by Evan Antin
Mike explained that once they smelled the bait, the sharks would swoop in near the crate, then swim away and circle back again and again. Oddly, the crate would never run out. One of the cool things about this whole process is that it’s simply the smell of the baitfish that keeps these sharks interested. Many would come but not eat. In addition to the tiger sharks, we’d probably see reef sharks and lemon sharks. We might also see nurse sharks, more tentative bottom dwellers who’d arrive late to the party but often try to suck the fish from the small openings of the crate.
We’d see it all, but it would be the tigers we’d remember, because they’re one of the largest species of any kind in the sea, and once you’ve seen one, you never forget it.
Out of My Element
Not very many wildlife encounters can put me on edge. Plenty of them heighten my attention and keep me dead focused, but that’s something else. Heading out to meet one of the most profoundly powerful apex predators on the planet was, honestly, fine, but doing it so far out of my element—air—was enough to give me a twinge of actual fear. To get really close to sharks, I’d have to move out of the oxygen and under the water. I’ve done plenty of diving; still, it’s always a leap to trust a machine with your breathing, and being underwater alters the way your senses process everything. Over a decade of world travel and wildlife interactions, I’d come to trust and rely on my quick reaction times, and while I was swimming with sharks didn’t seem like an ideal time to start throwing all that out of whack.
When we’d finished going over the basics of equipment safety, shark etiquette, and diver behavior, Mike and I slipped off the boat’s platform and started a quick descent. For the record, the moment of entry and the moment of exit are the most potentially problematic times for divers in the vicinity of large sharks. Anytime you’re splashing around on the surface of the water you’ve got two big disadvantages. First, you’re distracted and you’re not seeing the full underwater picture. Second, you’re likely flailing around like a potential food item. I was eager to get this step over with—and to do it without making any big splashes that might either scare a shark away or bring a hungry one to me.
I was certified to dive down to one hundred feet, but the sandbars at Tiger Beach are only about thirty feet under. The deeper a dive, and the higher the water pressure on your body, the more oxygen you consume with each breath. Less depth here meant more available breaths to work with during the dive, which meant more tank time, which was so fine with me.
We wore weight belts to counter the buoyancy of our wet suits and quickly dropped toward the floor. The water was warm and clear, and as we descended I focused on the sandbar that would momentarily be under me, thinking, I guess, about landing on my feet. (Generally I don’t often do or think about this as a diver, because most of my dives are on coral reefs and I’m making a real effort to avoid touching my feet to anything.)
Whatever my thought process, it was wrong. Mike was descending at the same pace, facing me as we were just hitting the sand. One second I was looking at him like any other compadre I’d travel side by side with, and the next he was forcefully thrusting his right arm out past the left side of my face. His hand was extended like that of a testy traffic cop dealing with an especially difficult driver. I looked over my left shoulder and there, directly behind my head, her eye to my eye, was a fourteen-foot shark—who appeared, in that terrifying moment, to be mostly teeth.
Hello! She’d been coming straight at the base of my head. Mike’s extended arm deflected her away from me. He would explain later that the goliath had probably been attracted by the glint of metal on my BCD (buoyancy control device) apparatus and its resemblance to light’s reflection off fish scales, but in the moment I realized that everything he had warned me about on the boat was very, very real.
As always, adrenaline and enthusiasm make for the most epic wildlife experiences, and now I knew I was in for some real action. From that moment on, I was on an almost mechanical swivel. Look front, look left, look right, look behind. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. I literally didn’t spend more than a single second looking in the same direction for the next two hours. Keep in mind that on dives you wear a mask and that diminishes a significant amount of your peripheral vision—all the more reason to keep that head moving.
As I touched bottom, I took a minute to scan the terrain. There was a long, wide sandbar, there was the bait crate, there were just us two divers in the water, and there was a growing parade of sea life streaming our way. Dozens of lemon sharks, skittishly darting from side to side, barely steering clear of Mike and me. And from about twenty feet off, the giant tiger who’d just given me the most terrifying peekaboo of my life, making a huge arc, heading back my way. Fifteen feet, ten feet.
Mike stepped up beside me to demonstrate the move that would be key to our entire dive: the redirect. We’d talked about it, but some things you have to see to believe. As the shark closed in at about eight feet, Mike played the traffic cop again, only this time, not nearly as urgently. He casually raised one arm up, palm open and facing forward, his eyes focused on the animal, who was two and a half times longer than us and closing in. I was thinking, Wow, okay, it’s just like that? My guide knew what he was doing, and the shark’s eyes took in the outstretched hand and the obstructive arm, and as I stood there infatuated with her and excited to do this on my own, she made a small adjustment to her path that would have almost—though not quite—caused her to miss us.
I was thinking, Nice, but not enough, but then Mike finished this maneuver by placing his hand at the side of the shark’s snout and gently easing her a hair farther from us—far enough that the shark would pass peaceably by.
