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

  In January 2002 a report came in from Australia about two divers being harassed by a six-foot-long, several-hundred-pound grouper that seemed intent on trying, at least, to eat them. It sneaked up on one diver and took his entire head in its mouth. Only quick, aggressive action by his buddy saved the diver from serious injury, or worse.

  I grew up knowing how violent and voracious bluefish could be during a feeding frenzy. Every summer I fished for them off Nantucket, and when birds were working on a school of baitfish and bluefish were attacking from below, the carnage was mesmerizing. The blues would roll and leap and dive, snapping at everything with their scalpel-sharp, triangular teeth, and often we’d decide not to bother throwing a lure into the mèlée because there’d be no sport to it: a bite was all but guaranteed in writing.

  From the safety of the boat, I never gave a thought to what would happen to a person who found himself in the water amid an orgy of feeding bluefish.

  A lifeguard in Florida found out. He was sitting on a surfboard in calm water less than a hundred yards offshore when, first, flocks of gulls and terns drove a huge mass of baitfish toward him, and then he saw—he could tell from the sudden, roiling chop in the glass-calm sea and the glint of sunlight off the scales of rolling fish—that a school of blues was assaulting the baitfish.

  He watched, spellbound, as the feeding frenzy came closer. He didn’t move, didn’t paddle away, just sat there with his feet dangling over the sides of the surfboard.

  So fast did the bluefish strike and so sharp were their teeth that two of the lifeguard’s toes were gone before he could yank his feet out of the water.

  In the newspaper account I read, the lifeguard didn’t talk about the pain he felt, or what he had done to stem the flow of blood from his mangled foot while he paddled ashore. All he would discuss, all that seemed to be on his mind, was the terror he felt at the prospect of a dozen frenzied bluefish flinging themselves onto his surfboard and continuing to chomp on him, and the ultimate horror of what would happen if, through panic or clumsiness, he capsized his surfboard, fell into the water, and was eaten to death by a thousand ravenous fish.

  Nature has spent millennia creating balanced ecosystems all over the world: on one island, just the right kind and number of snakes to keep the bird and rodent populations in check; on another, the proper plants to nourish the resident animals, and the appropriate insects to pollinate the plants.

  On huge, isolated landmasses such as Australia, which contain several disparate kinds of environments—jungles, deserts, mountains, forests, and coastlines that vary from straight and sandy to cold and rocky to warm and swampy—disparate natural balances have evolved. Animals, plants, and insects live well together, feed and sustain one another, and maintain viable populations with one another.

  The sudden introduction of new species—almost always by humans, intentionally or not—can, and usually does, disrupt those natural balances. Sometimes the disruptions are catastrophic to local populations. In the Galápagos Islands, for example, the introduction long ago of pigs and goats (from passing ships) destroyed populations of birds and reptiles that laid their eggs in the ground. And nowadays, tourist cruise boats inadvertently transport colonies of insects from one island to another, creating chaos among resident plant and insect populations that have no defenses against the newcomers.

  Some of the Hawaiian Islands have lost almost all their native birds to an invasion of voracious snakes from Guam that, scientists believe, have hitchhiked their way across the Pacific in ships’ cargoes and sometimes in the wheel wells of passenger jetliners.

  The so-called “killer bees” from Africa were brought over to South America by scientists trying to create a productive new strain of bees. Inevitably, some of the bees escaped, and over the past several years they have gradually made their way north up the American continent, overpowering and crossbreeding with native species and creating ferociously aggressive new strains of ill-tempered bees.

  Kudzu was imported into the American South, where, because it has no natural predators, it has overrun enormous areas of several states. Gypsy moths were imported into the American North by a well-meaning but wrongheaded scientist, and they’ve become a plague upon our trees.

  Another instance of man attempting to manipulate nature put me and my family into one of the weirdest encounters of my life.

