Demon Fish (32 page)

The KwaZulu-Natal Sharks Board has experimented with a range of deterrents over the years, including electrical ones. Since sharks have such sophisticated electroreceptors, the theory goes, a pulsing electric charge surrounding a diver could keep them away. This research has produced the Shark Protective Oceanic Device, or Shark POD, which divers can wear while underwater. In two series of tests conducted on great white sharks off the Western Cape of South Africa, scientists concluded that the probability of an attack within a five-minute period declined from 70 percent to 8 percent when the unit was powered on, and within a ten-minute period the chances dropped from 90 percent to 16 percent. Since the experiments simulated a worst-case scenario—the researchers were offering bait to the white sharks at the very moment they are in their most aggressive predatory state, during their annual pilgrimage to the area in search of Cape fur seals—the chances of facing an attack while wearing a Shark POD are even less likely.
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However, the Shark POD has its limits: it can’t protect an entire bathing area, the unit is not mass-produced, and it’s not as if every recreational swimmer is going to take a dip wearing a bulky electrical unit.

A few inventors based in Oak Ridge, New Jersey, have been experimenting with a range of potential repellents since 2001, the so-called Summer of the Shark. Eric Stroud serves as managing partner of Shark Defense Technologies, and he and his colleagues have been trying out their material on Gruber’s lemon sharks for years. They discovered by accident that magnets made of neodymium, iron, and boron can rouse sharks from a catatonic state known as tonic immobility and prompt them to flee, but the magnet works only if it’s ten inches away from the shark in question. The firm won $25,000 from the World Wildlife Fund’s annual International Smart Gear Competition in order to develop magnets that could keep oceangoing sharks from being caught on fishing lines aimed at attracting swordfish and tuna, and they are also exploring the possibility of embedding metals in nets that could repel the sharks instead of having them entangled in the nets and killed.

This work holds considerable promise, though it’s yet to be fully realized. A group of scientists have already tested whether electropositive metals could repulse juvenile sandbar sharks in a lab, the first step in proving that electrical hooks could deter sharks from going after unintended bait. The researchers, led by Richard Brill at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, determined these types of metals did put off groups of sandbar sharks attempting to feed and altered the swimming patterns of those that were not seeking a meal.
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Some of these effects were not always long-lived, however, and a team of researchers—which includes Stroud—are still trying to determine what size, shape, and exact metal composite would work best as a deterrent.

Shark Defense has already developed a prototype of a circle hook that could potentially work. The hook, which has a gleaming metal composite wrapped around it, almost looks too gorgeous to sit out at sea on an industrial fishing line. But if it works, the industry could face pressure from environmental activists and regulators to incorporate it into their gear. And these rare earth metals, worn as an anklet, could also help humans avoid shark strikes.

In many ways, the inventors at Shark Defense are using the sharks’ own biology to protect them from harm. They are working on a chemical repellent based on the scent of rotting sharks, a closely guarded, slightly sweet-smelling combination of a dozen compounds known as A2. Patrick Rice, a partner in the company and its senior marine biologist, explains they’ve mixed a more effective version of the repellent, which does not have to be injected directly into a shark’s mouth. The fact that this scent repels all types of sharks suggests it stems from a primitive instinct that evolved before sharks radiated into an array of species. At the same time, the scent attracts the very bony fish that sharks seek out as prey. “It’s sending a chemical signal to sharks: get out of here,” Rice says. “It’s sending another chemical signal to bony fish: the predators are gone.” They’ve already packaged the repellent in a number of forms: as a pressurized aerosol spray and as a “pop-pouch,” both of which can spurt out underwater at a moment’s notice, and as a hard waxy gel that can be injected into bait and seep into the water over time. The latter method would work best for fishing vessels, giving anglers an incentive to keep sharks alive. And while Rice is an unabashed booster of the repellent’s powers—“It fires out, and the sharks are gone!”—even he knows these safeguards have their limits. “Just like anything else, nothing’s 100 percent effective. If a shark’s in a frenzied state, if they’re hungry enough, they’ll start eatin’.”

