Demon Fish (38 page)

“People said we were crazy, that we couldn’t do it,” Betancourt recalls. But she and her allies had made an apt calculation: the fishermen had learned enough from the 1980s lobster debacle to know they needed to set limits when it came to dealing with the sea. “They know if we don’t take care, all of us are going to lose.”

The economics of shark tourism are pretty clear: the fish are worth much more alive than dead. In Belize tourists flock to the small town of Placencia to gawk at whale sharks in the Gladden Spit Marine Reserve, and a 2002 study estimated they brought $3.7 million to Placencia over a six-week period. In the Donsol region of the Philippines, the number of whale shark tourists mushroomed from 867 to 7,000 over the course of five years, bringing $620,000 to the country’s economy in 2005. A third of all diving activity in Spain’s Canary Islands is linked to sharks and rays, according to a recent study by the Institute of Social and Political Sciences at the University of La Laguna, accounting for nearly $25 million a year of the region’s tourist economy. While shark tourism is not yet on par with whale watching, which generates roughly $2 billion a year worldwide, it has started to generate significant revenues. As Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed puts it, “We think that you can make more money by looking at a shark than by making it into a soup.”

From Willy Betancourt’s perspective, sacrificing fishing for tourism was a fair deal. “It’s simple and more predictable than fishing,” he explains, adding that the twelve men who now work for him as boat operators and guides earn as much in half a day as they used to earn fishing for an entire day. “We respect the rules. People understand it very well.”

Graham is not entirely convinced that Holbox is as much of a paradise as some of its residents think. A member of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Ocean Giants Program, Graham is as physically imposing as Paul Ahuja: the word “Amazonian” best describes her nearly six-foot, broad-shouldered frame. Equally at ease in English, Spanish, and French, Graham is adept at convincing local fishermen to confide in her about their activities, which is why she knows that some of them still fish some shark species, out of the tourists’ sight. Even more important, they’ve told her some of the whale sharks swimming off Holbox have begun to shy away from people the same way they do in Belize. This isn’t a coincidence: Graham has been tracking these whale sharks for years, and it’s quite likely that the same individuals are making their way from Belize to Mexico and Honduras, in search of the best available food as tourists gawk at them.

“This is the same population,” Graham says. “Along the Mesoamerican reef they’re being hit up in three locations. That, to me, is a worry.” It is, she suggests, akin to autograph seekers bothering you in a restaurant each time you begin to approach the buffet line.

The fact that now some tour operations in Cancún are bringing visitors in on fast boats to see the sharks, and that fishermen at nearby Isla Mujeres are also angling to become whale shark tour guides, only exacerbates Graham’s concern. Maybe the whale sharks can handle it. Or maybe they’ll give up on the buffet and head somewhere else.

There are still a few vestiges of the fishing village Holbox used to be, like the faded and cracked mural on the edge of the town square that touts the failed 2006 presidential candidate from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Roberto Madrazo. “More Support for the Fishermen,” the mural reads. “Roberto, Yes We Can. President Roberto.”

But while those allusions still resonate somewhat—the once-powerful ruling authoritarian party is making a bit of a comeback from Mexico’s political sidelines—fishing no longer defines Holbox. The town’s Main Street now bears the name of the animal that has brought money to Holbox: Calle Tiburón Ballena, or Whale Shark Street. Every few yards boasts a storefront that is serving tourists one way or another, whether it’s the Cyber Sh@rk Internet café or the McRústico hamburger and sandwich shop, serving “the best subs on the island.” Images of whale sharks dominate the entire town, and every hotel offers sightseeing trips to see the famed fish in action.

Francesca Golinelli is a Holbox hotel operator whose parents, Greta and Johnny, came over from Italy in 1999 to build a vacation home. By 2001 they had enlisted their daughter in their plan to start a small hotel on the island, and a year later Casa Las Tortugas opened on the same skinny stretch of sand that houses the rest of Holbox’s accommodations. Casa Las Tortugas is pretty mellow: guests can eat their breakfast at a table planted in the sand, and air-conditioning in one’s room costs an extra $10 a night. Much of the building is made out of local wood, and each bathroom sports all-natural artisanal soaps from nearby Mérida.

