Demon Fish (37 page)

Ahuja has a dark sense of humor, which serves him well in his line of work. Most days he heads out from La Paz’s waterfront in his small motorboat, named for an ex-girlfriend (his current one wants him to rename it, of course), to survey the fishermen’s wreckage. Just a few minutes’ ride away sits El Mogote, a narrow strip of land where La Paz fishermen fillet their catch and discard body parts with no value before heading to port. Ahuja and his colleagues, armed with cameras and vials for collecting DNA evidence, descend on El Mogote like a forensics team.

As we disembark, Ahuja scans the water for castoffs: he digs into the muck just offshore, and within moments he has begun pulling up the heads of hammerhead and angel sharks, as well as plenty of remains of
mobilas
, a species of ray protected under Mexico’s shark law, and whip rays. He pulls up the rays two at a time, by their skinny tails, as other researchers use their scalpels to extract small pieces of flesh to conduct DNA tests.

“There must be a manta taco special today,” Ahuja mutters, the rays hanging down behind him.

Ahuja holds out some hope that Mexico’s 2007 regulations will give federal officials enough information to correct the worst shark-fishing abuses—“For the first time we will have data,” he says—but he places more faith in the ability of Luis Muñoz to convert his fellow shark fishermen into conservationists. It’s a wise bet, since Muñoz—a La Paz fisherman who goes by the nickname Meli—is as charismatic as it gets.

Meli was born the same year Steinbeck and Ricketts journeyed to his home city. He remembers the very first day he began fishing at the age of twelve: June 5, 1952. At that time, he recalls, “the seas were full of sharks.”

Sitting in front of his house, with his shiny blue pickup truck behind him, Meli can hardly contain his enthusiasm. His face is wrinkled and dark after spending so many years in the sun, but he has the energy of a man decades younger: he freely gesticulates as he speaks, leaning forward intently to convey his points. He can divvy up shark species according to how serious a threat they pose—“There are some shark species you have to respect, like the mako shark; blue sharks are a little aggressive”—and can’t say enough good things about shark meat, which he describes as “delicious.” In many ways Meli sees sharks as willing partners in his fishing expeditions who have helped pay for the house in which he lives and the truck he drives.

“I love the sharks very much. I’ve been living with them. I’ve captured hundreds and hundreds of sharks; none of them have attacked me,” he says. “I feel a great love and affection for the sharks because the sharks have for many years given me food. For me, the sharks are my life.”

Meli doesn’t go out fishing anymore. For years he has belonged to a fishing labor cooperative, and now he takes the fish his fellow cooperative members catch in Todos Santos, a small town on the Pacific Coast a couple of hours away, and sells it in La Paz. The son of a fisherman, around 1992 Meli started getting concerned that he and his cooperative buddies had to go farther and farther out to catch sharks compared with a few decades earlier. It’s a complaint you hear often on the beaches of Baja: Jesús Orozco, a Todos Santos fisherman who goes by the nickname of Lobo, or Wolf (all Baja fishermen seem to have a nickname; it’s like a CB handle or something), says he spends the bulk of his days trolling the waters in search of sharks, rather than battling them from his boat. “It’s not difficult to fish the sharks,” he says. “It’s difficult to find them.”

Meli told his three sons they would be better off staying in school than following his example, but they opted to hunt sharks as well. “I’m studying and studying, when am I going to earn money?” one of his sons asked him. Meli had no answer, so he let his sons leave school.

But at this point, Meli spends much of his time worrying about “the future of sharks, and of our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.” So he has teamed up with the researchers at Iemanya Oceanica, and when he shows up on the Punta Lobos beach in Todos Santos on Saturday afternoons, he talks to his fellow cooperative members about whether they might want to ditch fishing for whale shark guiding.

Many cooperative members are open to the idea of starting a new tourism venture. José Mesa, who caught two hammerhead sharks and one mako shark on a day when Meli showed up, says he looks forward to the moment when he and other local fishermen will be shuttling visitors across local waters rather than foraging for sharks. “Economically, it would be better than fishing,” he reasons. “It would be easy to do, because we know the sea. The only thing that’s hard is the English.” Shark fishing, by contrast, is “too much work. It’s difficult work. We don’t have medical insurance, and it’s dangerous work.”