We are often unwilling to acknowledge that experiencing nature carries a risk as well, one that might be a little harder to calculate. Every wild ecosystem operates on a cycle of life and death, and it’s naive to assume that one can enter it without, on occasion, falling prey to those forces.

Average citizens in the United States, and most other industrialized countries, have resisted this message for decades. Instead, they tend to blame people in power for not protecting them adequately. In a fascinating piece of electoral number crunching, the Princeton University politics professors Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels found that voters tend to punish incumbent politicians for natural disasters, including floods, droughts, and shark attacks. “As long as responsibility for the event itself (or more commonly, for its amelioration) can somehow be attributed to the government in a story persuasive within the folk culture, the electorate will take out its frustrations on the incumbents and vote for out-parties,” Achen and Bartels write. “Thus, voters in pain are not necessarily irrational, but they are ignorant about both science and politics, and that makes them gullible when ambitious demagogues seek to profit from their misery … In most cases, incumbents will pay at the polls for bad times, even in situations where objective observers can find little rational basis to suppose that those incumbents have had any part in producing the voters’ pain.”
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To test this hypothesis, Achen and Bartels analyzed the impact of America’s seminal shark attack incident—the killings off the Jersey shore in 1916. The attacks took place just a few months before the 1916 presidential election and generated a spate of negative press for President Woodrow Wilson at the time, including an editorial cartoon in which a black fin titled “defeat” slashed through America’s Northeast. Wilson, the former governor of New Jersey, was alarmed enough to call a cabinet meeting in the wake of the attacks, but his advisers were at a loss to offer any preventive policy response. Wilson did command the Coast Guard to patrol and survey the beaches where the attacks had taken place, but at that point the damage was done.

Wilson managed to hold on to the White House in the fall, but he lost New Jersey. More important, he suffered a noticeable dip in the four beach counties—Monmouth, Ocean, Atlantic, and Cape May. Achen and Bartels estimate “the negative effect on Wilson’s vote in the beach counties is a little more than 3 percentage points … The shark attacks indeed seem to have had an impact—about one-fourth the effect that the Great Depression had on Herbert Hoover’s vote in New Jersey 16 years later.” He did even worse in two of the townships hardest hit by the shark attacks—with an eleven-point decline in Beach Haven and a nine-point drop in Spring Lake, far more than the negligible changes in the Wilson vote in these townships’ broader counties and in the state. As the professors explain:

Shark attacks are natural disasters in the purest sense of the term, and they have no governmental solution. Yet the voters punished anyway.

Of course, it is possible that the voters did not blame the government for the attacks themselves, but did blame it for not helping them with their economic distress. In that case, retrospection might not be blind. No doubt voters told themselves something like that at the time. Yet in the case of the sharks, it is not clear what the government could have done to help the local economy. The truth could not be covered up. The vacationers could not be compelled to come to the beach, nor could the sharks be forced to stay away.
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With every fresh shark strike, politicians often scramble to show voters they are taking concrete action to protect them. Virginia’s former Republican governor George Allen formed a shark task force in the wake of the 2001 attacks, in large part to ensure that his state’s tourism industry would not suffer a serious downturn. In the end, however, the task force failed to spur any significant changes in state policy. The group did offer commonsense advice in a public report, warning beachgoers who fear being attacked that they should avoid swimming at times when sharks may be feeding: late afternoon, evening, and early morning. But Virginia Institute of Marine Science emeritus professor Jack Musick, the task force’s lone scientist, says public officials have to accept the limits of their influence as well. “What the hell are you going to do?” he asks.

