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

  Bolivar was where Dr. Barry Bruce, an eminent SARDI biologist from Tasmania, and I would be filmed dissecting the great white shark. (Actually, of course, he would dissect and comment while I watched and asked questions.)

  Bolivar stank. Oh, my, did it stink! Every square inch of every surface, every atom of air that flowed from and around the great gleaming tanks full of putrefying flesh reeked with a nauseating pungency that brought tears to our eyes. (Though I was given a chic yellow rubber apron to wear, along with striking black rubber boots and lovely pink rubber gloves, the stink invaded and so completely inhabited every fiber of my cotton clothes that eventually, after a few futile launderings, I would be forced to wrap them in plastic and put them out with the garbage.)

  The shark lay on her back, tilted slightly to port by the protrusion of her rigid dorsal fin, which shifted her massive insides leftward in a bulge that threatened to roll her off the dissecting table. Barry and his team of assistants and students had placed buckets and plastic vats all around the table, to catch whatever fell out when the shark was opened up. While Barry honed the twelve-inch blade of a carving knife, John Bredar placed me, his cameraman, his lights, and his sound equipment in positions perfect to announce and record any and all discoveries.

  Nobody knew what we would find inside the shark, and nobody speculated aloud about the possibilities, though we all silently shared the same thoughts. A keg of nails? Half a horse? A whole swordfish? A sea lion? A human leg? An entire person? All of these and a thousand other implausible objects had been found before inside great white sharks.

  Barry placed the point of his knife against the belly of the beast; I cleared my throat; the cameraman said the magic word, speed, telling John that the camera was rolling at the proper rate; John gave Barry a quiet “Action!” and the dissection began.

  Have you ever daydreamed about plunging your knife into the belly of a marauding shark? Perhaps you’re diving down to open the treasure chest or rescue the fair maiden when suddenly a dark shadow falls over you and the giant shark attacks. You duck below the monster, reach up with your knife hand, and slide the blade into the soft white flesh of the underbelly, splitting it open like a ripe melon and sending the mortally wounded shark off to die in the deep.

  Well, forget it. Your knife would either bounce off or break off, and you’d face a future as lunch.

  While Barry labored to slice through skin—no, meat!—more than an inch thick, he explained that female great whites are armored by nature to protect them during mating, which is a violent affair punctuated by repeated bites from the male desperate to maintain his grip on the female. “Remember,” Barry said, “they don’t have hands, and they have to hold on somehow.”

  As the slit in the shark’s belly grew longer, pressure increased from within, and cutting became quicker.

  Someone said, Watch out.

  For what? I asked.

  The liver. It’s a third of the body weight. Here it comes!

  And here, forcing its way out through the hole in the shark, came a thousand-pound liver, the immense organ of energy storage that permitted the shark to go without eating for a month or more after one substantial meal.

  For a couple of hours the dissection proceeded methodically. Barry described each of his findings, first in layman’s terms for the camera, then in scientific jargon for the tape recorder monitored by one of his aides.

  The shark’s fins were sliced off, and as each was tossed into a bin, we spoke of the sorry fact that there were people all over the world who would gladly have butchered this shark for her fins alone.

  Though she bore old mating scars on her flanks, and though her uterus was stretched (indicating that she had borne young), she was not pregnant when she died.

  We took breaks—to change tapes and batteries and to rinse our lungs with fresh air—and during one I was taken on a hunt for specimens of Australia’s notorious endemic funnel web spider. Small (about the size of your thumbnail) and inoffensive-looking, Australian funnel webs are among the most poisonous spiders on the planet and, unfortunately, are common in populated areas like suburbs. It took us less than five minutes to find several—in a woodpile, under discarded equipment, beside a corner of the building—which reinforced my conviction that Australians are some of humanity’s hardiest and most sensible people.

  Wherever they live, travel, hike, swim, fish, dive, kayak, or trek, they risk being confronted by something capable of doing them in with tooth, fang, claw, jaw, or stinger, and yet there is no public clamor to eradicate any animal because of the peril it poses to the human population. Australians have learned to coexist in relative peace with nearly everything, and when occasionally a human life is lost to an animal, the public usually reacts philosophically.

