Shark Trouble (11 page)

The marine food chain had been altered forever.

The student turned in her paper, and she received a good grade. She would have received the highest grade, but her teacher said the report lacked solutions for the problems the student had discovered.

But there
are
no solutions, replied the student.

Nonsense, said the teacher. There are always solutions, for everything.

In this case, however, the teacher was wrong. He did not recognize the truly significant discovery the student had made: that nature is not invulnerable, the ocean is not infinite and eternal, and that now, for the first time in history, mankind has the power to destroy the ocean that gives life to the planet that gives life to us. We can actually affect the fundamental functioning of the earth, altering the mechanisms that give us the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat.

What the student knew in her heart but was loath to believe and afraid to articulate was that unless mankind changes its ways—and soon—we have all begun a leisurely stroll down a seductively gentle slope to eventual self-destruction.

All this she had learned by studying the events that followed the day when the sharks died in the waters off the seaside village that used to live in harmony with nature.

Moray Eels

There are a great many kinds, colors, and sizes of moray eels, most of which live in tropical and subtropical waters. Morays range in size from under a foot to nearly ten feet long, and I know from experience that a seven-footer—as big around as a football and displaying its long, white, needlelike fangs—is as scary-looking a monster as there is under water.

A significant contributor to its frightening appearance is its manner of respiring. Its mouth opens and closes constantly, which forces oxygen-rich water over its gills but which also, when accentuated by its wide, blank, maniacally staring eyes, makes the eel look as if it can't wait to rip your head off.

Morays aren't poisonous, but their bites can carry so much toxic bacteria that they might as well be. They're scavengers as well as predators, and they have no aversion to rotten flesh. A moray bite is usually ragged (thus difficult to suture), exceedingly painful, and quick to become infected. It is also usually a mistake: the eel confuses a human digit for a piece of food. Usually, that is. But not always.

David Doubilet, the incomparable underwater photographer with whom I've worked for more than twenty years, was once severely bitten on the hand by a yellowish-colored moray off Hawaii. The eel, he says, literally charged him—zoomed out of its hole, bit him, and went home. The wound not only took forever to heal but left considerable residual damage to David's hand.

Al Giddings, the underwater cinematographer who worked on
Titanic
and
The Abyss,
was bitten by a moray in 1976 during the filming of the movie based on my novel
The Deep,
of which he was codirector of underwater photography. Columbia Pictures had built a two-million-gallon tank to contain its underwater sets in Bermuda and stocked it with live animals, including a shark and some eels, one of which took a liking to one of Al's toes. Al kept his toe, but the wound became infected immediately, and he lost some diving time.

There's no reason for swimmers, snorkelers, or scuba divers to get into trouble with morays, and there are only a couple of circumstances in which people do get bitten.

The eels live in cavelets, crannies, and holes in reefs, and an incautious diver who goes poking around—searching for lobsters, perhaps—risks having a probing hand mistaken for a fish, seized, gnawed on, and shredded.

Another risky business involves morays that have been conditioned to accept and be fed by humans. As dive masters and other sea-savvy folks know, conditioning is not the same as taming, and eels, fish, sharks, and other marine creatures (except for some of the mammals)
cannot be tamed
. No one should ever try to treat a moray eel like a pet.

The danger in conditioning morays is rarely to the conditioner or the conditioner's customers. They, after all, play by established rules: they arrive at the dive site, bringing fish scraps or other savory dead things for the eel (or eels, though to deal with more than two at once is to court serious danger); the eel emerges from its hole, expecting to be fed; it is fed; it permits itself to be touched and handled; sometimes, if the ritual has been repeated enough times that it has become imprinted as part of the eel's repertoire, it will hunt for morsels concealed on the diver's person, slithering in and out of his buoyancy-compensator vest, between his legs, around his neck.

For the paying customer, the performance looks truly impressive, and, in fact, it
is
.