Everyone acknowledges Baja fishermen will have to overcome some logistical obstacles before they start bringing Americans down for sightseeing. The waters right off Punta Lobos are rough, so the cooperative needs a loan to build a marina with a proper deck from which to launch. As Ahuja puts it, “When the waves are big, if you get five overweight Americans in a boat, they’re not going to be up for it.”

Orozco fears building an adequate marina, from which whale shark–watching guides can push off their boats farther at sea, will cost “many thousands of pesos.” But a fisheries professor from a local university gave a lecture on ecotourism to the Todos Santos fishermen in August 2006, and cooperative members have been plotting a career switch ever since.

Todos Santos fishermen have done the math: on many days Jorge Cambillo Zazueta spends 500 pesos, or $50, on fuel—along with extra money on ice and bait—and he catches about 350 pesos’ worth of sharks.

Even the researchers who support the idea of whale shark–watching operations, however, worry about whether Baja will adopt adequate regulations. Deni Ramírez, a Ph.D. student at Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas del Noroeste who has been studying whale sharks in both Baja and Isla Holbox, an island off the Yucatán, says environmental rules in Mexico often come down to a question of nationalism.

“The gray whales have a lot of protection because they are Mexican; they are born here,” she says. No one knows exactly where the whale sharks swimming along the Baja peninsula are born, so they lack the same Mexican imprimatur. “It’s amazing in Mexico—in one area they protect the sharks, and when they move to another area in Mexico, they have trouble.”

Ramírez spends a decent amount of time underwater photographing whale sharks in Baja, since each animal has a separate coloring pattern that allows researchers to identify them. Much of the time she can spot propeller marks on their bodies, vestiges of the many run-ins the fish have had with commercial and tourist boats. While some high-end cruise lines focused on conservation, such as Lindblad Expeditions, take safety precautions, most do not. “It’s not fair,” she complains. “You’re making money with these whale sharks, and the whale sharks are getting hit by propellers.”

Ahuja harbors his own concerns about whale shark watching in Baja, fearing that the sharks one day might become like bears in Yellowstone that have become dependent on humans for food, or the stingrays in the Cayman Islands that have reversed their nocturnal feeding patterns to maximize their take from tourists.

“I have a problem with saying tourism is the way to go,” he says, right after detailing how his group has devoted much of its time to evangelizing about its virtues to local fishermen. “But I don’t see another road on which to go. So does everyone in Mexico. That’s all they talk about.”

The place the Baja fishermen are talking about is Isla Holbox (pronounced OHL-bosh, reflecting its Spanish and Mayan roots), a small Yucatán community that has successfully made the ecotourism leap. Rafael de la Parra, who is research coordinator for the conservation group Proyecto Dominó and splits his time between Cancún and Holbox, is confident it can serve as a model for Mexico and other developing countries. De la Parra is an unabashed ecotourism booster: in an effort to woo locals, his group printed up placards depicting a whale shark trailed by a bunch of dominoes (as a play on the shark’s nickname) and a slogan in Spanish reading, “Conserve the whale shark, it’s your best game.” It’s a mantra, he argues, that has finally begun to sink in here.

Sitting on the beach with hotels arrayed behind him and whale shark–watching boats tied up at the dock in front of him, de la Parra is satisfied with the transformation he has witnessed in Holbox over the past few years.

“This originally was a shark-fishing village. They were using mantas as bait till last year, and a long time ago they used dolphins,” he says, peering out at sea. “Now everything turns around the whale sharks.”

——

Back in 2002, Isla Holbox resembled Las Barrancas more closely than the holiday destination it’s become. Lying roughly ninety miles northwest of Cancún, Holbox has never managed to lure American frat boys the way its better-known neighbor has. (Perhaps this is because getting to Holbox, on the very northern tip of the Yucatán, involves riding over rocky dirt roads for two and a half hours and then taking a noisy, water-soaked ferry ride.)

But a few years ago a small cadre of scientists from Mexico, the United States, and Belize started making an annual pilgrimage to this narrow, twenty-five-mile-long island in order to observe the whale sharks that flock in the hundreds to its shores each summer in search of plankton-rich water. For decades researchers had paid little attention to whale sharks: as filter feeders with tiny, vestigial teeth, they did not hold the same scientific or popular appeal as murderous great whites or the other fierce predators roaming the seas.

