying tingling sensation—which may say as much about the highly subjective nature of pain as it does about jellyfish toxins.

  Poisonous fish, many of which are of the family Scorpaenidae and include the scorpion fish, the lionfish, and the stonefish, are found in tropical waters and normally live near, on, or in the bottom, which is a blessing for swimmers and snorkelers because many of the family members are deadly. They have highly venomous spines on their backs, which are used entirely defensively, so no one need worry about being attacked by one. Stepping on one, however, is another concern altogether, and one that makes wading around reefs a perilous pastime.

  Scuba divers worry about the Scorpaenidae for yet another reason: under water and within the kaleidoscopic chaos of color that is a tropical reef, they’re almost invisible. Stonefish, which according to Ellis are the deadliest fish in the world, can look exactly like a rock covered with marine growth as they lie, half-hidden in the sand, and wait for potential prey to amble by. A wader who steps on one or a diver who reaches out to steady herself on this apparent rock may be stabbed by dorsal spines fed by venom glands. Untreated, an adult human can die in less than two hours.

  Lionfish look like Christmas-tree ornaments designed by Hieronymus Bosch—gaudy, brazen, and armed with long venomous dorsal spines. They don’t bother to hide, not in sand or reef, and they rarely retreat at the approach of a human. Instead, they’ll seem to aim their spines your way, as if daring you to take your best shot. To me, the prime danger of a lionfish lies in its ability to disappear from view against the background of a particularly s
pectacular reef. Several times I’ve blundered up to and among lionfish without seeing them, and only good fortune has protected me from bumping or putting a hand on one.

  I’ve had very little close contact with poisonous sea snakes, most of which live in the Indo-Pacific, and almost all of which want nothing whatever to do with human beings. There are several species; most are at least as venomous as the Indian cobra, but their fangs are very short and their temperaments usually placid. During breeding season, however, some species can become aggressive, and a couple of friends of mine have been surprised by snakes heading for the surface to breathe that suddenly reversed course, charged, and bit them. My friends’ quarter-inch-thick wetsuits prevented the snakes’ fangs from reaching their skin—or at least slowed the bite enough to give them time to grab the snakes and fling them away before fang touched flesh.

  Barracudas

  If ever there was a fish that’s gotten a bad rap solely for being bad-looking, it’s the barracuda. Up to six feet long, slender, tough, fast as lightning, and armed with a prognathous lower jaw (it extends forward beyond the upper one) studded with dozens of jagged, needle-sharp teeth designed specifically to tear prey to shreds, a barracuda looks to me like the Jack Palance of the sea: mean, menacing, and deadly. (I speak here specifically of the great barracuda, the largest of the more than twenty species that roam the tropical waters of the world.)

  The image is a phony. While the great barracuda is capable, no question, of causing grievous bodily harm to any and all of us, it has no inclination to do so. It feeds on fish, and its speed and weaponry are so formidable that it has little difficulty catching and killing whatever it wants.

  There have been very, very few cases of barracudas biting people, and all those I’ve heard of were, almost certainly, accidents of misidentification. A swimmer wears a shiny watch, ring, or buckle into the surf, where visibility is poor, and a barracuda mistakes a flash of reflected light for the shimmer of fish scales. It bites, instantly recognizes its error, and vanishes. Sometimes the bite is so fast and efficient that the person doesn’t know he’s been bitten.