The most remarkable morays I've ever seen lived on a reef off Grand Cayman. They had been conditioned by Wayne and Ann Hasson, who at the time ran a successful diving operation in the Cayman Islands. (You'll have noticed by now that I persist in using the word
conditioned
instead of
trained
. It's because I'm not certain that what the eels are taught to do constitutes training: they don't jump through hoops or play volleyball or do anything else they're not accustomed to doing. They eat—though, granted, in an unnatural way, that is, from the hands of humans, whom they have been taught to tolerate and, to an extent, trust. Is that training? I don't think so; I think it's conditioning.)

Wayne and Ann had arbitrarily anthropomorphized the two green morays into a heterosexual couple named Waldo and Waldeen. Both were enormous: six and a half or seven feet long (longer than I am tall, that much I know for sure), at least a foot high, and as thick as a large honeydew or a small watermelon.

David Doubilet and I were doing a story on the Caymans for
National Geographic,
and Wendy and our daughter, Tracy—both certified divers—had come along to enjoy a couple of weeks of the best diving in the Caribbean.

Tracy has always had a mystical, almost spooky, ability to communicate with animals both terrestrial and marine. I don't mean “communicate” in the Dr. Dolittle sense; she doesn't talk to animals. Nor do I mean it in the Shirley MacLaine sense; she doesn't channel Amenhotep through turtles. She and animals merely appear to trust each other.

That kind of trust isn't uncommon for humans to have with dogs, cats, horses, and other mammals. But with
fish
? I have seen big groupers come to Tracy—while avoiding every other human in the area—and almost snuggle up to her. I'll forever retain a vision of her in the Caymans, walking slowly along the bottom, with two groupers swimming beside her, one under each arm.

The only person I know with a greater affinity than Tracy for marine creatures is Valerie Taylor, the legendary Australian photographer, diver, and marine conservationist, who truly
is
spooky—off the scale. I believe that Valerie could wordlessly convince any fish, eel, or dolphin to fetch her newspaper, pick up her laundry, and wash the car.

One day, Ann Hasson introduced Tracy to one of the giant green morays—Waldeen, I think—and when the eel had been fed and stroked by Ann, it took immediately to Tracy, snaking all around her, in and out of her buoyancy-compensator vest, seeming not to be seeking food so much as getting acquainted. Tracy never moved, except to raise her arms slowly to give Waldeen another platform around which to slither.

After a few moments, the eel calmly slid away from Tracy and returned to its home in the reef. We all puttered around for another minute or two, then prepared to move on. When I signaled to Tracy to follow us, however, she shook her head, calmly but definitely saying no.

I was bewildered: what did she mean,
no
? What did she plan to do, stand there all day? Then I saw her point downward with one index finger, and I looked at her feet, and there was Waldeen, halfway out of the reef, with its huge, gaping jaws around Tracy's ankle. The eel's head was moving gently back and forth, its jaws throbbing open and closed on my daughter's bare flesh.

Waldeen was mouthing Tracy, the way a Labrador retriever will mouth your hand to get you to play with it. Labradors, though, are known for having a “soft mouth”; moray eels aren't.

Tracy's expression was serene. Clearly, she was neither hurt nor afraid. She stayed still. I stayed still, too, paralyzed with fear and wondering what I'd do if I suddenly vomited into my mask.

The eel played with Tracy's ankle for perhaps another thirty seconds, then withdrew into the reef.

We moved on.

When we returned to the Cayman Islands a couple of years later, I learned that both Waldo and Waldeen were gone. One had been caught and killed by local fishermen—illegally, of course—and the other was said to have vanished. I'd bet that he or she, whichever it was, had been killed, too, for the most prominent danger attendant on conditioning eels to trust humans is not to the humans but to the eels. Their fate is familiar and almost inevitable; I've seen it happen all over the world, from the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean to the Tuamotu Islands in French Polynesia.

An eel is conditioned to associate humans with food. Sometimes the betrayal is simple. A spearfisher will descend to the reef, maybe carrying food, maybe not. The eel will emerge from its den. The fisher kills it. More often, though, the eel's demise is more complex.

