Scientists estimate that, worldwide, populations of some species of sharks have dropped by 80 percent. Though precise numbers of white sharks aren’t known, there is a growing consensus that they are not reproducing at a rate sufficient to maintain the population. What is known now is that great white sharks—scarce by nature and growing scarcer thanks to contact with man—are, for all their grace and power and manifest menace, remarkably fragile.
Exactly how fragile I discovered one day in the small South Australian resort town of Glenelg, home to the world’s uniquely qualified white shark expert, Rodney Fox. In 1963 Rodney was attacked while spearfishing. He was snorkeling, with a dead fish dangling from a float nearby. The shark struck, retreated, then struck again. “I looked down,” Rodney said when he told me the story years ago, “and saw that great big jaw rising at me through a cloud of my own blood, and I knew I was in trouble.” Trouble, indeed. Only a series of amazingly lucky breaks—including the fact that the strands of his neoprene wet suit held his guts in—saved his life. He spent weeks in the hospital and months in recovery, sewn together, like a quilt, with 462 stitches.
Rodney went on to win the South Australian team spearfishing championships one more time, and ever since he has devoted his life to the study and protection of great white sharks. (As David Doubilet puts it, “The shark bit Rodney and then inhabited him.”) He has never held a grudge against the shark that chewed him up (“He was only doing what sharks do”), and he offers advice to any diver who finds himself in the water with a great white: “Make sure he knows you’ve seen him. Great whites are ambushers, and once one knows he can’t surprise you, he’s probably not going to expend a lot of energy to get you. Move slowly to other divers or the boat.”
Rodney was David’s and my cicerone in our search for great whites, and he had heard that the South Australian Research and Development Institute (SARDI) had acquired a huge dead female. Before she underwent scientific dissection, her body was to be shown to the public as part of South Australia’s ongoing effort to protect the sharks. (Though not officially designated as endangered worldwide, great white sharks are protected off South Africa and Namibia, Australia, the Maldives, and parts of the U.S.)
The day of the display dawned foul: wind, mist, and a pelting rain. Nevertheless, 12,000 people stood in line—some for more than an hour—for the privilege of walking by and seeing and smelling and touching the sad and sorry corpse of this single animal.
To be sure, she was impressive: about 18 feet long, 3,000 pounds, a robust, mature female with teeth two inches long and dark, impenetrable eyes. Child after child, adult after adult touched the shark not only with their fingertips but with their entire hands, as if to commune with the great creature. They were not afraid; they were awed, almost reverent.
For years after the movie version of Jaws exploded into the public consciousness, I was asked why I thought it had had such an impact. I had no answer beyond the obvious: People have always been terrified of sharks, of deep water, and of the unknown, and this story touched all those nerves.
Then, a few years ago, I came across some words by Harvard sociobiologist E. O. Wilson. “We’re not just afraid of predators,” he wrote, “we’re transfixed by them, prone to weave stories and fables and chatter endlessly about them, because fascination creates preparedness, and preparedness, survival. In a deeply tribal sense, we love our monsters.”
True enough. I, transfixed, had woven stories and fables. And here were these men, women, and children—soaking, cold, and tired—gathered in what was definitely a kind of love for this monster.
They all wanted to know what had killed her. What could kill her? Children especially wanted to know why, why would anyone kill such an animal?
The answer to what had killed the shark was depressingly banal. “A longline,” said John Keesing, then SARDI’s chief scientist. “A fisherman had set out a longline to catch snapper, and she happened upon it. She got hooked, and in trying to get away, she wrapped herself up in the rope. When it came taut, she couldn’t move. She drowned.” Like many sharks, she had to keep moving to flush oxygen-rich water over her gills.
Longlines are among the most insidious killers in the sea, for they kill indiscriminately, old or young, pregnant or not, endangered or not. In the open ocean some longlines stretch for 80 miles and contain thousands of hooks.
