Demon Fish (31 page)

Oelofse was trained as a conservation biologist, but sounds more like a psychiatrist when he describes his office’s campaign to manage the threats great whites pose to residents and tourists who enter the water. Lean and angular, he reclines in his chair as he explains that he is facing a psychological challenge, not just one of public safety. “A lot of what we’re trying to drive is a value system,” he elaborates, sitting in his cramped, nondescript office in downtown Cape Town. Oelofse and his colleagues must convince people that these animals are an asset, rather than a curse, but they also need to have people take individual responsibility for the very act of entering the water. When it comes to surfing, swimming, and kayaking, he says, “people must realize that taking on those activities is a personal choice, and no matter what we do, there will always be risks.”

Part of the problem is that people often have difficulty processing certain kinds of risks, particularly ones associated with activities they don’t do on a regular basis. Studies have shown we’re very good at calculating the chances of things that we see as quite possible: elderly people know how likely they are to break a hip, while trained equestrians have a good sense of the chance that they’ll be thrown from a horse they’re riding. It’s much easier to contemplate the dangers you can estimate with some degree of accuracy, rather than a murky unknown. Humans accept the risks associated with plenty of mundane and unusual activities—one’s daily commute could end in a car accident, while skiing or skydiving can produce a broken leg—because they think they can predict how likely it is.

One of the best examples of this phenomenon occurs among the spearfishing community, the only group of humans that competes directly with sharks for prey. Janette and Jacques du Toit make their living by targeting game and reef fish off the coasts of South Africa and Mozambique, and they’re well aware of the danger they face in the water. They’ve had friends attacked by sharks—a spear fisherman was even killed by a white shark off Cape Town in July 2005—and both of them have faced these predators firsthand. In 2007 a ragged-tooth shark came straight at Janette while she was fishing—when she pushed it away with her spear, it spun around and came at her again. She pushed the animal away a second time, and it slapped her with its tail as it left her. Du Toit escaped without a significant injury. A year later she spotted an eight-foot tiger shark while fishing off the Eastern Cape: she managed to shoot the fish she was after, but when she went to pull it up, the shark “just went berserk, and I thought, ‘Okay, you take it.’ I just thought, ‘I’m not even going to argue.’ ”

Both Jacques and Janette describe spearfishing as a mind game where practitioners must constantly calibrate their behavior in order to ensure their self-preservation. A twenty-year veteran of the trade, Jacques recognizes what it means to share space with sharks. “You’re part of the food chain when you jump in there. That’s what makes it so exciting,” he says. “You never know what you could encounter.” While he tends to adopt a more aggressive stance toward sharks than his wife, du Toit makes just as many underwater assessments as she does and considers swimming with sharks “a calculated risk.” He knows diving in dirty water is more dangerous because it’s harder to detect what sharks might be swimming there, and if he does encounter one, he looks for any unpredictable or jerky movements. In an odd way, he is applying rationality to the most irrational of situations.

But the average human reaction to the prospect of a shark attack is anything but rational. Alison Kock, a born-and-bred Cape Town native who works for the Save Our Seas Foundation in addition to pursuing her own academic research, sensed the backlash as soon as Webb lost her life in 2004. “I almost didn’t want to tell people what I was working on, because people were so anti-sharks,” she says. The following year Kock decided to put her fears aside and hold sessions with local residents to discuss possible responses to the shark threat, but found herself fielding questions on everything from outright shark hunts to the idea of attaching a helium balloon to every shark’s tail so that beach visitors could see the animals from shore. “It felt like a witch hunt, people were so scared. When I got home one night, I told my boyfriend at the time that I wouldn’t be surprised seeing people running around town with pitchforks.” After one incident in August 2006 the city’s major paper, the
Cape Argus
, ran a front-page story on the subject every day for three weeks. An article in a South African scientific journal put it best: “Even though shark attacks are a minor cause of mortality for humans, this phenomenon receives an inordinate amount of media cover and interest, probably due to humans’ psychological abhorrence of being eaten alive.”
¹

The public pressure on the Cape Town task force was enormous. The group reviewed and tossed out all the traditional methods of shark control—exclusion nets that are so finely meshed they keep out all marine animals, physical barriers that create a similar exclusion zone—as impractical. The more innovative methods of shark control, such as erecting some sort of electrical barrier or employing sonar detection, were too expensive and still unproven. City officials were “left with nothing,” in Oelofse’s words. Which is why they turned to shark spotting.