Once there lived a big moray eel in a large coral head inside the lagoon of the Rangiroa Atoll in the Tuamotus. Our son Christopher used to like to visit the eel, to watch it as it waited in ambush in the shelter of the coral. Now and then he'd see the eel dart out of its hole and, with blurring speed, snatch and kill a passing fish. Christopher kept his distance from the eel, for though local laws forbade the feeding of morays, it was common knowledge that glass-bottom-boat operators from cruise ships would send snorkelers down with food, to draw eels out of their holes for the entertainment of their passengers. Christopher didn't carry food with him, and he didn't want the eel to make any false assumptions about him.

News came one afternoon that a swimmer had been badly bitten by a moray eel and had had to be evacuated by air to a hospital in Tahiti. By coincidence, we were scheduled to go out into the lagoon that day. When we reached the coral head, Christopher put on mask, fins, and snorkel and dove down to see his friend, the eel.

The eel had been speared, just behind the head. It was still alive, struggling to retreat into its hole, but the steel shaft that had gone clean through its body now protruded a foot or more from either side, stopping the eel from retreating.

Christopher hung in the water, helpless, and watched the eel die.

We heard later what had happened. A snorkeler had happened by and seen the eel waiting in the opening of its hole. She had approached very close to the eel, which—thinking she was bearing food, like other humans who came so near—came out of its hole prepared to feed.

When the woman gave it nothing, the eel pursued her, conditioned to associate humans with food. The flesh the eel saw looked like food but was, in fact, the woman's hand.

I'm sure you can finish the story yourself. The eel was deemed too dangerous to live, and a diver was dispatched to dispatch it. In truth, of course, the eel had only been obeying the conditioning imprinted upon it by humans.

The single strangest experience I've ever had with moray eels occurred in the Galápagos Islands, where I first went in 1987 to appear in a television show for John Wilcox. Stan Waterman was one of two underwater cameramen. The other was Howard Hall, one of the finest wildlife filmmakers working anywhere in the world today. Paul Humann, author of many fish-identification books and an expert still photographer who had spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours under water in the Galápagos, was “co-talent” with me; he would act as my guide and docent for the cameras.

Before the simple two-week shoot was over, all three of them were to escape death and serious injury by the narrowest of margins: Stan and Paul by being lost in the open ocean at twilight and, another day, by being set upon suddenly by a large school of very aggressive small sharks; Howard and Paul, after Stan and I had departed, when the boat we had chartered crashed into an island and sank in the middle of the night. (The boat had been running on automatic pilot, and the crewman on duty had only to watch the radar screen. He had been taught everything about the radar—except
what it was for
—and had gazed serenely as the blip indicating the island drew ever closer to the center of the screen, until finally the boat slammed head-on into the rocky shore.)

We had filmed sharks of several kinds, in situations both controlled and hairy: tiny Galápagos penguins (the northernmost penguins in the world), which swam like miniature rockets in pursuit of their prey; exotic critters like red-lipped batfish, which looked like a medical experiment gone awry, as if the body of a frog had been grafted onto the mouth of Carol Channing; seals and iguanas; Sally Lightfoot crabs and blue-footed boobies.

What we hadn't yet filmed were moray eels, which in the Galápagos (for reasons I know not) tend to congregate in large numbers in tight quarters. We had been told to expect to see four or five, or maybe more, eels poking out of a single hole, their heads jammed together, their jaws opening and closing as they respired in ragged synchrony. We hadn't seen it yet, but we kept looking, for we all knew it would make a wonderful image.

One day we found it—not once but several times—and it
was
wonderful and we filmed it till we ran out of film. Then, as we turned away, we noticed something curious: the eels were following us. We were on a rough, open lava plain, and from hidden holes all over the bottom, moray eels large and small, green and spotted, had come all the way out into the open and were chasing us.

Impossible. Morays
never
left the safety of their holes.

Oh, really?

We knew there was no point trying to flee; the morays could catch us up in a wink. And they did. And once they had us at their mercy, they … did nothing. They chased us, caught up with us, and passed us by.

It was frightening and—once we knew they didn't intend to bite us—fascinating and utterly inexplicable. None of us had ever seen anything like it before, and I haven't since.