Unlike some fishermen, the man who caught this shark obeyed the law, notified the proper authorities, and even brought the body to shore. He had requested that he be given the jaw. The government turned him down.
“We couldn’t give it to him,” John explained. “A jaw this size might bring $10,000 on the open market. If we let him keep it, suddenly we’d find a whole lot of white sharks being killed ‘by accident.’ ”
And so, jaw and all, the shark was hauled off to the Bolivar maceration facility, next door to a sewage-treatment plant on the plains north of Adelaide, where a ton and a half of great white shark could be studied out of the public eye.
This was a rare boon for the scientists. One reason so little is known about great whites is that they are enormous, bulky, and hard to handle. And that’s when they’re dead. Studying a live great white shark up close and in detail is, for obvious reasons, practically impossible.
Barry Bruce, one of Australia’s preeminent shark experts, had flown over from his base in Tasmania to oversee the dissection and study of the shark. He and his assistants got into blue jumpsuits, rubber boots, and gloves, and as Barry delicately—with a knife suitable for quartering an ox—sliced open the belly of the beast, I stood beside him and watched.
“We know a few things for certain,” he said. “For example, we know that they’re warm-bodied, like all the lamnid sharks. (Others in the Lamnidae family include shortfin and longfin mako sharks.) Their body temperature is sometimes ten to fifteen degrees [Celsius] warmer than the surrounding water, which makes them efficient predators in cool water. We know they’re primarily coastal, so they have contact with humans, and sometimes they lose. Then again, they do venture into deep water. They’ve been found off Hawaii, in the Coral Sea, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic. But we don’t know much about their travel and migration patterns.”
In my experience the best way to find a great white shark is to go where they’re not supposed to be. A ten-footer and I had a chance meeting underwater years ago in the Bahamas, where, at the time, great whites were unheard of. The shark was as shocked to see me as I was to see it. It stopped dead in the water, braking with its two pectoral fins, voided its bowels, and fled. (My reaction? Well … none of your business.)
I asked Barry if anyone had a reliable estimate of the number of great whites in the world, and he said flatly, “No. We don’t even know how many there are around Australia. Not very many, though.”
“A hundred?” I asked. “More? Less?”
He wouldn’t bite. “Nobody knows.”
Rodney chimed in. “I’ve heard people claim that 40 or 45 great whites are killed every year here in South Australia, by longlines, nets, and illegal fishing. No question, some people still do target them for the jaw or for what they call ‘sport.’ But to sustain a loss like that—45 individuals a year—I would think the population would have to be a couple of thousand. I find it hard to believe that there are that many great white sharks in South Australian waters.”
Until recently sharks have had no constituency: That is, there has been no public outcry to Save the Sharks, as there has been for whales and dolphins. One problem, of course, is that unlike whales and dolphins, sharks aren’t cute, they don’t nurse their young, they don’t appear to “talk” to one another, and consequently they’re hard to anthropomorphize. More practically, unlike whales and dolphins, which are mammals, sharks don’t breathe air, so they don’t surface at regular intervals and thus are not easy to track and count.
Also, great white sharks do have a documented record of killing human beings. (Rarely though: only 74 times in the past hundred years
, according to the International Shark Attack File.)
Nowadays more people are coming to respect and appreciate sharks for what they are: beautiful, graceful, efficient, and, above all, integral members of the ocean food chain. In large measure the change is due to television and the abundance of films documenting not only the glories of sharks but also the dangers to them from longlines, nets, and the odious practice of finning—slicing the fins off sharks to sell in Asian markets, then tossing the living animals overboard to die. Gradually governments and individuals are learning that while a dead shark may bring ten or twenty or even fifty dollars to a single fisherman, a live shark can be worth thousands of dollars more in tourist revenue to a community. Divers will fly halfway around the world to see white sharks.