  Wendy, Christopher, and I were in Moorea, the island forty minutes by fast boat across the Sea of the Moon from Tahiti. Christopher was ten, and this was the second year we had taken him with us to explore the waters of Polynesia while I did a story for a magazine. He was already an accomplished diver, and over the next couple of years he would become more so as he accompanied us on two voyages to explore the underwater world of the Galápagos.

  Our hotel in Moorea featured a swim-with-the-dolphins attraction. I’m aware of the controversy surrounding human contact with captive marine animals, especially captive cetacea (dolphins and whales), and, with a few specific exceptions, I’m against holding large cetacea in captivity.

  Still, we decided to try this program. Christopher had never been in the water with a dolphin, and besides, the facility in Moorea was not a normal captive-interaction program. It seemed to me to be particularly enlightened: for one thing, the two trained dolphins were not captives—they had access to the open ocean, were free to come and go as they pleased, and had been conditioned only to return to the tank at the hotel twice each day, when they would be fed and permitted—the trainer swore that they didn’t have to be coaxed—to interact with a few humans.

  Before we entered the tank, the trainer explained to us that the two dolphins were of an especially intelligent branch of the family Delphinidae: rough-toothed dolphins, a male and a female, approximately eight feet long. They were not trained to do tricks; they would simply come to us when and as they chose and swim among us, and though we could extend our hands and feel the hard, slick skin as the dolphins passed, we were not to grab a dorsal fin and hitch a ride or to try to hold or impede the dolphins in any way.

  The tank was approximately four feet deep and a hundred feet in diameter, and when we were all in the water, the trainer signaled to his assistant, who opened the gate between the tank and an exterior holding pen.

  Immediately the two dolphins swam into the tank. For a moment they paused together on the far side, like (I imagined) two vaudeville performers facing a small audience and discussing how best to wow them. And then … well, first I’d better explain something:

  At the moment when what happened was happening, I hadn’t a clue as to what was really going on, or why. Not until several days later, after conversations with people who knew a great deal more about dolphins than I do, did I understand how and why a macho-mad dolphin had threatened my life.

  When the trainer told us that rough-toothed dolphins were smarter than most, he neglected to add that they’re also temperamental and difficult. Other dolphin experts used words such as “cranky,” “aggressive,” and “darn well dangerous.”

  While the male and female paused on the opposite side of the tank from where we were, they were studying us. Literally. Using their phenomenal sonar, they scanned our bodies, inside and out, and were able to determine our genders, our ages, and our positions in the sexual strata of mammals. Here’s what they perceived: our party consisted of one presexual male (Christopher), one sexually active female (Wendy), and one sexually active male (me). To the male dolphin, Christopher was no threat, Wendy was a potential possession, and I was—very definitely—a potential rival for its position as alpha male. I was to be dispensed with, one way or another.

  The dolphin’s great intelligence was, at once, the cause of my peril and my salvation. If its brain had been smaller, more primitive and less developed, it wouldn’t have had the impulse or the ability to perform such a detailed analysis of humans in its presence; nor, however, would it have had the supersophistication to choose between issuing a warning and launching an outright attack. />
  Why, I will never know—perhaps it took pity on me as a schlemiel—but it decided to warn me, not kill me.

  All I did know was that, from a dead stop, in what seemed like a fraction of a second, the bigger of the two dolphins had crossed the tank, passed between Christopher and Wendy without touching either, and—with a final, powerful thrust of its broad tail (which did wallop Wendy and leave her with a permanent dent in the thigh)—rammed me, at full speed, precisely between my legs.

  It knew exactly what it was doing, what it was aiming to hit and what it was aiming to miss. It didn’t want to injure, maim, or kill me, or surely it would have and certainly it could have. (Dolphins can and do butt sharks to death frequently, and once in a great while they kill humans who tease or otherwise mess with them.) It wanted to warn me. It was saying, This is my turf, bub, and all females herein are mine, so scram!

