Shark Trouble (2 page)

2

2001

The Summer of Hype

After shark attacks—genuine attacks, not the kind staged from the safety of cages—had dominated the news in the summer of 2001, I contacted George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida, and requested, early in 2002, the latest figures for 2001.

Worldwide, the number of shark attacks recorded in 2001 was seventy-six, down from eighty-five the year before.

In the United States, fifty-five people were attacked by sharks in 2001, exactly one more than in 2000. As for fatalities, five people in the world died from shark bites in 2001, twelve in 2000.

In sum, then, said Mr. Burgess, “2001 was an average year by U.S. standards, and below average internationally. Most important, serious attacks were way down.”

Why, then, the shark hysteria of 2001? Because of a conjunction of disparate factors that came together all at once.

There was, first of all, the intangible but everlasting blend of fear and fascination with which human beings regard sharks. Harvard sociobiologist E. O. Wilson put it this way in a 1985 article in
Discover
magazine titled “In Praise of Sharks”:

“We're not just afraid of predators,” he wrote, “we're transfixed by them, prone to weave stories and fables and chatter on endlessly about them, because fascination creates preparedness, and preparedness, survival. In a deeply tribal sense, we love our monsters.”

That love accounts, I think, for the long life
Jaws
has enjoyed as a movie. Aside from the many and manifest merits of the Steven Spielberg film, the core story apparently touches the deep tribal nerve in a great many people.

Then there was the fact that for the first eight months and ten days of 2001, the United States and the world were in a relatively slow “news cycle.” Not much was going on that was newsworthy. The controversial presidential election of 2000 was finally over. The economy was slipping, but slowly, and after the Federal Reserve had cut the prime interest rate several times, even that became old news.

Then, at dusk on July 6, eight-year-old Jesse Arbogast was attacked by a bull shark in shallow water off Pensacola, Florida. The attack was particularly gruesome and sensational. Somehow, his uncle wrestled the seven-foot shark to shore and, with the aid of a park ranger, retrieved Jesse's severed arm from the mouth of the shark and rushed it to a hospital, where it was reattached to Jesse. Miraculously, the boy survived.

After that incident, the antennae of the media and the public were set to receive reports of other shark attacks as soon as they happened. And happen they did—the normal encounters between bathers or surfers and sharks that occur, however infrequently, off beaches from New Jersey to Key West.

Each incident was treated as a new sensation, until, very soon, a trend was spotted, and from the trend grew what was seen as a pattern and, eventually, an epidemic. The world was gripped by shark fever.

The fever took hold with such ferocity because of another factor that has come into play over the past few years: the complete alteration in the way news is disseminated around the world.

With the advent of the Internet, cable television, cellular telephones, and satellites, everything that happens anywhere—everything that is said or rumored to have happened anywhere, anything that might possibly have happened anywhere—is ours for the plucking in raw, unedited, unanalyzed, unverified, and (often) unverifiable form.

We choose our news. We decide what's news. We read and see whatever we want, and decide—each in his or her personal wisdom—what is and isn't true.

And thus, no sooner was Jesse Arbogast removed to the hospital than rumors began to fly through the ether, rumors that answered questions no one had asked, rumors that defamed Jesse's heroic uncle: he had been fishing for sharks; he had had this one on his line for an hour; the water was full of blood and chum; children had gathered round to see the shark as the uncle dragged it into shallow water; the uncle was so distraught that he had tried to commit suicide; the reason he was giving no interviews was that he was in the Federal Witness Protection Program … and so on.

Not one of the rumors was true.

On August 14 a school of sharks was sighted close to shore near St. Petersburg, Florida. No one knew how many sharks there were; first reports—by telephone and e-mail—described them as “a bunch.” Soon there were “dozens,” then “hundreds.” By the time a reporter for the
St. Petersburg Times
was assigned to cover the story, the number of sharks was “in the thousands.”

The suspicious reporter chartered a small plane and flew out over the scene. He didn't know what to expect; surely, there would be too many sharks to count, but would they be moving toward the beaches or away? Were they chasing food or hunting for food? Was this mass gathering a breeding event … or a killing event?

I spoke to him on the phone after he returned.

“The water was murky,” he said, “but I could still count the sharks 'cause it was calm and they were all on or near the surface. There were forty sharks. Exactly forty. Even I could see what they were—blacktips—and they were following a school of baitfish, which happens every day. There were more fishing boats out there than sharks, all intent on killing the ‘killers.' It was ridiculous.”

By the end of July 2001, shark attacks were being reported almost daily—in Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, all up and down the coast. Most of the “attacks” were, in fact, incidents that, in a normal year, would not have merited coverage beyond the local press. But this was not a normal year. The season had been proclaimed “Summer of the Shark” by
Time
on the cover of its July 30 issue, which reached newsstands and most subscribers on July 23.

Though the actual number of incidents was not abnormal, though there had not, as yet, been a single shark-attack fatality in U.S. waters, it seemed to the public that the times were out of joint and the world (or at least the ocean) had gone askew.