Immodestly I claim some credit for the change in attitude, for while the Jaws phenomenon was blamed for distorting the public’s view of sharks and causing sporadic outbreaks of macho mayhem, it also generated a fascination with and, over time, an affection for sharks that had not existed before. These days I receive more than a thousand letters a year from youngsters who were not alive when Jaws appeared, and all of them, without exception, want to know more about sharks in general and great whites in particular.
Great white sharks are among the true apex predators in the ocean. The largest predatory fish in the world, they have few natural enemies. And so, in balanced nature, there are not very many great whites, and the number grows or shrinks depending on availability of food. They breed late in life and pup relatively few. Again, nobody knows exactly how many, but seven or eight seems to be a safe average. The youngsters appear alive, four or five feet long, weighing 50 or 60 pounds, fully armed and ready to rumble. Still, many don’t survive the first year because other sharks, including great whites, will eat them.
Of all the infuriating unknowns about great white sharks, none is more controversial than size. How big can they grow to be? Fishermen from Nova Scotia to South Australia, from Cape Town to Cape Cod claim to have encountered 25-footers, 30-footers, even 36-footers. (Usually the proof offered is that the beast was “bigger than the boat.”) There have been reports of a 23-footer in the waters off Malta and a 21-foot, 7,000-pounder off Cuba, but none has held up under scrutiny. The largest generally accepted catch—made by lasso, of all things—was a shark 19.5 feet long. The largest great white shark ever caught on rod and reel weighed 2,664 pounds.
According to British biologist Ian Fergusson, chairman of the Shark Trust, no great white shark longer than 19.5 feet has ever been validated, and in an e-mail widely circulated last spring, he expressed irritation at “this stubborn reluctance by some elements of the media to accept the facts and even more of a reluctance to accept that a 16-foot, 4,500-pound white shark is BIG, very BIG, and should need no further exaggeration to impress even the most discerning of viewers when seen up close.”
I can attest that underwater, cruising toward you out of the gloom with the serene confidence of the invincible, a 12-foot great white looks like a locomotive with malice in mind.
When the belly of the dead shark was open, Barry Bruce beamed. “Look at that liver,” he exclaimed. “That’s a 500-pound liver.” The liver is an immense energy-storage facility, and I liked Rodney’s clear and simple description of how it governs the shark’s feeding habits. “If a shark has eaten a whole seal or sea lion,” he said, “it might not have to eat for a month. But the smell of chum or bait or blood in the water will stimulate the feeding impulse, and it may decide to top off its tank of energy.”
Barry removed several vertebrae from the shark’s cartilaginous spine (like all sharks, great whites have no true bones). He wiped one clean and held it up. “See the rings? Those are growth rings that we use to age sharks, just like rings in the trunk of a tree. In white sharks we are only just starting to understand which ones to count to give their age in years. We think female white sharks start breeding when they’re about 12 to 14 years old.”
To reach the heart, Barry had to actually climb inside the body cavity of the shark, and the image proved irresistible to everyone with a camera, myself included.
Pores on the shark’s snout were oozing what looked like jelly, and I asked Barry what it was. “Those are the famous ampullae,” he said, referring to the ampullae of Lorenzini, named after the Italian scientist who first described them in the 1670s. By detecting bioelectric impulses in the water, these jelly-filled canals are among the most important of the shark’s sensory organs.
Much of the shark was reduced to reeking flesh and bloody cartilage, but the head remained intact, staring implacably, a constant reminder of what it once had been.
I needed no reminder, for still fresh in my mind were images I had seen the day before, postmortem photographs of a young man killed by a great white shark the previous June, close to shore, in a little bay on an island in the Neptunes, where he and a pal had been snorkeling for abalone. The shark had bitten him only once, severing arteries in a leg and an arm, and the man had bled to death.
“Obviously the shark didn’t want to eat him,” the man who had the pictures told me. “It bit down, had a taste, and let him go. It knew this wasn’t its normal prey.”