As more sharks rolled in, I observed for another minute or two, all the while keeping up my front, left, right, rear spot checks. And then I was dying to try it, to have this amazing contact myself. I moved closer to the bait tray, kicked my fins off, buried my feet in the sand, and got down on my knees. Then I waited just seconds for the first shark to arrive. A lemon shark, small and fast and clearly not interested in having an interaction, as he stayed a foot or two away. Behind him, though, was a full-grown tiger.
This time I was ready, and I was able to focus not just on how to avoid getting a test bite on my BCD but also on memorizing the details of this magnificent creature. Like most sharks, this tiger came with minions, foot-long remoras, under her belly. Her skin shone in the water, her eyes glinted black and bottomless, and her mouth—about a foot across—was a great gash across the front of her entire face.
She approached with it slightly agape (as sharks always do), and inside I could see those big, broad, beautiful chompers. The dentition on these guys is amazing, built to allow them to eat anything. They can use those teeth and their powerful jaws to crack open a sea turtle shell like a nut. They can shear off great chunks of dead whales. For the most part, though, they eat—wait for it—fish.
I raised my arm, ready for this shark, and she politely adjusted her path to go around me. Inside I was bummed not to make contact, but I wanted to be respectful. The next one approached, coming from behind, and for the first time I put my hands on one of these amazing creatures, feeling the rough and stippled skin with its perfectly symmetrical pattern. Although I’ve put my hands on a lot of animals, the feeling of tiger shark scales was a completely new experience. Their scales (a.k.a. dermal denticles) actually feel synthetic—so much that you wonder, How did nature create this?! Wow. I wanted to put my nose right up to that skin, get up close and examine it, maybe rub my cheek against it for just one sec. But any of those things would have been both invasive and risky (and weird, I’m told), so instead I just watched the shark go.
For the next two hours, I was like a kid playing in the world’s biggest, most action-packed sandbox. The biggest challenge, honestly, was not stopping and staring. Being up close and personal with this species I’d been dying to meet was so satisfying, I wanted to soak it all up, so that I’d remember every detail. But staring
was the one no-no in the box. I needed to keep my eyes up, and my head turning, to stay safe.
Hundreds of sharks came my way (including seven or eight tigers that stuck around through the entire dive), and I felt that I was directing traffic around that bait tray like a pro (and loving every second of it). After the first few passes, I was able to distinguish some of the individuals—one with a scar over her eye, one with a chunk missing from a fin, a couple who almost seemed to want to engage. To investigate? Maybe. To hurt me? Nope, or I would have been hurt.
One thing was for sure, though: they were relaxed and comfortable, and none of these sharks were even the least bit hungry for me. I was no more a prey item there on the seafloor than the boat itself or my discarded flippers. They had come for the fish.
We stayed on the seafloor until the oxygen tanks started to run low. If I’d had enough air to breathe for two days of sandbox-and-shark play, I would have been all in and Mike might have had to stop me from trying to feed from the bait crate.
Breaking the surface and climbing back onto the boat and into the sun, I felt like I’d been gone for days, as if I’d made an epic trek, or aged a year. The whole experience felt that monumental. For someone who’s afraid of sharks, my day would have been a nightmare; but for me, it had been a dream come true.
Can’t Swim Without a Fin
It’s clear at just a glance that the tiger shark is an alpha predator, perfectly evolved to be top dog in the ocean, never needing to fear much of anything. Even so, they don’t target humans in the water, don’t especially want to eat us, don’t automatically feel threatened or defensively aggressive toward us when we dive into their realm. What other apex predator does that? Try getting between a lion or a grizzly bear or a crocodile and its food and then firmly guiding it around you by the muzzle and see how that works out.
Wait. Don’t.
The fact is, of those ten or fewer human fatalities that are attributable to sharks every year, almost all of them are cases of mistaken identity—a shark taking a bite out of something it believes might be food and then tragically leaving that victim to bleed to death.
On the flip side, many of the cases of people killing sharks are deliberate predation, often of the worst possible kind. Rather than killing these creatures and then making use of the entire animal, unscrupulous fishermen who supply the demand for shark fin soup slice the fins off live sharks and then drop the rest of their bodies—95 percent or more—back into the ocean, where they, too, bleed to death.
That’s not really fishing, is it? It’s just wasteful, thoughtless slaughter.
Since we’re so apathetic about sharks—or fearful of them—it’s easy to think, Eh, who cares? Only not caring about sharks is getting us into trouble. I know the day is never going to come when everybody wants to snuggle a tiger shark as badly as I did, but we are way overdue for adjusting our mind-sets from fear of these amazing creatures to respect. We can all respect how powerful they are. How durable. How effectively they do their jobs in ecosystems all over the world.
Without sharks to keep other species in check, the delicate balance of sea life experiences a ripple effect, with the sharks’ direct prey thriving and consuming more of what’s below them on the food chain. When the numbers of a single hammerhead species plummeted due to overfishing, for example, the population of the rays they eat exploded. Then the supply of their food—scallops, clams, and other bivalves—took a dive. Sharks are also responsible for consuming a significant amount of carcasses that would otherwise spread disease and dirty our oceans. We are literally talking about the circle of life here, and when we allow somebody to hack a big slice out of it, we don’t get to choose how that section gets filled in.
