Shark Life: True Stories About Sharks & the Sea Read online

  + The downfall of sharks may, ironically, be accelerated by the same qualities that have made them so well adapted for so many millions of years. Because apex predators are at the top of the food chain, nothing preys on sharks except larger versions of themselves and, sometimes, killer whales. To maintain ecological balance, the number of each species of apex predator—be it grizzly bear, lion, tiger, or shark— must remain low. These animals breed late in life and not too often, and produce 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. Other species may 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.

  In their appearance, their efficiency, and the striking evidence of their incredible adaptability, sharks are—to me, anyway—among the most beautiful creatures on earth.

  We are all— each living thing on the planet—linked together in the complex chain of life. Here is a story I wrote about sharks, to explain how they function in that chain.

  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. 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. First there were the fishermen who caught them, the mates who worked on the boats, and the wholesalers on the docks who bought the lobsters, processed them, and packed them up for shipping. Then there were the truckers who took the lobsters to stores and restaurants up and down the coast. There were the men and women who worked at the restaurants where lobsters were served, the businesses that cleaned the linen used in the restaurants, and the bankers who financed the businesses. On it went, like ripples spreading from the splash of a stone dropped in a pond.

  A small colony of sea lions lived on a rocky point of land that joined the breakwater at the mouth of the harbor. In the springtime tourists from other towns would come to the village and have lunch at one of the restaurants on the harbor. They came 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.

  The villagers did not think much, or worry at all, about the great number 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. At those times, 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 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. 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.

  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.

  Village fishermen who had gotten close enough to the ship to read its name couldn't remember it or pronounce it. It was stenciled on the ship's bow and fantail not only in a foreign language but also 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 spool looked like it could hold at least a mile's worth of thick, strong fishing line. And visible in the coils of line were 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 assaulted.

  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 also 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 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. 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 almost no sharks in other regions up and down the coast. The big ship and the boats it carried had worked the entire coastline. It had taken nearly all the sharks from all the reefs and used 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.

  For the first few weeks, nothing seemed much different. Fish and lobsters were caught and sold, money was earned and money was spent, and life continued as before.

  Then fishermen began to notice that they were catching fewer lobsters in the pots. Slowly at first, then more rapidly, the number of lobsters was declining. Often lobster fishermen found in their pots not lobsters but octopuses. They had never paid attention to octopuses before. Now the octopuses seemed to be everywhere.

  Within a month or two, the villagers realized that the number of sea lions had increased, too, especially young ones. As the sea lion population grew, the number of fish caught by the village's fishermen declined. In itself, this was no mystery. Sea lions eat fish, so as their numbers increased, they took more and more fish from the sea.

  The mystery was, why had the sea lion population exploded?

  Soon there were so many sea lions that they outgrew their rocky point and spread back toward the village. Some took up residence on docks, some on boats moored in the harbor. Since sea lions poop wherever they please, boat owners found the decks and cockpits of their boats soile
d and stinking.

  When the wind blew toward shore, the stink wafted into the village and made dining an unpleasant experience. Restaurants lost customers. Waiters and waitresses were laid off, and some had to move away to find new jobs, leaving houses and apartments vacant.

  Lobster catches continued to drop. Most lobster fishermen had borrowed money from banks to pay for their boats. Some had borrowed to pay for their homes as well. Now, with their income so low, they couldn't make the monthly loan payments. Eventually the banks had no choice but to take the lobster boats from the fishermen and try to sell them to someone somewhere else.

  Every one of these decisions and actions became a new stone dropped into the pond. Ripples spread, affecting businesses and men and women and their families for miles and miles around.

  And always the question lingered: why? What had gone so terribly wrong so terribly fast?

  By the time the answer came the following summer, the village was in trouble. The signs were visible to anyone. The words FOR SALE were printed, stenciled, painted, and scribbled, and hung on houses, boats, shops, restaurants, cars in driveways, and lawn mowers on lawns. The streets were silent, the harbor nearly empty. And the vast, uncountable population of sea lions now inhabited every square inch of waterfront property in the village.

  All the sea lions were unnaturally lean. Only those strong enough to swim far out to sea and dive very deep to find fish were able to feed themselves. Even they spent so much energy catching food that they could barely keep themselves nourished; they had no extra to feed to their young. Their natural duty was to keep themselves alive so they could breed new litters of pups every year. And so, as nature had programmed them to do, mother sea lions let their pups starve. The bodies of the dead young sea lions rotted on the rocks and washed around in the shallows.

  It was a high school student working on a paper who discovered what had hurt the village, and her discovery wasn't even very complicated. It was just a matter of knowing where to look.

  The student examined the food chain in the sea when the village had been thriving. At the top were the sharks. Some sharks preyed on the fish on the reef; all sharks preyed on octopuses. Octopuses, in fact, were one of the sharks’ favorite foods. That was one of the things that kept octopuses from overrunning the reef. Octopuses lay thousands and thousands of eggs at one time, because not many usually survive. When the sharks disappeared, the student discovered, the octopus population had boomed out of natural proportion.

  Now, one of an octopus's favorite foods is lobster. An octopus will trap a lobster with one or more of its eight powerful arms, squeeze it to death and crack it apart with its arms, and then eat it with its powerful beak. Even small octopuses can catch and eat small lobsters. So when the sea around the village became overpopulated with octopuses, the lobster population suddenly crashed.

  Very soon there were no more lobsters for the fishermen to catch.

  Normally, other sharks—larger ones, including great whites—preyed upon the sea lion colony. They took the weak, the sick, the malformed, and the vulnerable, leaving only the strong and healthy sea lions to maintain the colony.