  It was after noon when Barry determined that the time had come to open the shark’s stomach and examine its contents. What would be in there? We all watched with childlike anticipation.

  Barry slit the stomach sac, and following an initial deluge of liquid, there came …

  … not much, really, except confirmation of how the shark had died. The stomach contained three intact fifteen- or twenty-pound snappers, swallowed whole and complete with hooks, leaders, and lengths of line, and a few bits and pieces of other prey: beaks from small squids and octopuses, otoliths (bony pieces from the inner ear) from different fish, which would be studied later, and a four-inch-long stingray barb whose owner must have been consumed a long time ago, for it had already migrated through several inches of dense flesh on its way to rejection by the shark’s amazingly rugged defense mechanisms.

  We shared a feeling of anticlimax: inside the shark there were no billfish, seals, or walruses, whole or in part, no priests, scientists, or politicians—not even a license plate or two.

  By now, our excitement had been replaced by subdued silence, for as Barry reached up behind the jaw and felt around for the shark’s heart, we could see that the once magnificent creature had been reduced to little more than a memory. Only the head remained intact, and even that now radiated not power but pathos.

  What I felt most, I think, was sorrow at the waste. The death of this giant had benefitted no one. Maybe Barry and his team would come up with discoveries or conclusions that might help protect other sharks; maybe the children in the crowds that had stood in line to see the great white would grow up with respect and affection for the animals. I hoped so, because otherwise the net result of this accidental catch and all the attention and effort attending it would be merely one less apex predator in the critical food chain at the bottom of the world.

  Nature is very careful with her apex predators. They were not made with man in mind—remember, they’ve been present on earth, more or less exactly as they are today, for scores of millions of years—and they cannot survive interference, accidental or intentional, from humans.

  At the rate at which great whites are being killed all over the world, the existence of certain populations is already threatened, and the survival of the entire species may soon be in doubt.

  Our grandchildren may be able to know great white sharks only from film and videotape.

  The same is true, to a greater or lesser degree, of other sharks and other fish.

  Ideologues of every stripe, as well as folks with interests economic, political, or personal, can interpret data and statistics to suit their own purposes, but a few unalterable facts resist interpretation: every major fishery in the world is being overexploited, pushed beyond its capacities. At a time when a swelling human population needs more animal protein than ever, catches of almost every important food fish are in decline.

  Everywhere, too many fishermen with too much sophisticated gear are chasing too few fish.

  In retrospect, the shark-attack hysteria of the summer of 2001 seems to have been a diversion. Yes, an unfortunate youngster whose case lit the fuse was attacked by a shark. Yes, others, too, were attacked, and four died. Those were tragic accidents that can’t be denied, mustn’
t be diminished, and won’t be forgotten. But they were neither unprecedented nor inexplicable.

  The sensational “summer of the shark” was a creation of the media, and only in that regard was it extraordinary. Seldom in recent centuries have so many spent so much energy, print, and airtime trying to discover and deftly explain the cause of something that hadn’t happened, wasn’t happening, and didn’t exist.

  We mustn’t let ourselves be distracted from the genuine problems that do exist in the sea, problems that can be solved only by us and only if we will reexamine our place in nature and rethink our conduct as members of the natural order.

  My personal guide are some words written by the naturalist Henry Beston in his 1928 classic, The Outermost House, and I end with them because additional words would be superfluous:

  We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

  For Stan Waterman

  —sui generis

  ALSO BY PETER BENCHLEY

  Time and a Ticket

  Jaws

  The Deep

  The Island

  The Girl of the Sea of Cortez

  Q Clearance

  Rummies

  Beast

  White Shark

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  After graduating from Harvard, PETER BENCHLEY worked as a reporter for The Washington Post, then as an editor at Newsweek and a speechwriter in the White House. His novel Jaws was published in 1974, followed by The Deep, The Island, The Girl of the Sea of Cortez, Q Clearance, Rummies, Beast, and White Shark. He has written screenplays for three of his novels, and his articles and essays have appeared in such publications as National Geographic and The New York Times. He has written, narrated, and appeared in dozens of television documentaries. He is a member of the national council of Environmental Defense and is a spokesman for its Oceans Program.