Shark Trouble: True Stories and Lessons About the Sea Page 5

  It was rare, therefore, if not unprecedented, for a wife to accompany her husband on an expedition like ours, living in close quarters on small boats, and Wendy found herself treated with profound awkwardness, though neither resentment nor disrespect.

  So when the white shark had appeared and I had climbed into the cage, Wendy was banished from the action, exiled up to the flying bridge.

  Admirably, she hadn’t argued, and almost immediately she discovered that she had the best position on the boat, with a comprehensive view of everything that was going on: the giant shark lunging at the baits, bumping and biting the two cages—mine and Stan’s—the surface cameraman struggling to keep up with fast-moving figures, ever-changing focal lengths, shifting light, and splashes of blood and oil and water.

  She saw the rope attached to my cage slip into the shark’s mouth; she saw it catch between the teeth; she saw the shark grow increasingly desperate to rid itself of the cage, thrashing and gnashing and pummeling both cages.

  She also saw that nobody else had noticed any of it. They were all too close to the action, too focused on their own tasks. Cameramen were leaning over the transom, trying for close-ups; assistants held on to the cameramen’s belts to keep them from tumbling overboard; some crewmen were busy ladling more chum into the water; others could do nothing but stare, openmouthed, as a fish the size of a Buick went berserk behind the boat.

  Wendy knew what would happen if the shark couldn’t shake loose of the rope, and it became obvious that it couldn’t.

  She slid quickly down the ladder from the flying bridge, marched aft, shouldered aside one chummer and one idle gaper, and took hold of the rope a foot or two behind the cleat to which it was tied on the stern. She leaned over the stern, trying to see the head of the shark and locate the spot where the rope entered its mouth.

  Just then the shark raised its head and lunged upward, and Wendy found herself nose-to-nose with—perhaps twenty-four inches away from—the most notorious, hideous, frightening face in nature. The snout was smeared with red. Bits of flesh clung to its jaws, and rivulets of blood drooled from the sides of its mouth. The upper jaw was down, in bite position, and gnashing as if trying to climb the rope. The eyes, as big as baseballs, were rolled backward in their sockets—great whites do not have nictitating membranes—and as the great body shook, it forced air through its gill slits, making a noise like a grunting pig.

  All this Wendy recalled in meticulous detail. She also recalled shaking the rope and yelling at the shark, calling it a son of a bitch and other epithets she wasn’t aware she knew, and demanding that it let go of the rope. The shark grunted at her and twisted its head, showing her one of its ghastly black eyeballs, and the rope sprang free.

  The shark slid backward off the stern and away from the boat, and when it was fully in the water, it rolled onto its side and, like a fighter plane peeling away from a formation, soared down and away into the darkness.

  Part II

  7

  Six Dangerous Sharks

  There are, I believe, half a dozen species of sharks that can, and sometimes do, pose a threat to human beings.

  The Great White

  First and most notorious is the great white, the shark portrayed in Jaws. The largest carnivorous fish in the sea, great whites can grow to more than eighteen feet long and can weigh more than four thousand pounds. They can and sometimes do eat people, though it’s now accepted that nearly every attack on a person is a mistake: the shark either confuses the person with a seal or sea lion or, particularly in murky water where it must rely on senses other than its eyes, takes a test bite to determine if this living thing is edible. There have been cases of great whites targeting humans, and few though they are, each case generates justified horror.

  A few years ago a woman who had been scuba diving near a seal colony was taken from the waters off Tasmania. She had almost gotten to the boat and was reaching out to grab her husband’s hand when an enormous great white attacked her from behind and below. While her shocked husband held on to his wife’s hand, the shark bit her in half, then returned and took the upper half, literally yanking her torso from her husband’s grasp.

  Another notorious episode—and one for which no shark expert, scientist, or diver I’ve spoken with has ever offered a credible explanation—occurred back in 1909. A fifteen-foot-long female great white was caught off the town of Augusta, Sicily, and her belly was found to contain the remains of three human beings: two adults and a child.