People have likely been fishing for sharks for as long as we’ve walked the earth, and that’s been a part of our balanced circle. But killing one hundred million of these critical predators each year? It’s unprecedented, and it’s asking for trouble.
There’s one other way to look at this equation, a perspective worth considering even if you don’t or can’t love sharks. A recent study of the economic benefits and impacts of finning and of the growing ecotourism industry found that a shark that brings in divers is about two hundred times more valuable alive than it is dead. If money is your only motivation—that’s a ton of it.
My fave warning sign in all of my travels, further encouraging me to find a wild cobra. This was in Wehea Forest in Kalimantan (Borneo). I never found that cobra there, but I found a bunch of other snakes and monitors, and I saw my first fully wild orangutans. One of the most gorgeous jungles I’ve ever visited.
My pet iguana “Pete,” which my uncle gifted me. I’m ten years old here.
My Maasai homestay experience in Tanzania. My homestay brother, the chief’s son, is standing to my left, his best friend to my right, and another friend and that friend’s little brother on my far left.
A wild Philippine crocodile in the Sierra Madres Natural Park, Northern Luzon, Philippines. Joey and I pumped her stomach for his crocodile diet study. I didn’t expect freshwater snails to make up such a significant portion of their diets!
At the Elephant Nature Park in Thailand. I’ve seen some amazing moments of kindness between animals, but to this day I’ve never seen anything as touching as the relationship between these two elephants, named Jokia and Mapong.
Sharing the water with tiger sharks in the Bahamas made my life!
Dental procedure on the crested black macaque, also known as a Celebes macaque, at the Tasikoki Wildlife Rehabilitation Center. Besides my clinical work near Los Angeles, this was my first wildlife veterinary procedure after graduating vet school.
Komodo National Park in Indonesia is home to the world’s largest and deadliest lizard: the Komodo dragon. Meeting one of these beauties face-to-face had been a dream of mine ever since I was a little kid. I mean, dragons. Does it get any better than that?
Also on Komodo Island is the Javan spitting cobra, and like all spitters, it aims to propel its deadly venom directly into the eyes of its targets. Pack your goggles. This is the first cobra I ever encountered in the wild.
Two different species of green tree viper intertwined in Khao Yai National Park, Thailand.
Making a new friend in a subadult male orangutan in Tajung Puting National Park, Kalimantan (Borneo).
An adult male orangutan in Tanjung Puting National Park. This was the male that scared the bejesus out of us on the trail.
A baby slender loris checking out my hand while I’m checking, out him. Those eyes are cute, but his bite is venomous. This kiddo was an orphaned rescue and being cared for by a wildlife zoo and educational center in Sri Lanka.
During my 2019 visit to the Lwiro Primate Rehabilitation Center in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, I was able to hold this new friend: a freshly rescued baby redtailed monkey.
Gorillas are native only to Africa, and the two species (eastern and western) are separated by about six hundred miles of Congo basin forest in the center of the continent. Eastern gorillas, seen here, are divided into two subspecies, and the critically endangered mountain gorilla was the species I was able to witness here in Rwanda. There are only around a thousand of these gorillas left in the wild. I later saw eastern lowland gorillas in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Here with the indigenous Palawan water monitor on the island of Palawan, Philippines.
Is it a mustache? Is it a bear? Is it a cat? It’s a bearcat. This is a baby, but adults grow into massive sixty-plus-pound tree-dwelling mammals with faces like little bears, cat eyes and whiskers, a prehensile tail like a howler monkey, and long, sharp claws like a wolverine.
Baby rhinos are the best selfie companions. Here I am with an eight-week-old female orphan in South Africa at the Hoedspruit Endangered Species Centre.
In the fall of 2019, while helping relocate a small seed population of giraffes from Murchison Falls National Park to Uganda’s Pian Upe Wildlife Reserve.
Acknowled
gments
Working with wildlife around the world has always been a dream for me, and I’ve been willing to do just about anything—and go absolutely anywhere—to make it a reality. I’ve also had a ton of guidance and support along the way from people who believed in me, taught me, invited me along to learn and experience, and shared my observations and enthusiasm. I owe each of them my gratitude. I especially want to thank my family and friends, who never questioned my pursuit of this vision (or the outcomes so far). That goes double for my mother and father, who’ve encouraged and cultivated my passion for the natural world all my life. To my partners and mentors at Conejo Valley Veterinary Hospital, thank you for your unwavering support of even my most unconventional goals, and for letting me call such an outstanding facility my professional home.
Being an animal lover puts me in the company (and in the social media feeds) of like-minded people around the world, and I’m grateful to every reader, follower, and contributor who has supported my work. Even if we haven’t met, your engagement and support have been significant to my wild pursuits.