  The four- or five-hundred-pound dolphin was too big to pass between my legs, so when it struck me it lifted me high into the air, out of the water, and thrust me several feet away. I recall a weird sensation of having been hit by a torpedo, so hard and slick was its skin.

  In a wink the dolphin zipped away, circled, and started back again, to—well, I’ll never know—but the trainer, who had watched the assault dumbstruck, came to life, blew his whistle, waved his hands at the dolphin, and stepped between the dolphin and me.

  The dolphin stopped so suddenly that it would have left rubber, had it had wheels.

  “Get out!” the trainer shouted to us, over his shoulder. “Get out of the pool!”

  We three waded to the edge of the tank and hoisted ourselves out of the water. Only then did Wendy feel the pain in her leg and see the deep, purple crease in her thigh.

  Christopher hadn’t understood any of what had just transpired, and he was laughing himself silly. He thought the dolphin had been playing.

  I? I felt confused and slightly sick.

  The trainer covered his embarrassment and surprise by sending the dolphin away with angry hand signals. This was an aberration, he told us; nothing like it had ever happened before. Ever, ever, ever. He promised. And it would never happen again. He would teach the dolphin a lesson by punishing it: it wouldn’t be allowed to play with any more humans for the rest of the day.

  He said he hoped that I wouldn’t feel compelled to mention the incident in the story I was writing, for—truly—never in all his years, et cetera.

  I said I saw no reason to publicize the episode. After all, no one had been seriously hurt, and this was a fluke.

  The next day David Doubilet, who had been taking pictures on another island, arrived on Moorea and, without contacting us, visited the same “dolphinarium.”

  The same dolphin did the same thing to him, driving him from the tank before he could snap a single picture.

  As tempting as it was to lay all the blame on the operators of the facility, I knew that, really, I had only myself to blame. I hadn’t been savvy enough about the particular species of dolphin, and I had violated one of the fundamental precepts of venturing into the sea, by making my wife and young child vulnerable to the instincts and urges of a large, strong, and—above all—wild oceanic predator.

  So eager can we be to humanize all the world’s animals that we forget to respect the most precious element in an animal’s life: its wildness.

  Finally, there’s the peril that cruise-ship operators, tour organizers, and dive-group leaders don’t like to talk about: piracy. Over the last decade or so, piracy has become one of the fastest-growing, serious, life-threatening, no-kidding dangers to scuba divers and sailors all over the world.

  Boats and ships of all sizes are being seized, their cargoes plundered, the vessels themselves repainted and renamed or abandoned or sunk, and their passengers and crew frequently murdered. Dive resorts on remote islands are being invaded and the guests killed or taken hostage, sometimes in the name of one or another radical religion, sometimes in the name only of greed.

  Drug pirates, of course, have been a plague on the Caribbean and the southern North Atlantic for years, with criminals often seeking “clean” boats with legal registrations in which to ferry their cargoes ashore in U.S. ports. In the early 1980s Teddy Tucker and I and our crew were set upon twice by drug pirates who swooped down on us in small speedboats and retreated only when we brandished an arsenal of assault rifles. (Nowadays, we wouldn’t stand a chance: some pirates are armed with bazookas, grenade launchers, and heavy machine guns.)

  According to the International Chamber of Commerce’s Commercial Crime Services, 469 attacks by pirates were reported in the year 2000. Seventy-two people were killed—six times the number reported killed by shark attacks—and another hundred were injured.

  Of the attacks, 119 took place in Indonesia, 75 in the waters between Malaysia and Sumatra, and 55 off Bangladesh. The rest were scattered all over the planet. The vessels assaulted ranged from huge bulk carriers to mom-and-pop sailboats.

  Everywhere the numbers were up from the year before.

  Those figures represent only the attacks that were reported. They don’t take into account the boats and people that merely went missing, as if, in a single gulp, they were swallowed by the sea.

  15

  Okay, So What Can We Do?