  More than 70 percent of great-white-shark-attack victims survive, because the shark realizes it has attacked in error and doesn’t return to finish off the prey. Granted, that figure doesn’t take into account swimmers, divers, and snorkelers who simply disappear while swimming in great-white country.

  The high rate of survival may have to do with a phenomenon known as the “bite, spit, and wait” thesis of great-white behavior. First advanced by Dr. John McCosker, senior scientist at the California Academy of Sciences, the thesis explains both terminal attacks and attacks aborted after a single bite. According to McCosker, great whites have the astonishing capacity to assess, in the microsecond of a first bite, the caloric value of potential prey. If the shark determines that the prey isn’t worth the effort—that is, won’t return as much energy as the shark will expend in attacking and eating it—it breaks off the attack after a single bite. Depending on the ferocity of the bite, the prey may or may not survive.

  But if the first bite tells the shark that the prey contains an energy bonanza—as would a nice fat seal, for example, or a sea lion—it will hang around after the first bite, wait for its prey to bleed to death, and then come back to finish the meal.

  In general, large great whites perceive human beings as too bony to bother with, so they often depart after that first bite. Of course, when a 2,000- or 3,000-pound fish tastes a 170-pound man, withdrawal can be too little, too late. I will never forget a coroner’s postmortem photographs of a young man killed in the Neptune Islands off South Australia. The shark must barely have grazed him before recognizing its mistake, for aside from one deep cut in a thigh and a nasty wound on one hand and wrist, the victim was unharmed. In the photographs he looked as if he was asleep. Sadly, however, the big shark’s big teeth had opened two arteries, and the man had bled to death before he could reach the shore.

  Some white-shark victims insist that they felt no pain at all when they were attacked, only a thud as they were struck and then a feeling of being tugged, as the shark’s scalpel-sharp teeth severed flesh and bone. A friend of ours who lost a leg to a white shark while snorkeling off Australia recalled, “I couldn’t see it, but I knew exactly what had me. It had me by the leg and was pulling me down. I thought for sure I was going to drown. I’ve never been so relieved in my life as when I felt my leg let go.” Luckily for him, a boat was nearby, someone aboard knew how to tie a tourniquet around his thigh, and he made it to a hospital.

  From the swimmer’s perspective, the best thing about great whites is that although they exist worldwide, they’re extremely rare everywhere. Nature, in its infinite and eternally astonishing wisdom, determined that an apex predator (the absolute top of the food chain) as powerful and devastating as a great white should not exist in vast numbers: the marine food chain couldn’t support them. So nature decreed that great whites would breed relatively late in life—not until they’re at least twenty years old—and would bear relatively few young, only some of which would survive to adulthood.

  Tiger Sharks

  Tiger sharks, too, are genuinely dangerous to man. They’ve been responsible for several attacks off Hawaii in recent years, and it’s widely believed, with good reason, that they pose more of a threat to humans than do great whites. Tigers may not be as big or as robust and heavy as great whites, but a fifteen-foot, fifteen-hundred-pound tiger shark is plenty big enough; there are more of them, for they pup many more young than great whites (though some of the rapacious young quickly eat their brethren), and they
’re ubiquitous. While great whites, as a rule, hang around coastal waters, tiger sharks are completely free-roaming: they’re fond of coastal waters, they like to enter lagoons at night and hunt in the shallows for prey that often includes smaller sharks, and they also roam the deep.

  Once, when I was on a boat over the abyssal canyons off Bermuda, a huge tiger shark cruised leisurely around our stern, as if showing off its formidable size. The top of its head was as big around as a manhole cover, and the long, slender striped body seemed to take forever to pass by the stern. It was a chilling sight, reminiscent of the crocodile in Peter Pan that waits for Captain Hook to fall overboard. To me, the message from this giant said, Take your time, no rush, I’m in no hurry, but sometime, someday, one of you will make a mistake and enter my realm, and then you’ll be mine.