Most politicians, and their aides, have a very low tolerance threshold when it comes to sharks. Since I was covering the 2008 presidential campaign for
The Washington Post
at the same time I was writing this book, the idea that I was scribbling about sea monsters in between rallies provided considerable amusement to some of the political junkies riding along with me on John McCain’s Straight Talk Express. On April 25 a shark, most likely a great white, killed sixty-six-year-old Dave Martin off San Diego’s Tide Beach in a single bite. It was the first recorded attack in Southern California since 1959, and it came on the heels of a report on the most shark-infested beaches in North America. Steve Schmidt, one of McCain’s top strategists, e-mailed a news article about the attack to me, and within minutes Mark Salter, another senior McCain adviser, added his own, gently mocking note: “As u can see, this is v distressing to both schmidt and me. Pls reconsider publishing your testimonial to the virtues of these vicious creatures.” When the news hit less than a week later that a U.S. surfer in Mexico had fallen prey to yet another shark, Salter kept firing off messages. “Jeez, we settled the West abt 130 years ago. Every place in America should be purged of vicious predators. what kind of country are we?” he wrote in one. Then, in a separate missive, “Holy shit, Juliet. These beasts must go. It’s us v. them. Better hurry up and publish. This time next year, they’re going to be as rare as a wooly mammoth.” While they were joking on one level, their banter also carried a clear message: Why would anyone give a thought to keeping these creatures around?

Just as McCain’s aides were firing off these e-mails, some surfers down in Mexico decided to take measures into their own hands. Eager for vengeance, they waded into the water where their compatriot had been killed. And they began murdering sharks.

Fascinated by Schmidt and Salter’s preoccupation with sharks, I decided it was worth polling the man they worked for, McCain, on the issue. As one of our bus rides came to a close, and his press secretary, Brooke Buchanan, was doing her best to shoo reporters off the bus, I piped up that the next ride should be entirely devoted to a discussion of shark policy, but in the meantime I wanted to know where the senator stood on the question of sharks.

He looked at me, and the other journalists gathered around me, smiling. Pausing for a moment, he declared his allegiance in the Campaign Shark Wars. “I gotta be pro-shark,” McCain said, with a little shrug. “They’re important to the whole chain.”

Ever the politician, McCain quickly sought to split the difference between the two sides. “But I don’t want them eating people,” he added. “I’m pro-shark, with the important caveat that I don’t want them eating people.”

Buchanan—the lone shark supporter among McCain’s campaign staff, who happened to be sitting next to Salter at the time—raised her fists in victory. The candidate had spoken.

On South Africa’s Eastern Cape, the men and women face the same quandary that McCain fumbled to articulate on the campaign trail: how to tolerate an uncontainable threat for the sake of an abstract ideal. Everyone’s got a job to do: Oelofse and Dudley, who want to keep tourists as well as sharks coming to their region in the summertime; the du Toits, who accept the fact that they will cross paths with sharks in the course of their underwater workday; and Tshandu, who composes songs in her head as she stands watch from the mountain above Muizenberg Beach. More than most people in this world, they have learned how to negotiate daily life with the ocean’s fiercest predator.

As the car guards make their rounds at Muizenberg Beach, the two veteran surfers pulling on their wet suits in the parking lot take a little comfort that a shark spotter is looking out for them. They know the risks they face, and they’re realistic about what they can do to protect themselves. Peter Stride, who has been surfing for nearly half a century, begrudgingly gets out of the water each time the shark alarm sounds. But he’s philosophical about what fate might await him in the Atlantic, harboring just one wish should he meet a great white in the water: “If a shark wants to bite me, please heave off and leave me dead.” And with that he laughs and heads for the waves crashing behind him.

On January 13, 2010, Oelofse’s worst-case scenario transpired. A thirty-seven-year-old tourist from Zimbabwe, Lloyd Skinner, swam by himself off Fish Hoek beach. Though shark spotters were positioned at their usual stations—one on the beach and one at a hut overlooking the water—they could not prevent the lethal attack by a great white shark that took Skinner’s life. The entire incident, which involved three separate strikes, lasted roughly three minutes. Within moments the news had gone viral as a nearby resident tweeted about the incident. “Holy shit, we just saw a GIGANTIC shark eat what looked like a person right in front of our house in fishhoek. Unbelievable,” wrote a Twitter account user called skabenga.