Demon Fish (33 page)

A confluence of factors contributed to Skinner’s demise. He had separated himself from about a dozen other swimmers in the water, making him more vulnerable to an attack. He happened to swim near a school of fish, which attracted the great white to his vicinity. And worst of all, it appears the shark mistook Skinner for a seal, launching a deliberate strike from deep beneath the sea’s surface. “All indications are that this attack was predatory in nature,” Oelofse and two colleagues wrote in a review after the fact. “The shark’s behaviour as described by eyewitnesses and as seen in photographs displayed classic signs of feeding behaviour i.e. thrashing at the surface using its tail to facilitate chewing action.” The shark spotter stationed on the beach saw the third pass the shark made at Skinner and immediately radioed his counterpart stationed at the mountain lookout. That spotter, who was looking at an area of water north of Skinner, never witnessed the incident, though he did see the blood in the water once he turned his attention to Skinner’s location.

In the end, the reviewers concluded the shark-spotting program hadn’t failed. They had raised the black flag to indicate that shark-spotting conditions were poor: the choppy water and intermittent cloud cover made it hard to notice fins breaking the ocean surface. Just as important, the fact that the shark struck from below meant it would have been all but impossible to warn Skinner ahead of time that he was at risk. Still, Oelofse knows that explanation might not be enough to satisfy a skittish public that had expected the shark spotters to protect them from harm. “This time round the reaction has been much tougher than usual as it happened at a beach where our shark spotting programme is,” he wrote in an e-mail shortly after the attack. “However, the questions remain the same—the public wants to know why, which, of course, we can’t answer as we don’t know.”

In the end, Skinner’s death underscores a harsh reality: there is no way to eliminate the threat the most dangerous sharks pose to us. The best we can hope for is to lessen the odds. If we don’t recognize that, there is no possible way we will learn to live with them.

8

FISH FIGHT

As you may know, I was mauled by a shark thought to be a Great White on July 1, 1991 while surfing near Davenport, CA. My experience with the shark convinced me that sharks are an important part of the natural order of things. Any creature which is as well-adapted to its environment as the shark deserves a lot of respect.

—Eric Larsen, writing to California assemblyman Dan Hauser on April 17, 1993, in support of legislation protecting great white sharks off the California coast

S
onja Fordham’s colleagues gave her a nickname a few years ago: shark princess. Actually, she and several other women who dedicate themselves to conserving the sharks, skates, and rays that compose the elasmobranchs prefer another moniker to describe themselves: elasmobroads. “More gravitas,” she explains.

In the summer of 2006 a coalition of American environmental organizations banded together to form a group called the Shark Alliance, and they sent Fordham—a longtime advocate with the D.C.-based Ocean Conservancy, the kind of person who sports shark earrings as a conversation starter and discusses fisheries management policy with unbridled enthusiasm—to Brussels. The fact that three advocacy groups were funding her job did not mean it was a luxurious overseas posting. Paid in dollars at a time when the euro was rising, Fordham spent years working out of a small Brussels apartment. Many times she trekked to fisheries management meetings in an array of European cities, where officials often looked upon her with disdain as she nagged them to consider clamping down on the shark trade.

While concern about some environmental issues, such as climate change, has steadily intensified in recent years, attention to sharks has waxed and waned. In much of the world, policy makers are now willing to declare the issue merits action, but they are often loath to deliver on their promises. In some cases conservation initiatives have advanced through the political process, only to stall before becoming law. And even within some of the traditional bastions of environmentalism, these efforts can fall short. We may be on the cusp of a new approach to protecting sharks, but it will take a serious political push—and an unprecedented level of global cooperation—to make it work.

When it comes to most green issues, Europeans stand in the vanguard: they drive more compact cars than Americans, live in smaller houses, and rely more on renewable energy. But when it comes to the question of protecting sharks, they’re laggards. And that’s why Fordham moved from Washington, D.C., to Brussels—a town with not quite as many bureaucrats but much higher quality chocolate.

Until a few years ago, government officials on both sides of the Atlantic didn’t accept the concept that any fish could go extinct. Most fishery managers didn’t even keep track of shark catches until recent decades, because they did not view the fish as commercially valuable. A handful of marine scientists based in Canada changed that. Coming from diverse backgrounds—one hailing from a small town in Mississippi, another a French-born cosmopolitan of African American descent, and a third a young German—all of these researchers were irreverent, tireless, and willing to defy the conventional wisdom.

One of them, Daniel Pauly, now makes his home as a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia. While Pauly grew up and received his doctorate in fisheries biology in Europe, he devoted his early years as a researcher to living in disparate regions including Indonesia, western Africa, and the Philippines, where he examined how fishing activities were reshaping the ocean. The longer overfishing continues, he concluded, the more precipitously the quality of seafood dining will decline. He coined the phrase “fishing down the food web” to capture how our current fisheries system works: we kill off all the big, tasty fish, and when we’re through with them, we start pulling out the inferior, smaller fish. Before we know it, he warns, we’ll all be eating jellyfish.

Just as Pauly began receiving attention for his dire warning to gourmets across the world, Ransom A. Myers began making his academic mark. Born and raised in Lula, Mississippi, the son of a cotton plantation owner, Myers decided to focus on studying fish after sailing from Africa to the Caribbean in a twenty-eight-foot boat, and settled at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada.
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Myers—called Ram, a nickname derived from his initials—revolutionized the way researchers calculated the abundance of fish, poring over old catch records to chart massive declines. A quirky academic who padded around campus sporting white socks underneath his sandals, he used numbers to prove his point that fishing fleets were effectively wiping out species after species. He initially focused on cod, one of Canada’s most commercially valuable species, showing the collapse of its once-robust cod population stemmed not from seals eating the fish but from overfishing. But then he shifted to top predatory fish such as sharks. In 2003 he published two papers with Dalhousie colleagues that reverberated through the popular press. The first made a small splash: written with Julia K. Baum and four other scientists, it documented that scalloped hammerhead, white, and thresher sharks in the northwest Atlantic had all declined by more than 75 percent in the past fifteen years. That same year Myers and Boris Worm, a charming German who had come to Nova Scotia to work with him, estimated that fishing had eliminated 90 percent of the ocean’s top predators, in an academic paper that made the front pages of newspapers across the globe.