  Suddenly, though, the shark must have received a signal that real potential prey was nearby, for it sped away and, a few seconds later, exploded through the surface fifteen or twenty feet behind the boat, clutching in its jaws an adult sea turtle. The turtle was too big to swallow, its shell too tough to crack; its head and legs had withdrawn into the safety of the carapace. The shark shook the turtle violently from side to side and then, mysteriously, let it go and slipped silently beneath the surface.

  For several moments we watched the turtle bobbing on the surface, head and legs still invisible, and we guessed that the shark had abandoned the effort and departed in search of easier prey. The turtle must have come to the same conclusion, for slowly its legs protruded from the shell, then came the head, and then …

  Bammo! Like a rocket, the shark blasted up from below, clamped its jaws on one of the turtle’s hind legs, and worried it with its teeth until, at last, the leg came off. The remaining three legs and the head snapped back inside the shell; again the shark slid away under water; again the turtle bobbed on the surface.

  For the next half hour or so, we saw the assault repeated again and again, though without further success. Once wounded, the turtle appeared to be prepared to hunker down inside its shell forever, if necessary. As much as we rooted for the turtle—we knew it could live a successful life with three functioning legs—there was no way we could interfere; nor did we want to, for this was normal, natural predation in the sea.

  Bull Sharks

  The third shark that poses a true threat to man in the sea is the bull shark, which comes in several varieties, including the Zambezi shark, the Lake Nicaragua shark, and several of the so-called whalers of Australia. As the first two names imply, bull sharks are even more wide-ranging than tigers; they have been found in—and have killed people in—lakes and rivers. Most sharks can’t survive, not to mention hunt and feed, in even brackish water, but bull sharks are equipped with some biological quirk that permits them to function normally in salt, brackish, and fresh water.

  Bull sharks also frequent shallow water and murky water, like that off the Gulf Coast of Florida. It was a bull shark that attacked young Jesse Arbogast in July 2001, triggering the media frenzy that lasted all summer, and Bahamians asserted that bull sharks were probably the culprits in the two nonfatal attacks a month later in the shallow waters off Grand Bahama Island. Bull sharks have such a bad reputation for being aggressive, fearless, and territorial that they undoubtedly are blamed for more attacks than they’re responsible for. Still, there are so many bull sharks in so many waters in which so many people choose to swim that they must be classified as extremely dangerous.

  Oceanic Whitetips

  Then there’s the oceanic whitetip, whose Latin name so aptly describes the creature that I’ll burden you with it: C. longimanus, or “long-hands.” This shark’s pectoral fins are extraordinarily long and graceful, resembling the wings of a modern fighter jet. Longimanus tends to stay in the deep ocean, and nobody on earth has the vaguest notion about total numbers of long-hand attacks because the people they do attack are either adrift, alone, or survivors of shipwrecks, who don’t much care what species of shark it is that’s harassing them. I’d bet that many of the crewmen of the Indianapolis, in 1945, were killed by long-hands, but no one will ever know.

  I do know, however, that longimanus is unpredictable, scary, and demonstrably capable of killing a human. There’s a story about one that attacked two U.S. Navy divers in the deep waters of the Tongue of the Ocean in the Bahamas. The shark took a big bite out of one of the divers and then, as the diver’s mate fought it for possession of his friend, dragged the diver into the abyss. Finally, at a depth of about three hundred feet—far beyond safe scuba depth—the mate had to choose between letting go of his friend and dying himself, and he watched as shark and body disappeared into the gloom.

  Long-hands are my personal bêtes noires—one of the few species of shark of which I am genuinely and viscerally afraid. A couple of decades ago one made an honest effort to eat me. I don’t blame the shark for trying, because my situation fell well within the bounds of Stupid Things You Should Avoid at All Costs, but the near-miss scared me—and scarred me permanently—nevertheless.

  I was with an ABC-TV crew, also in the Tongue of the Ocean, in open water more than a mile deep. We had tied our boat to a Navy buoy that had become a popular spot to film because it had been in the water for so long that the sea had claimed it, transforming it into an artificial reef. Microscopic animals had taken shelter in the buoy and the chain and had been followed by tiny crustacea and other small critters. Then the larger ones had come to feed, and those larger still, until—in the magical way the sea has of generating life on all levels—the entire food chain had come to use buoy and chain as a feeding ground.