At nine in the morning, high above Cape Town’s Muizenberg Beach, Ethel Tshandu is standing on alert. Muizenberg Beach, a spot one surfing veteran calls “the biggest nursery of surfing in South Africa,” is a place that attracts an array of people—swimmers and kayakers, along with aspiring and experienced surfers. And it also lures great whites.

Standing about five feet tall, Tshandu doesn’t look imposing, but with her binoculars, polarized sunglasses, and black Windbreaker she’s fully outfitted to do her job: shark spotting. Filling out her official data book as she stands watch in a small hut with a corrugated tin roof, the former restaurant cook is all business. She has just noted there are nine surfers, two kayak paddlers, and six bathers in the water, which only boasts 5 percent visibility at the moment. She has instructed her counterpart standing on the beach far below to raise a black flag for everyone to see, so they can know that it’s difficult to determine whether any of the great white sharks that frequent False Bay are in their midst. But she is still scanning the sea, methodically working her way from left to right across one horizontal swath after another, to see if she can detect the sharks’ black shadows in the water.

For all her precision—Tshandu’s careful recording of wind temperature, her refusal to take phone calls from friends while she’s at work—the young woman knows her job requires an enormous leap of faith. The men and women who are tugging on their wet suits and heading out to sea are banking on the fact that a single person, perched on a mountain up above them, will keep them safe from a predator whose very survival depends on its ability to commit surprise attacks from below.

“Before I start work every day, I prefer praying and saying, ‘God, I put this in your hands,’ ” she explains. “Sometimes you do get nervous. What if something happens to someone? But I just put it in God’s hands.”

The shark spotting Tshandu practices started not as a government program but as an informal system surfers employed for self-preservation. When you drive up to Muizenberg Beach, which is also known as Muizenberg Corner or Surfers’ Corner, a couple of men are constantly strolling back and forth along the sidewalk eyeing the cars parked in front of them. Known as car guards, the men expect a few coins in exchange for making sure your car remains safe; most people pay them rather than risk any sort of damage to their vehicle. For years surfers had paid the car guards while they went to sea, even leaving their keys behind with them. From time to time they paid them to look out for sharks as well, and in October 2004 Greg Bertish, the owner of a local surfing and travel business, decided to establish a formal shark-spotting operation. Bertish raised money from both corporate and local sponsors, bought some equipment, and made sure the guards got first-aid training.

Now half a dozen beaches surrounding Cape Town all have the same warning system. Every day, regardless of weather conditions, from morning until night, one person stands watch above while another remains on the beach, ensuring the proper flag is flying to signal the current conditions. A green flag means no sharks are in sight and visibility is good; a black flag means while no sharks have been detected, visibility is poor; and a red flag means a shark has been sighted within the last two hours. If a monitor detects a shark in the water, he or she triggers a siren that blasts on the beach below, letting people know they need to come to shore immediately. When the alarm sounds, people move. The whole program, which monitors four beaches seven days a week year-round and another six during peak visiting times, costs the city of Cape Town just under $125,000 a year. In addition to giving beach visitors greater peace of mind, it has provided jobs to more than a dozen underprivileged young people in the area.

Between 2005 and 2008, spotters reported 530 white shark sightings off the city’s most popular beaches. This is not even a comprehensive count of the number of great whites that move into and out of False Bay, since scientists have detected many more movements through both aerial spotting and acoustic tagging of individual sharks. Peter Chadwick, who directs the World Wildlife Fund’s Honda Marine Parks Program in South Africa, has seen the animals during his scientific missions: “The great whites are swimming amongst the bathers and the surfers. We see it from the air and everyone’s blissfully unaware, and quite happy.”