  When those sharks were killed by the big fishing ship, there were no predators left to control the growth of the sea lion colony. And sharks are not only predators but scavengers as well. So even the dead sea lions were not recycled into the food chain but were left to rot and become host to flies and other carriers of disease.

  The most discouraging discovery the student made was that there was a possibility that the village might never recover. No one could know for certain, but there was a chance that the marine food chain had been altered forever.

  A year passed, and another, and then, one day, a couple on a sailboat just beyond the reef saw a dark triangular fin slice through the calm water. A few feet behind it, a tall tail fin swished back and forth. It was a shark, a big one, and whereas a few years earlier the couple might have shuddered at the sight of the fins, now they cheered.

  Soon other sharks began to visit the reef, and gradually—very gradually—the number of sea lions declined. So did the number of octopuses, and that meant that more lobsters had a chance to survive to adulthood. By the time the high school student had finished college, lobstermen could once again make a living from the waters around the village.

  What had saved the village was an idea hatched by some scientists alarmed by the decline in the number of fish in all the oceans of the world. Too many boats with too much modern technology were taking too many fish from the sea too quickly for many species to recover. The idea the scientists had was to locate areas where fish were breeding and spending their first few months of life and to protect them from fishing.

  It took them a long time and a lot of arguing and pleading, but eventually they were given permission to create what came to be called Marine Protected Areas in many places around the world.

  One of the MPAs was located a few miles offshore, up the coast from the village. As animal populations in the protected area recovered, their eggs and larvae drifted south and began to nourish the reefs and waters near the village.

  Some people resisted MPAs. They believed they should be allowed to fish for whatever they wanted wherever and whenever they wanted and with the most effective killing equipment available. They argued that they had to feed their families now, and they couldn't afford to worry about the future.

  Millions of others, however—and their numbers grew—recognized that if random, destructive fishing was permitted to continue, someday there would be no oceans. Instead, there could be a catastrophic collapse of marine life, and along with that would surely come a human catastrophe.

  They couldn't let that happen.

  And neither can we.

  III

  13

  Dangerous to Man?

  Moray Eels, Killer Whales, Barracudas, and

  Other Creatures We Fear

  We humans live on the edge of the world's largest primal wilderness, the ocean. We venture onto and into it for recreation, relaxation, and exercise. But we don't appreciate the fact that the ocean is the hunting ground for most of the living things on planet Earth.

  No matter how peaceful the sea may seem on a warm and sunny day, it is in fact always— always!—a brutal world. Two basic rules govern it: kill or be killed, and eat or be eaten.

  Sharks are by no means the only predators that haunt the wilds outside our door. They're just the biggest and most spectacular. Every living thing, of every size and shape conceivable, possesses weapons with which to defend itself and tools with which to feed itself. When we enter alien territory, we can startle, frighten, or, occasionally, tempt creatures that are minding their own business and behaving as nature has programmed them to behave. So we shouldn't be surprised if we get into trouble.

  Many years ago, Roger Caras wrote a book I liked titled Dangerous to Man. In it he examined many of the animals we see as threatening to humans. He explained why and in what circumstances each one should or shouldn't be feared. His premise, of course, was that no animal is dangerous to humans if humans leave it alone. Some friends and I believed that Caras's book could be translated into an excellent series of informative half hours for television. We almost succeeded in getting the project made. It was not to be, but the premise of the book is still valid. In the next pages I'll describe the marine animals most commonly thought of as being dangerous to humans. I hope you'll conclude, as I have, that the animals truly most dangerous to humans are humans.

  The list that follows is incomplete. I've included only the animals that I or friends of mine have personal knowledge of, or animals I've studied for so long that I think I know them pretty well. (For technical details about some of the creatures, I have borrowed from Richard Ellis's superb Encyclopedia of the Sea.)

  MORAY EELS

  There are a great many kinds, colors, and sizes of moray eels. Most of them live in tropical and subtropical waters. Morays range in size from under a foot to ne
arly ten feet long. I know from experience that a seven-footer—as big around as a football and displaying its long, white, needle-like fangs—is as scary-looking a monster as there is underwater.

  One of the things that makes a moray look so frightening is the way it breathes. Its mouth opens and closes constantly, which forces oxygen-rich water over its gills. But this, combined with its wide, blank, maniacally staring eyes, makes the eel look as if it can't wait to rip your head off.

  Morays aren't poisonous, but their bites can carry so much toxic bacteria that they might as well be. They're scavengers as well as predators, and they will eat rotten flesh. A moray bite is usually ragged (thus difficult to sew up), exceedingly painful, and quick to become infected. It is also usually a mistake: the eel confuses a human finger or toe for a piece of food. Usually, that is. But not always.

  David Doubilet is an excellent underwater photographer with whom I've worked for more than twenty years. He was once severely bitten on the hand by a yellowish moray off Hawaii. The eel, he says, literally charged him. It zoomed out of its hole, bit him, and went home. The wound not only took forever to heal but also did considerable damage to David's hand.

  Al Giddings, the underwater cinematographer who worked on Titanic and The Abyss, was bitten by a moray in 1976. This happened during the filming of the movie based on my novel The Deep. Columbia Pictures had built a two-million-gallon tank to contain its underwater sets in Bermuda. They stocked it with live animals, including a shark and some eels. One of the eels took a liking to one of Al's toes. Al kept his toe, but the wound became infected immediately, and he lost some diving time.

  There's no reason for swimmers, snorkelers, or scuba divers to get into trouble with morays. And there are only a couple of circumstances in which people do get bitten.