  A school of yellowfin tuna was swarming around the buoy, attracted by something, and in the brilliant sunlight of the summer day the colors were so gorgeous that we decided to take some footage for the film segment about the Bahamas that we were working on for The American Sportsman.

  I, as the so-called talent, was dispatched into the water. Stan Waterman followed to film whatever happened—presumably nothing more than the contrasting colors of the beautiful fish against the cobalt sea, interrupted now and then by a black-rubber-suited human wearing a yellow “horse-collar” buoyancy-compensator vest around his neck.

  Back then I was still a pretty green blue-water diver. Blue-water diving is diving in water with no bottom visible or reachable; it can spark fears and phobias, for to look down into the darkling blue nothingness is to harken back to childhood nightmares about monsters and infinity. I wasn’t accustomed to diving in water I knew to be more than five thousand feet deep, and once in a while I was haunted by a vision of my body drifting down, down, down, from light blue to darker blue, to purple and violet and the unknown black.

  So, naturally, whenever I had to dive in blue water, I carried a security blanket: a sawed-off broomstick about three feet long, attached to my wrist by a rawhide thong. Exactly what it was supposed to protect me from I never determined, but my logic was unassailable: if cameramen could carry cameras with which to ward off attackers, and assistants could carry cameras and lights, why shouldn’t I be allowed to carry a broomstick?

  Thus armed, I jumped overboard and swam among the yellowfin tuna—or, rather, they swam around me. I held on to the barnacle-covered buoy chain to keep from being swept away by the current, and the school of tuna, which had scattered when I splashed into the water, re-formed and circled me. The shafts of sunlight piercing the surface glittered on their silver scales and yellow fins, and it seemed to me that Stan must be gathering an entire library of beauty shots.

  The water was very clear, visibility more than a hundred feet, I was sure, though it’s hard to tell in blue water, for there’s nothing visible against which to gauge distances.

  At the very edge of my vision I saw a shark swimming by. I couldn’t discern what kind it was, and I didn’t much care, for it was ambling, really, and showing no interest in me or the tuna.

  Meanwhile, far up on the bow of the fifty-five-foot boat, one of the crew—bored and tantal
ized by the sight of so many delicious meals swimming so close to the boat—rigged a fishing rod, dropped a baited hook into the water, and let it drift back into the school of tuna. He had not asked permission, nor had he told anyone what he was doing, for—hey, who cares?—he was staying out of the way and minding his own business. When he hooked a fish, he would simply drag it up to the bow and haul it aboard, and no one need be the wiser.

  Stan gestured for me to move away from the buoy, so that he could frame me and the fish cleanly against the blue background. I let go of the chain and kicked my way out into open water. Obligingly, the tuna followed.

  Suddenly I was gone, jerked downward by an irresistible force, with a searing pain in my lower leg, arms flung over my head, broomstick aiming at the surface. I could see Stan and the tuna receding above me. I looked around, panicked and confused, to see what had grabbed me. The shark? Had I been taken by the shark? I saw nothing.

  I looked down. I was already in the dark blue; all that lay below were the violet and the black and … wait … there, against the darkness … what could it possibly—

  A tuna, fleeing for the bottom, struggling, fighting … fighting? Against WHAT?

  Then I saw the line, and the silvery leader. The fish was hooked, for God’s sake. Somehow it had gotten … no, impossible, no way it could have—

  A cloud billowed around my face, black as ink, thick as … blood. My blood.

  I leaned backward and kicked forward, wanting to see my feet.

  The steel leader was wrapped around my ankle. The wire had bitten deep, and a plume of black was rising from the wound, a sign that I was already down very, very deep, for blood doesn’t become black till the twilight depths. (The sea consumes the visible spectrum of light, one color at a time, beginning a few feet under water. Red disappears first, then orange, yellow, green, and so on, until, when you reach 150 or 200 feet, blood looks black.)