And once the public had accepted that 2001 was a particularly shark-plagued summer, experts—often self-anointed—popped up everywhere to offer theories and explanations.

The supposed reasons given for the nonexistent rise in shark attacks included the following:

•  The general, overall decline in fish stocks had left sharks desperate for food; consequently, they were attacking humans. There's no evidence, statistical or otherwise, to support this theory.

•  Restrictions imposed, since 1993, by the federal government on shark fishing had created an overabundance of sharks, which were now preying on helpless swimmers. The theory ignores all the accepted evidence of a drastic decline in the numbers of nearly every accessible species of shark.

•  By targeting certain species and ignoring others, commercial fishermen had inadvertently encouraged a population explosion among bull sharks, which were the villains in several serious attacks. There is no evidence of an increase in the bull-shark population. For a complex combination of dubious reasons, it is
possible
that bull-shark populations have suffered slightly less than species more highly prized by commercial fishermen, but even that has by no means been proven.

•  Shark-feeding enterprises, which abound in Florida, the Bahamas, and elsewhere as tourist attractions, had conditioned sharks to associate the presence of humans with the promise of food. When those sharks encounter people who
don't
feed them—for example, swimmers and surfers—they go after the people instead. Not only is this theory unsupported by reliable data or credible anecdotes, it also sparked a squabble in the summer of 2001 between the few scientists who espoused it and the many who dismissed it.

Of all the stories, theories, analyses, and speculations, however, none summed up the lunacy of the summer so perfectly as the cover headline of the September 4, 2001, issue of the
Weekly World News:
CUBA LAUNCHES SHARK ATTACK ON U.S.
!

Inside, on pages 2 and 3, beside photographs of Fidel Castro and an openmouthed great white shark, a banner headline shouted,
CASTRO TRAINED KILLER SHARKS TO ATTACK U.S.

Datelined “Miami,” the story exposed the monstrous plan:

“A cruel plot by depraved dictator Fidel Castro to spread panic and discourage refugees from fleeing Communist Cuba is responsible for the shocking wave of deadly shark attacks along America's Atlantic and Gulf Coasts.”

After considering and rejecting other plans, such as releasing poisonous sea snakes along U.S. bathing beaches, Castro, the story said, “came up with the scheme to breed especially ferocious species of sharks and unleash them on the American public—and on Cuban rafters.”

The “shark summer” of 2001, which had begun on July 6 with the attack on Jesse Arbogast, ended on Labor Day weekend with two fatal attacks—the only two of the summer in the United States.

On Saturday, September 1, ten-year-old David Peltier bled to death after being bitten on the leg while surfing in the waters off Virginia Beach. Two days later, on Monday, Sergei Zaloukaev, twenty-seven, was killed by a shark while he and his wife, Natalia, were wading in the surf off Avon, North Carolina. Natalia was bitten, too, and lost a foot, but she survived.

The summer ended. Then came the horror of the World Trade Center disaster of September 11, and shark sightings, shark encounters, and shark attacks disappeared from the news.

3

Sharks

How Little We Know

There are a great many sharks, and a great many kinds of sharks, in the sea, and very few—an infinitesimal, insignificant number—will ever have contact with a human being, let alone bother one … let alone
eat
one. As a general rule, being attacked by a shark is not something you should worry about—unless you're a person who worries about being struck by lightning, attacked by Africanized killer bees, or murdered, all of which are more likely to happen to you than a shark attack.

Still, there are actions you can take to reduce the odds even further—besides staying out of the water altogether—and there are even one or two things you can do to protect yourself if, God forbid, you ever
are
set upon by a shark. More about both later.

Each of the following statements about sharks has been printed, reprinted, graven in stone, and guaranteed to be the final, unarguable, absolute truth. Of the three, which one, would you say, is true?

1.  Of the 380 species of sharks known to science, fewer than a dozen pose any threat whatever to human beings.

2.  Of the more than 400 species of sharks in the world, only 11 have ever been known to attack a human being.

3.  Of the 450 species of sharks on record, only 3 qualify as man-eaters.

Don't bother to guess, for it's a trick question. The answer is: none of the above. To begin with, nobody knows for certain how many species of sharks there are. Scientists can't agree on how many different species have been discovered and catalogued. Some sharks go by different names in different countries. Australia's gray nurse shark, for example, bears no resemblance to the nurse sharks of the Atlantic and the Caribbean. In some countries, some subspecies are identified as separate species. Most scientists believe that the Zambezi shark and the Lake Nicaragua shark are both bull sharks; a few disagree. Some experts insist that
Carcharodon megalodon,
the fifty-foot monster that roamed the seas thirty million years ago, is a direct ancestor of today's great white shark; others insist just as vehemently that today's makos are the true descendants of
C. megalodon
.