  On a beautiful autumn day in late March 1999, I knelt inside the belly cavity of a gargantuan great white shark and helped a scientist hunt for its heart.

  In life, she had been nearly eighteen feet long—longer than all but the biggest sport-utility vehicles—and had weighed nearly two tons. By now, after a year of being frozen, she had shrunk by a foot and had lost a few hundred pounds of water weight.

  Still, the two of us fit easily within her, and when the National Geographic cameraman approached for a close-up, there was ample room for him as well.

  This leviathan had died, or been killed, or had killed herself—the difference between interpretations was not insignificant and depended on your attitude toward animals and nature and mankind’s relationship to both—by rolling up in a coastal longline set to catch big Australian snappers, becoming ensnared, and finally asphyxiating. Like all sharks of her kind, she stayed alive only by constantly moving forward and flushing oxygen-rich water over her gills. Once immobilized, she died of anoxia—lack of oxygen.

  The fisherman who found her had towed her to shore and notified the authorities. Though it was illegal to kill a great white shark in the state of South Australia, this death had obviously been accidental, and no charges were lodged. In fact, the police expressed their gratitude to the fisherman; he could easily have cut the shark away from his line and let it sink to the bottom. When he asked for permission to keep the jaw, however, his request was denied: a great-white-shark jaw this huge might fetch ten thousand Australian dollars from a collector, and news of such a sale might encourage other fishermen to discover other “accidental” catches.

  The scientific community expressed its collective regret that the enormous predator had died, but individual scientists were delighted to have the opportunity—very rare, indeed—to study a fully mature, intact, and undamaged female great white shark.

  First, though, they had to find a freezer large enough to hold her until they could decide exactly what to do with her and how and where to do it. They located a gigantic cold box a few miles outside Adelaide, and there they stowed this special specimen—until now.

  I had been working for months on a story for National Geographic magazine and a television special for NGTV about great white sharks, to be published (and broadcast) in the spring of 2000, as close as possible to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the release of the movie version of Jaws. David Doubilet and I had proposed the story as a vehicle through which to gather photographs the likes of which had never before been taken (his responsibility) and to assemble all the new information about great whites that had accumulated in the quarter-century since the film had burst upon the public consciousness (mine).

  When John Bredar
, the gentle, genteel, and gifted producer/director of the television film, told me that the gigantic shark was about to be brought in from the cold, thawed, and studied, I quickly volunteered to return to the other side of the planet, where we had been diving with great whites only a couple of months earlier.

  Thawing the shark took several days—well, hey, do you have a microwave capable of defrosting a thirty-five-hundred-pound fish?—and on the first day she was displayed, on a trailer bed at the South Australia Research and Development Institute (SARDI) outside the town of Glenelg, twelve thousand people waited in line for hours, in a driving rain, for the chance to see, touch, feel, and smell the most formidable predator any of them had ever seen—or, probably, ever imagined.

  She was magnificent even in death. Her length, her breadth, her sheer bulk struck spectators dumb. Her inch-and-a-half-long upper teeth were irresistible to wide-eyed children, who ran their fingers over the serrated sides of each white triangle and thought thoughts that would surely return to them in the dark of night. Nobody said much, and those who did speak kept their voices low. I heard not one smart-mouth crack, not one lame joke, and I knew that if someone had uttered even a mild expression of cynicism, the crowd would have turned on him and shamed him into silence.

  The folks were fascinated, yes, and awed, but as the hours passed and the crowd kept shuffling through, the sentiment I felt permeating the atmosphere most thoroughly was reverence. What they were seeing was not merely a legend come true, but tangible evidence of the power of elemental nature. For several people this was, I was certain, a moment of epiphany.

  The next day the shark was moved farther out of town, to the Bolivar Maceration Facility, a big, hangarlike building on open land beside a sewage-treatment plant, where whales and other large marine animals that washed up onshore were cut to pieces and rendered into disposable constituent parts.