In 2005, Kock placed acoustic tags on seventy-eight great whites circling Seal Island near the city’s shores. Monitors registered a hit every time a tagged shark swam by them, making it easy to determine where the sharks spent their time during different parts of the year. Yet when Kock started downloading the data from the monitors, she couldn’t quite believe it when they revealed they had registered such an immense number of hits. “It was a complete mind blow that over 50 percent of the animals tagged at Seal Island were coming inshore, and they were staying inshore for months,” she says. At the very time that people are going to the beaches off Cape Town, the great whites are headed there as well. It’s the unintended consequence of the conservation measures South Africa has adopted over the past couple of decades. South Africa was the first nation in the world to protect great whites, in 1991, and its protection of Cape fur seals has helped the sharks as well, by providing the animals with additional prey. As the sharks thrive, their numbers are growing.

Kock’s and Chadwick’s data also underscore a simple point: if great whites deliberately hunted humans, they would be having a field day every summer off the Western Cape, consuming the many surfers, swimmers, and kayakers in their midst. They don’t, but the chances of an accidental shark attack still loom large.

The South African branch of the Save Our Seas Foundation has launched a critically acclaimed advertising campaign detailing the statistics that put shark attacks in perspective—how 652 people died in chair-related accidents in a single year compared with the 4 killed by sharks. It has made Oelofse’s job slightly easier, but it is only a start, because when it comes to the public perception of sharks, individuals do not always engage in such coolheaded calculations. (As Oelofse puts it, “When you walk into a room, you’re not scared by a chair.”)

Knowing that this is the case, Oelofse has a simple mission: keep the sharks and the people apart from each other, to the extent possible. So far the shark-spotting program has done exactly that: for several years it ensured there was not a single deadly attack off Cape Town. But Oelofse has no illusions about the success the project has enjoyed up to this point: the moment a great white takes a beachgoer’s life, the public’s trust in the shark spotters could evaporate. “We could have two shark attacks in three days next week, and the whole thing could spin back again,” he admits. “To the extent we can keep people and the sharks apart, the better for everyone concerned, including the animals themselves. Things could go badly quickly. It’s very dependent on what happens in the water.”

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For decades a cadre of researchers have tried to develop an effective shark repellent, convinced that they were within reach of this holy grail. During World War II, both the American and the British governments had secret programs aimed at developing an elixir that would prevent sharks in tropical waters from savaging the unfortunate pilots and naval personnel who ended up stranded there. (This effort inspired one of the most memorable lines a politician has ever uttered on the subject, when Prime Minister Winston Churchill told the House of Commons, “The British Government is entirely opposed to sharks.”) In 1942 the U.S. Office of Strategic Services kicked off a research drive that produced Shark Chaser, a chemical repellent that used copper acetate as a deterrent and included an inky dye that resembled what a squid would spray. The powder, encased in a packet and engineered to smell like rotting shark, was attached to life jackets and included in life-raft provisions; troops were told to open the packet and dissolve it in the water if they found themselves in shark-infested waters. While Shark Chaser produced mixed results at best—experiments showed it worked only in certain instances, and servicemen continued to fall victim to sharks in the Pacific—it provided some degree of psychological comfort to the troops headed to sea.

Still, U.S. federal scientists knew they had not solved the puzzle of how to keep sharks away from humans. In 1958 the Office of Naval Research’s Sidney Galler convened a panel of nearly three dozen experts in an effort to devise a more effective repellent.
²
In 1972 one of the nation’s most preeminent researchers, Eugenie Clark, determined that the Moses sole, a fish species that lives in the Red Sea, secreted a natural shark repellent. Sonny Gruber, the marine biologist who took me shark diving in Bimini, worked with a team of Israeli and Egyptian scientists in an effort to replicate this milky liquid but found there was a catch: it worked only when they injected it directly into the shark’s mouth. So much for the Moses sole solution.