Another reason for the lack of precision about numbers of sharks is that new sharks—new to man, that is—are still being discovered. In 1976 a behemoth virtually unknown to science, nearly fifteen feet long and weighing three quarters of a ton, was caught accidentally by a U.S. Navy ship off Hawaii. A plankton feeder and possessed of a disproportionately large mouth, it was dubbed megamouth. A dozen other specimens have since turned up, everywhere from Japan to Brazil, and in 1990 one was filmed swimming free, after it had been released from the net that had caught it off California. For all its size and heft, megamouth is slow-moving, curious, and not at all aggressive.

More new species of sharks will probably appear as, little by little, we and our miraculous technology turn our focus toward the sea. At least I hope we will, for our record so far has been nothing short of disgraceful.

We have seen less than 5 percent of our oceans; humans have actually visited less than 5 percent of
that
5 percent.

As a comparison, a terrestrial equivalent of the way in which we have gone about studying the ocean would be if we dragged a butterfly net behind an airplane over the Grand Canyon at night and, based on what we collected, developed theses, hypotheses, and generalizations about life on earth.

Despite the facts that nearly three quarters of our home planet is covered by seawater (of an average depth of two miles), that there are mountain ranges in the ocean higher than the Himalayas, that there is enough gold suspended in seawater to supply every man, woman, and child on earth with a pound of the stuff, and that the mineral, nutritional, and medicinal resources available in the sea are incalculably valuable, for the past half century we have devoted much of our national treasure to reaching and studying a moon that we know to be barren, while spending, relatively, pennies on exploring the rich body of our own earth. Forty years ago John F. Kennedy was already lamenting that we knew more, even then, about the far side of the moon than we did about the bottom of the sea.

We know, really, almost nothing about the ocean, so it's not surprising that we know so little about sharks.

Until recently, there's been no pressure to learn about sharks, for sharks have never had a constituency among the public. Whales, on the other hand, have an enormous constituency. The save-the-whales movement is more than thirty years old, and dolphins, of course, have long had their own legions of devoted humans. (Remember
Flipper
?)

It's true that whales and dolphins are easy to study and easier still to love. They're mammals. They breathe air. They nurse their young and guard them ferociously. They click and talk to one another. They do tricks. They're smart. We can anthropomorphize them, projecting human characteristics onto them. We give them names, and convince ourselves that they respond to—and even love—people they come to know.

Not sharks. Sharks are hard to study and harder still to love. Because they're fish, not mammals, they don't have to come up for air, so they're difficult to keep track of and impossible to count.

And they do have the unfortunate reputation of occasionally—very, very occasionally—attacking a human being and—even more occasionally—eating one.

It's hard to care deeply for something that might turn on you and eat you.

Traditionally, shark scientists, like scientists in many other disciplines, have been highly educated in the library and the laboratory and under-experienced in the field. But there have been—and are still—a handful of outstanding, dedicated shark scientists who are rich in talent, widely experienced in the field, and who have the admirable capacity to, when faced with a particularly perplexing problem, utter the words: “I don't know.”

In the United States, Eugenie Clark, John McCosker, Samuel Gruber, and Peter Klimley are heroes to us shark fanatics. Up-and-coming youngsters like Rocky Strong, with whom I worked in South Africa, are devoting their professional lives to the study of great white sharks. And Barry Bruce, with whom I once spent several hours wallowing around inside the corpse of a gigantic great white, is one of the leading shark experts in South Australia.

Of all the benefits that
Jaws
—as both book and movie—has brought me, none do I value more than the opportunity to do television shows and magazine stories with, and learn from, the scientists, sailors, fishermen, and divers who make the sea their home. The new knowledge we've gained since the mid-1970s has convinced me that while almost all of the great-white-shark behaviors I described in
Jaws
do, in fact, happen in real life, almost none of them happen for the reasons I described.

For example, what I and many others at the time perceived as attacks by great whites on boats were, in fact, explorations and samplings. In 1999, in the waters off Gansbaai, South Africa, I witnessed great-white behavior that would have been unimaginable even a few years ago. Large adult great whites approached our tiny outboard-motorboats and permitted a “shark wrangler” named Andre Hartman to cup his hand over their snouts—a risky business he had first attempted in order to guide a shark away from biting a motor and breaking its teeth—at which they rose out of the water, gaped for several seconds as if hypnotized, then slipped backward, down and away, in what I can only describe as a swoon.

Furthermore, the numerous reports I interpreted as intentional, targeted attacks on human beings were, for the most part, cases of mistaken identity. Sharks had been condemned as man-eaters for millennia, and it would be several more years before that core belief would be effectively challenged.

We knew so little back then, and have learned so much since, that I couldn't possibly write the same story today. I know now that the mythic monster I created was largely a fiction.

I also know now, however, that the genuine animal is just as—if not even more—fascinating.

Most shark behaviors, it turns out, are explainable in logical, natural terms.

Sharks are critically important to the health of the oceans and the balance of nature in the sea. Later I'll go into detail about what I perceive to be the value of sharks and why I believe we should appreciate, respect, and protect them, rather than fear them.

First, though, back to Australia in 1974 … my first personal year of living dangerously.