In a world of shrinking shark populations, however, this summertime whale shark aggregation intrigued scientists: there is a higher concentrated number of whale sharks here than anywhere else in the world. The whale sharks have picked the Yucatán as their annual vacation spot, and researchers want to know why. Even better, whale sharks—hulking but harmless creatures with polka dots and stripes on their backs—are the kinds of animals a kid can love, making them a sort of conservation poster child.

As David Santucci, who trekked to Holbox to see this phenomenon for himself when he worked as a spokesman for the Georgia Aquarium, puts it, “There is no better species to represent sharks than whale sharks. They’re gentle giants, they’re awe inspiring, they’re magnificent creatures.”

And this is how, in just five years, Holbox transformed itself from a sleepy island into a whale shark ecotourist mecca.

Founded 150 years ago, Holbox is the type of place whose official history includes phrases such as “according to legend” and “the locals say” before any fact is given. Most people agree the former pirates’ hideout got its name from a small dark lagoon on the southern part of the island: Holbox means “black hole” in Mayan. A different, freshwater lagoon named Yalahau was the island’s real draw: the Maya viewed it as a fountain of youth, and around 1800 Spanish Armada ships stopped by to get their drinking water from the pristine source.

Despite its attractive lagoons, Holbox has remained a backwater for centuries. Even now its official tour guide describes islanders as “descendants of pirates, mestizos of several races, fishermen by trade.” Jungle mangroves divide the island, which is less than two miles across at its widest point, into three parts; only the smallest section is inhabited.

For years Holbox had one business: fishing. In the 1980s the town’s inhabitants started earning a decent living for the first time by exploiting the local lobster fishery in earnest, moving them solidly into Mexico’s middle class. That initial prosperity, however, sowed the seeds of class conflict in the mid-1990s as some of the town’s residents began dealing in real estate. By 2000, Holbox was divided between those who could afford to own property and those who could not, and with the lobster fishery depleted, villagers were left wondering what to do next.

Willy Betancourt Sabatini was one of the first Holboxeños to realize how the residents could benefit from the massive whale sharks that congregated near the island from May to September. Like most of the other men in Holbox, Betancourt worked as a fisherman, but he knew the sea was an unreliable seafood supplier. So when the scientists started coming to the island—and meeting with Betancourt’s sister Norma, a local environmentalist who now serves as the project director for the Yum Balam National Protected Area just off the island’s shores—Betancourt wanted in.

Whale shark tourism had just begun to take off in nearby Belize, since researchers had figured out the animals tended to congregate around an area known as Gladden Spit during the full moon in spring. But some scientists there, including Rachel Graham, a D.C. native who had made Belize her home, became concerned that overenthusiastic divers were disturbing both the sharks and the red snappers whose eggs the whale sharks coveted. Graham started working with whale sharks in Belize in 1998, and by 2002, she says, tour operators told her they had “noticed if a lot of people jumped in the water and grabbed the shark’s tail, the behavior of this animal was evasive or elusive.” Graham wanted to make sure Holbox did not repeat these same mistakes.

So as Holbox began to establish its own marine tourism standards, Norma Betancourt and others made it clear they wanted a plan developed and enforced by members of the community, so that cheaters would face their neighbors’ wrath. Few Holboxeños have as much social standing as Norma, a direct descendant of one of the town’s founding families.

“I have Holbox everywhere,” she likes to say, in Spanish, with a smile.

A petite woman with a broad Mayan face, Betancourt brooded at first that the burgeoning whale shark–watching business “was going to end in disaster.” But in the spring of 2003 researchers and local entrepreneurs—including Norma’s brother Willy—worked to devise an ethical code that established the ground rules for frolicking with the polka-dotted giants. At any given time only two divers and one guide can be in the water with a single shark, and they must snorkel, rather than dive, so it’s obvious how many swimmers are in the water. Flash photography and touching of the sharks are forbidden. Any given boat can only have up to ten tourists in it, and each whale shark operation must apply for a permit.