In 2004, Baum and Myers published a scientific article that—using data collected by American long-lining vessels in the Gulf of Mexico—calculated the oceanic whitetip shark’s demise in precise terms. The shark had ranked as one of the most abundant sharks on earth during the first half of the twentieth century, but after comparing catch rates in the Gulf of Mexico between the 1950s and the 1990s, the two scientists realized the oceanic whitetip shark population had plummeted by more than 99 percent. The silky shark, another commonly caught shark in the region, declined 90 percent during the same period. And while their overall numbers shrank, so did their individual sizes: oceanic whitetip sharks in the 1990s were a third as big as they were forty years earlier, and silky sharks shrank by 83 percent. As a result, they now produce smaller litters.
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All of this happened, but no one realized it until Baum and Myers crunched the numbers.

“The oceanic whitetip shark may once have been the most abundant large wild animal on earth,” surmises Elliott Norse, who heads the Marine Conservation Biology Institute. “If, on land, the most abundant large animal disappeared, everyone would be talking about it. It would be considered an unmitigated environmental disaster. But it happened in the sea, and nobody was looking.”

A relentless worker, Myers only stopped producing when he was felled in 2006 by an inoperable brain tumor. He died at fifty-four on March 27, 2007; that week the journal
Science
published his last, groundbreaking paper: it provided convincing evidence that the decimation of sharks in the Atlantic had produced a cascade of unintended effects that were distorting ecosystems up and down the East Coast. He and his colleagues calculated that between 1970 and 2005, the number of scalloped hammerhead and tiger sharks declined by more than 97 percent, and bull, dusky, and smooth hammerhead sharks dropped by more than 99 percent. During that same period nearly all of the sharks’ prey species exploded: the cownose ray population off the East Coast expanded to as much as forty million. They became the thugs of the ocean, rampaging and pillaging in their quest to sustain their ever-rising numbers. Cownose rays eat tremendous amounts of bay scallops, oysters, and soft-shell and hard clams, and by 2004 their consumption of nearly all the adult scallops in the North Carolina sounds forced the state to shutter its century-old bay scallop fishery.

Charles H. “Pete” Peterson, a professor of marine sciences, biology, and ecology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who co-authored the paper, says its findings proved researchers had just “scratched the surface of the implications” of eliminating sharks from a given ecosystem.

Such findings, Elliott Norse argues, show humans have underestimated the extent to which they have changed what goes on beneath the ocean’s surface. And as the major fish have disappeared, people are waging battles over smaller fish that they didn’t even find desirable a generation ago, as French and Spanish fishermen fight over who has the right to catch more anchovies in the Mediterranean. “What we’re doing by removing sharks from the global marine ecosystems is we’re producing a massive, onetime uncontrolled experiment on the oceans. All over the world we’re seeing jellyfish explosions. We don’t know why. Now we’re arguing over the anchovies,” he says. “We have to live with the consequences, and I don’t want to live with the consequences.”

Joshua Reichert, managing director of the Pew Environment Group, describes this rapid accumulation of critical statistics as just one more indicator of the fatal flaw in how the world has approached environmental issues since the 1970s. The American buffalo’s near demise ultimately came about in the nineteenth century when people on the East Coast acquired a taste for the beast’s tongue: in response, hunters for hire slew thousands of them out on the range and left the animals’ bodies to rot after ripping out their most valuable asset. In the same way, he says, the growing demand for fins has prompted shark populations to plummet, a phenomenon researchers have documented even as policy makers have failed to act. “We’ve been steadily driving toward the edge of a cliff,” he says, “and taking meticulous notes along the way.” Or, as the National Geographic underwater photographer David Doubilet put it as he accepted a conservation award from the Blue Ocean Institute, “We are, in essence, seeing the actions of modern conquistadors: discovery, conversion, destruction.”

The extent to which humans can drain the ocean’s resources for our own consumption is breathtaking. Whaling provides one of the most vivid examples of this phenomenon. Phillip J. Clapham, a scientist in the National Marine Mammal Laboratory at NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center, describes it in one paper this way: “In terms of sheer biomass, the commercial hunting of whales in the 20th century represents one of the greatest wildlife exploitation episodes in human history.”
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In 101 years fishermen killed more than 200 million whales in the Southern Hemisphere alone. In several cases it took only a matter of decades to wipe out regional whale populations. Humpback whales migrating off New Zealand virtually disappeared after whaling stations operated at full force between 1912 and 1963, in part because Soviet fleets took 25,000 humpbacks in two seasons, between 1959 and 1961.
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Even back in the seventeenth century, whalers could accomplish similar feats: bowhead whales congregated in the tens of thousands off Spitsbergen in 1610, but by 1670 the landing stations there “were forced to close because of the paucity of whales in coastal waters.”
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Long-lived animals that produce a limited number of offspring are the most vulnerable to collapse due to overfishing, since they lack the kind of resilience other species have. At least with whales, we have the ability to calculate these declines because the animals had a market value and fishermen counted how many they took in. With sharks, we weren’t even watching most of the time.