This episode seems to reinforce a hypothesis proposed by A. Peter Klimley, a shark expert at the Bodega Marine Laboratory in Bodega Bay, California. He holds that great white sharks have an ability to assess the energy value of prey in the microsecond of a first bite. If the prey is perceived as not containing enough energy value to justify the energy expended in a full-scale attack, the shark releases it; if, however, the prey is perceived as being rich in fat (a seal, say, or a sea lion), the shark will pursue the attack. It will deliver a first, devastating bite and wait for the prey to bleed to death, then partake of a leisurely meal.
“If they ingest something that’s not energetically profitable,” Klimley says, “they’re stuck with that for a few days. Fat has twice the energy value of muscle.”
Rodney, for one, believes wholeheartedly in the idea. “The shark spat me out, didn’t he?” he says. “I was too bony for him.”
Over the past few decades the number of great white shark attacks worldwide has increased steadily, according to the International Shark Attack File. This is at least partly because more people (divers, surfers, swimmers) are using the water.
Fatal attacks, however, have decreased. Forty years ago more than half of all attack victims died; today more than four out of five victims survive. Improvements in communications and emergency medical care have, of course, saved many lives, but Peter Klimley believes that in several cases the sharks have simply changed their minds. “Can you imagine?” he said. “These sharks are seizing people and holding them to make this decision. They strike and hold and release.”
At the moment science accepts about 400 species of sharks, but the number changes as new species are discovered. Of all known species, only four attack human beings with any frequency: bull sharks, tiger sharks, oceanic whitetips, and great whites.
The old adage is true: A swimmer has a better chance of being struck by lightning than killed by a shark. And around the world many, many more people die every year from bee stings, snakebites, falling off ladders, or drowning in bathtubs than from shark attack … none of which, to be sure, detracts from the ghastly, visceral horror of being eaten by a huge fish, but all of which should give some comfort to the recreational swimmer.
In Australia, between 1876 and 1999, 52 attacks by great whites were recorded, and of them 27 were fatal. In the Mediterranean Sea since 1900 there have been 23 reliably recorded encounters with great whites, including one in 1909 in which the remains of two adults and a child were found inside a single 15-foot-long female shark caught off Augusta, Sicily.
Curiously, there has been relatively little progress over the past 50 years in the development of shark repellents. Dyes have been tried; so have chemicals and bubble curtains. The current state of the art uses electricity. So far, though, nothing has been prove
d to discourage a hungry great white in full attack.
We went to South Africa in the southern winter because of a phenomenon long known to locals but only recently deemed significant by researchers: In wintertime great whites gather in large numbers in a few bays in a little pocket between the Cape of Good Hope and Danger Point.
“The warm Agulhas Current sweeps down the east coast of Africa, out of the Indian Ocean,” Andre Hartman explained, “and meets the cold Benguela Current that flows up the west coast. Where the currents mix, there’s a temperate zone in False Bay, Gansbaai, and Kleinbaai, and sharks gather there in the winter. The temperature seems to suit them.”
So does the abundance of yearling South African fur seals, which swarm over rocky islands in the bays and provide a smorgasbord for the sharks.
We drove from Cape Town to False Bay, so named perhaps because early explorers who rounded the Cape of Good Hope thought that their next landfall would be India—until they bumped into the eastern shore of the bay, 20 miles away. Here Robert Lawrence and Chris Fallows run a modest cage-diving operation. For roughly a hundred dollars the young men will take visitors and scientists a few miles offshore and show them great white sharks from their choice of shelters: a small boat or an even smaller cage. They promised to show us behavior that, till now, we all had believed was the stuff of extreme rarity, if not outright legend.
We crowded into two boats and left the dock as day was breaking. It took us only 30 minutes to approach Seal Island, and we smelled it long before we saw it. Some 84,000 fur seals make their home here, and they covered every inch of the barren rock, barking, lounging, squabbling, and sliding clumsily into the water, where they metamorphosed into creatures of sleek and sinuous beauty.
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