Behind the boat we trolled a plastic seal with a videotape camera mounted in its belly, pointing downward.
We settled down to wait, confident that it would be hours before we.…
The water erupted. A gigantic body blasted through the surface—white beneath, gunmetal blue above, glinting in the dawn sunlight—with the seal decoy in its jaws. The shark flipped completely over, hit the water with a tremendous splash, and disappeared.
Before anyone could speak, it happened again: a rush from the dark, an explosion at the surface, a balletic somersault, a splash.
“The violence!” Rodney said. “My lord, the violence! We know they attack from below. We know they eat seals. But the violence!” He paused, then said, “If I’d seen this behavior soon after my attack, I tell you, today I’d be a first-class golfer.”
It was the breaching that none of us had ever seen, the sheer power of the attack that heaved the huge body out of the water. I turned to Rob and asked, “Does this happen often?”
“Every day,” he said. “Early in the day and late, morning and evening, when the seals leave the island to feed and when they come back. There’s.…”
Another shark soared into the air. This time the seal in its jaws was not one of our decoys.
“As I was saying,” Rob resumed with a wan smile, “there’s what you could call a ring of peril about a hundred yards wide around the island. The sharks patrol it. The seals know it.”
Indeed, as we watched, half a dozen seals slid off the rock and gathered at the surf line. All at once they disappeared. A few moments later they reappeared, but not together, each on its own a couple of hundred yards out in the water … outside the ring, I supposed.
No one knew why these great white sharks breached during the hunt, while the sharks Rodney had studied in Australia for 35 years didn’t. I could not recall hearing about populations of white sharks that breached so regularly and ferociously, nor could Rocky Strong, a young doctoral candidate who had joined us a few days earlier to work on a National Geographic Society grant to study white shark behavior.
Rocky did, however, find the breaching to be a possible cause for concern. “Each unsuccessful breach consumes a tremendous amount of energy,” he said. “If there’s a lot of debris on the surface, these guys could conceivably wipe themselves out chasing shadows.”
Two hours farther up the coast, in Gansbaai, shark-watching and cage-diving operations contribute mightily to the economy. Like False Bay, Gansbaai has a large seal colony close to shore, on Geyser Island, and in a channel around the island that has come to be known as Shark Alley. Here, apparently because the water is slightly shallower (not as much runway room), the sharks don’t usually breach; instead, they seem to swarm.
J. P. Botha, co-owner of Marine Dynamics, the company that took us out, told me that most of the operators are former commercial fishermen or abalone divers.
“We’re no different from the rest of the world,” he said. “Too many people, too few fish. Catches are down everywhere. Great white shark tourism—ecotourism, if you will—is a better business than fishing.”
Ecotourism is also joining the vanguard of research. More and more these days it is the naturalists and field operators, guides and dive masters who are contributing to the accumulation of practical knowledge about great whites. To cite just one example: Until recently scientists thought that the scars that mar nearly every mature shark were acquired either from prey that fought back or from ritual biting by prospective mates. Now there is eyewitness testimony of aggressive social interaction between sharks and also of spectacular threat displays that take the place of major—potentially fatal—encounters with other white sharks.
So we are learning—bit by bit, anecdote by anecdote—more and more about these magnificent predators. We must hope that we’re learning enough to save them before, through ignorance and inadvertence, we destroy them.
Great white sharks have survived, virtually unchanged, for millions of years. They are as highly evolved, as perfectly in tune with their environment as any living thing on the planet. For them to be driven to extinction by man, a relative newcomer, would be more than an ecological tragedy; it would be a moral travesty.
“Gift From the Sea”
by Peter Benchley
National Geographic, August 2005
Thirty years ago this summer, when the movie version of my novel Jaws was released, few people (including me) knew very much about great white sharks. For hundreds of generations, we humans have been taught to fear and loathe sharks, and the movie touched a nerve of horror. Ironically, though, Jaws also sparked a fascination with sharks that transcended this terror. In the past three decades a constituency has emerged dedicated to preserving and protecting sharks rather than destroying them.
Now something long thought impossible has happened: A great white shark was successfully held in captivity for several months. In August 2004 a very young female great white was caught accidentally in a fisherman’s net off Huntington Beach, California, then kept in an ocean pen for 25 days. Transferred to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, she thrived in the million-gallon Outer Bay Exhibit. Perhaps she was too young to understand that the enormous tank was not her natural environment, because she didn’t bash her head against the walls in an attempt to swim away, as others of her kind have done. And she began to feed almost immediately on salmon offered to her on a pole. In the months that followed, the shark incurred no serious injuries, caught no diseases, and grew noticeably larger, shattering all records for great whites in captivity. The longest any other great white has been held was 16 days.
Scientists were interested in how well the young shark responded to cues for food, and they were amazed at the détente she established with the tunas, barracudas, turtles, and other sharks that were her tankmates. Until February 23, that is, when she bit and killed a soupfin shark. As she grew bigger and her behavior grew more aggressive, officials at the aquarium knew the time had come.
On March 31, after 198 days in the aquarium, the great white shark was outfitted with a transmitter and released into the Pacific. The transmitter was programmed to pop off after 30 days, and on May 5 researchers retrieved it 25 miles off Point Arguello, south of Monterey. It indicated that the shark had traveled more than 100 miles offshore and gone as deep as 800 feet.
Scientists still have a lot to learn about sharks, especially great whites; scarce in the best of times, they are nowadays considered vulnerable. Scientists do know that sharks are critical to ocean health. Remove any significant animal from the marine food chain and you risk disrupting the balance of nature; remove the top predator, and the order of life in the oceans could be altered in catastrophic and unimaginable ways. For now, though, it’s nice to think about the magnificent creature that thrilled the crowds at the Monterey Bay Aquarium patrolling the oceans again.
For Wendy
By Peter Benchley:
TIME AND A TICKET
JAWS
THE DEEP
THE ISLAND
THE GIRL OF THE SEA OF CORTEZ
Q CLEARANCE
RUMMIES
BEAST
WHITE SHARK
SHARK TROUBLE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Benchley belonged to one of America’s most celebrated literary families: his grandfather was the humorist Robert Benchley and his father the novelist Nathaniel Benchley. His interest in the sea began at the age of nine during summers on Nantucket and led to his research into sharks and the writing of Jaws. He went on to write other bestsellers, including The Deep, Q Clearance, Beast, and Shark Trouble. Benchley died in 2006.
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