Golinelli had been working in the Italian fashion business before her parents started extolling the wonders of Holbox. “They just fell in love with the island, the environment,” she recalls. “It was so beautiful and so pure.” Tired of having other people telling her what to do in her previous job, Golinelli came to live on the island devoid of motorized vehicles, robberies, and tchotchkes.

Several years after her arrival, Holbox has changed. Even with the serious setback of Hurricane Wilma, which pummeled the island in October 2005, the place has exploded with business enterprises. There are at least a dozen hostels and more than fifteen hostels and posadas crammed into the island’s one inhabited section; restaurants offer everything from Italian fare to Cuban food. While cars remain scarce, golf carts have become ubiquitous, offering visitors fresh off the ferry a cheap ride from the dock to their hotel of choice. While Holbox’s full-time population hovers just below two thousand, registered tourist visits have increased exponentially in recent years: six thousand came in 2004, ninety-five hundred in 2005, and twelve thousand in 2006. And all that was before
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
wrote about the place.

At times, Golinelli—like most people who live in Holbox—waxes nostalgic for the early days. As she flips through the pile of travel magazines featuring Holbox that are stacked up on the main table in her hotel’s reception area, she recalls, “When I came here there were not any golf carts. For me this was amazing, because I hate the golf carts … The thing that has changed the most was the Holboxeños. Money came to the island. The tourists arrived, we arrived, and the whale sharks arrived.”

Locals now stroll across the plaza wearing hip, angular glasses and brightly colored Crocs. As Willy Betancourt puts it, “There have been changes in the way people dress because we imitate the Europeans. We see orange Crocs, and we think, ‘Ooh, we should get those.’ ”

To a large extent the local government has yet to catch up with this proliferation of people and services: the island’s roads are still all sand, not asphalt. Residents question how that sort of rudimentary infrastructure, along with the unchecked growth in golf cart traffic and lack of decent sanitation, can support an ever-expanding visitor population. Vultures hover over piles of trash in the town dump, located right next to the village cemetery. There’s no school beyond junior high and no town hospital—only a clinic where a doctor occasionally shows up to see patients.

But despite this, the number of whale shark–watching permit applications increases every year, and it’s unclear whether officials will ever place a limit on them. “It’s so important for the hotels, the restaurants, the stores,” says Norma Betancourt. “Whale sharks are an opportunity. It’s good luck and we shouldn’t lose it.”

Or, as her brother Willy reasons, they’ve simply traded in lobsters for whale sharks: “We live off the fish.”

While Holboxeños may understand the economics of whale shark watching, nobody really understands whale sharks. They are, quite literally, the biggest fish in the sea. Many whale sharks weigh well over a ton; some grow as long as forty feet. Their common name stems from their superficial similarity to whales, since they are enormous and spend much of their time filter feeding on plankton at the ocean’s surface. Unlike whales, whale sharks don’t need to breathe air, and they have a different internal mechanism for gulping down the tiny creatures that sustain them. A group of a dozen researchers led by University of South Florida biologist Philip J. Motta have determined that whale sharks spend between eight and twelve hours a day cruising the ocean with their mouths agape and angled upward at roughly 13 degrees, swallowing more than 162,000 gallons of water an hour to get the small crustaceans and worms that sustain them. They estimate a whale shark measuring twenty feet long takes in 6,721 calories per day, twice what U.S. dietary guidelines suggest for a six-foot, two-hundred-pound, moderately active thirty-year-old man.
¹

Until researchers learned about the group of whale sharks congregating in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, even most marine biologists had never seen them. (Officials at the Georgia Aquarium, which is the only facility outside of Asia to house whale sharks, like to brag that ocean explorers such as Sylvia Earle and Philippe Cousteau never saw a whale shark until they visited the aquarium, which opened in downtown Atlanta in the fall of 2005.) Even the hundreds of thousands of dollars scientists have spent researching them in recent years has just begun to pin down some basic facts about whale sharks, and much of this remains speculation.

“There are a lot of unanswered questions out there,” says Ray Davis, the Georgia Aquarium’s former senior vice president of zoological operations. “Everyone’s admitting they don’t know the answers, and everybody’s working together to get the answers.”

So far, in fact, many of the answers have come from dead whale sharks rather than live ones. It wasn’t until 1995, when some scientists got a look at a whale shark fished off Taiwan, that they determined the sharks were oviparous, meaning they could reproduce young from eggs. “Up to that point everything was conjecture,” Davis says.

But as with other elements of shark scientific inquiry, that’s pretty much where human understanding of whale shark reproduction ends. When scientists say whale sharks can produce three hundred eggs at a time, all they’re doing is referring to that one shark that had the misfortune to find itself on a Taiwanese wharf in the mid-1990s, since no one’s ever gotten another peek inside a pregnant whale shark’s belly.

Even the death of a male whale shark can spark an academic boomlet, as when two of the Georgia Aquarium’s whale sharks died in succession in 2007. Shark scientists from across the country rushed to Atlanta to take part in the necropsy of first Ralph and then Norton, the two males the aquarium had imported from Taiwan in June 2005.

Scientists focus on whale sharks for a couple of reasons: the critters eat constantly, and this, in turn, makes them enormous. Mote Marine Laboratory’s Robert Hueter, who has been coming to Holbox since 1994 and tracking whale sharks there since 2003, compares them to cows. “You come out here and here’s these big beasts who are only about eating,” Hueter explains one afternoon as we are cruising the Gulf of Mexico tracking whale sharks from the yacht of Jim Jacoby, a major real estate developer and Georgia Aquarium board member. “It’s their own equivalent of the great grassland.”

In the same way that cows are straightforward feeding machines, so are whale sharks. Thanks to the Georgia Aquarium’s necropsies, scientists discovered a whale shark’s massive body contains a brain smaller than the size of a human fist. But whale sharks do something infinitely more interesting than cows: they dive. And they dive deep.

Eugenie Clark, the founding director of the lab where Hueter works, encountered a whale shark off the coast of the Baja peninsula while diving there decades ago. Jacques Cousteau got most of the hype in the 1950s for surveying the underwater world, but women like Clark and Sylvia Earle were just as adventurous explorers, if not more so. Clark is in her late eighties now, but she is still a pixie, a diminutive researcher who relates her most daring adventures and shows off her latest scientific discoveries with relish. At one point, as we sit in her office at Mote Marine Laboratory, she casually mentions how deep she has gone diving recently and then realizes she needs to shush me before her colleagues find out. “Don’t mention how deep I went,” she cautions me, suddenly stern. “I’m not supposed to do that anymore.” Then she explodes into laughter.

The first time Clark ever encountered a whale shark, she grabbed on to a fold in the animal’s skin under its first dorsal fin, using it as a sort of handle as the fish cruised by. She zipped along with the shark for a while even though her air tank slid off her back; holding on to the tank, she went even deeper underwater. The shark was a massive pregnant female, so it was undisturbed by the lady on its back, but at some point it occurred to Clark that she had been going for some time.

“It was incredible,” Clark says now of her ride. “When I finally came up, I could barely see the boat, I was so far away.”

At the time Clark went on her whale shark ride, marine biologists had no idea how far these animals plunged below the surface. Rachel Graham, the first scientist to put satellite tags on whale sharks, determined that one of the nearly two dozen sharks she tagged in Belize between 2001 and 2002 dived as deep as 4,921 feet below the surface.

Hueter, whose team from the Mote lab has worked with Mexican scientists from the research group Proyecto Dominó, has also devoted much of his time to monitoring how whale sharks dive throughout their travels. One of his sharks has surpassed Graham’s poster shark by going 6,194 feet deep, more than a mile underwater. (Initially, scientists were limited by the fact that the satellite tags they attach to these fish would break off at 5,905 feet to ensure the tags’ computer circuitry remained viable, but as the gadgetry advanced, so did their findings.) As the sharks descend to these formidable depths, they move without trouble from balmy sea surface temperatures in the high seventies to water as chilly as thirty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. They don’t stay down for long, according to tagging data, but instead begin to rise once they’ve gone far down.