by Carl Safina
Catherine is now on the satellite phone, telling her mother, “It’s beautiful here. I’ve seen seals, turtles; I’m doing nest checks on the birds and stuff. Over.”
“That’s great! I’m so happy for you. Can I send you anything? Over.”
“A little camera would be awesome. Over.”
“O.K., will do. I love you. Over.”
“Love you too. Over—and out.”
Meanwhile, Greg is telling us how he came to produce special films for the National Geographic Society, explaining that he’d become fascinated with fish as a child. “But,” he adds, “I was derailed for a lot of years in college. I was convinced I couldn’t be a marine biologist. My father had scared me: ‘no jobs, no future, no money.’ He wanted me to get into law. And I did a prelaw curriculum. But after a couple of years, I just realized: Dammit, I want to do marine biology.” So he earned a master’s in his desired field. His main invention for animal study has been the “critter cam,” a camera that attaches by suction to marine animals. “One day I saw a shark go by with a remora attached to it, and suddenly a light bulb went on: if I built a camera body with a suction attachment like a remora has on its head for hitchhiking on sharks’ bodies, we would have access to a new world of underwater time and space.” This allows the animal to be the filmmaker, giving us unprecedented views of what creatures do underwater. For instance, Greg says that with the camera, “We were amazed to learn that the Monk Seals here, instead of chasing fish, are overturning rocks on the bottom and rooting around in the sand, eating a lot of eels and octopuses.”
Here’s something interesting about Monk Seals and sharks: there’s a small shark in these waters that lives a kind of parasitic existence. It rushes in to hit a larger animal like a seal or dolphin or whale, and twists out a circular, palm-sized scoop of flesh, leaving a round scar. It’s actually called a Cookiecutter Shark. Monk Seals generally don’t get bitten by Cookiecutters until they’re about two years old. Presumably, until that time they’re not in the deeper water where Cookie monsters live. It may take the seals that long to develop the lung capacity and skills to dive to between two hundred and five hundred feet.
Monk Seals appear to do most of their hunting at night—that’s where those big eyes come into play—which is when lobsters and octopuses are out. They eat perhaps the widest diet of any marine mammal: roughly forty prey species, from pelagic squid to fish, crabs, and the aforementioned lobsters and octopuses.
Greg concludes, “And so we’ve found, surprisingly, that these seals aren’t foraging in the shallows, which everyone thought was their ‘critical habitat.’ They’re going out deep—where people are fishing.”
BEFORE DAWN I REALIZE the rains seem finally to have ended. For the seabirds, it’s been a trial by water. The surviving youngsters might as well get used to it. Despite the forays of frigatebirds, so many Sooty Tern chicks remain alive that windrows of them move through the vegetation ahead of me, fanning out of my way. At first light, the eastern half of the runway is cloaked in a carpet of adult Sooties—probably fifty thousand. Birds begin drifting away from the island in the half-light, silhouetted against the morning. As sunlight begins flooding the sky, birds continue peeling off the runway in a great confusion of wings and deafening sound, until terns so fill the sky that the island seems to smoke.
The Sooties are still so loud by midmorning that I can’t hear the plane approaching. Alarmed, their collective roar is earsplitting. Off the plane comes National Geographic cameraman Bill Mills, and shark researchers Chris Lowe and Brad Wetherbee. They will be collaborating on the Tiger Shark film.
Chris Lowe, age thirty-five, has been studying Hawaiian sharks for seven years. He’s thin and supple, wears a mustache and a goatee, is soft-spoken, bespectacled, and thoughtful. He grew up on the New England island of Martha’s Vineyard, in a family with a two-hundred-year-old fishing tradition. Chris’s uncle operated the last coastal schooner in New England. His grandfather, a commercial fisherman who couldn’t swim, lost a son and a brother to drowning in fishing accidents. “When my grandfather started, he made a living fishing with just hand lines, no nets. He can take you to the beach and point and say, ‘You see that buoy? We used to catch cod this big there.’ They used to go just five miles offshore to harpoon Swordfish. That’s all gone now, too.”
So Chris’s route to fish research was a logical extension of his family background. “On Martha’s Vineyard there wasn’t a whole lot else for a kid to do besides fishing. I started reading books, one thing led to another, and I ended up doing science.” Chris got fascinated with sharks and their relatives the rays. As a graduate student, he studied electric rays in southern California. “Those things are just incredible. Think about an animal that can produce and deliver fifty volts—enough to make a fish contract so violently its spinal column snaps—yet itself is immune to the effects of that kind of power. I studied it, and I can tell you: nobody’s ever figured out how they do it.” Chris adds that the electric discharge is energetically very expensive for them to produce. (Even rays have high electric bills.) Consequently, the rays are conservative with their power. For defense they use small pulses, just enough to discourage a potential predator. But when catching food they give it all they’ve got.
Chris says, “Here’s what else amazes me: in most ways, sharks and rays are the same as other animals—they eat, mate, give birth. But in other ways they’re incredibly unique. They have sensory capabilities no other animals have. They can detect animals hidden in sand by perceiving the weak electrical fields living things produce. Some sharks apparently migrate by orienting to the very weak electrical fields created by the friction of water masses.”
Chris’s research partner, Brad Wetherbee, thirty-nine, is solidly built and clean-shaven, with close-cropped dark hair. Brad’s worked in Hawaii for nine years, including his Ph.D. research at the University of Hawaii. He says, “When I was younger, like most people I thought sharks were fascinating because they were dangerous. Later, I realized sharks are not well studied compared to most fish. As a scientist, you could pretty much pick a topic and gain a huge amount of information that had never been known before. They have unique adaptations for reproduction, internal salt balancing, and sensory perceptions. People think they’re primitive, but they’re quite remarkable.”
For his dissertation, Brad studied adaptations of deep-dwelling sharks, some living as far down as forty-five hundred feet. “Their eyes, and many other parts, are adapted to the specific depths and pressures they live at. This totally fascinates me. Shallow-water sharks keep swimming to avoid sinking. But for deep-sea dwellers, there isn’t enough food to be constantly on the go. So deep-sea sharks have to find some other way to avoid sinking. The thing is, the deeper you go, the denser the water is. So the bodies of sharks that live deeper are denser than sharks living shallower. Yet I found that all deep-water sharks are neutrally buoyant—they neither sink nor float—regardless of the depth and water pressure. Different sharks accomplish this in different ways. Most use large amounts of oils stored in the liver, but others fill their muscles with oil, and some flood their bodies with water. And young ones achieve neutral buoyancy differently than old ones; and males do it differently than females. In some species males live deeper than females, or young ones live at different depths than older ones. Their physiology is woven into the ecology of the animal. The whole process is amazingly dynamic and complex.”
WITH TIME FOR AN EVENING stroll, I hit the runway just before sunset, with Shiway and turtle researcher Julie Rocho. Julie’s just awakened from her all-day sleep for her all-night work. She’s wearing the unofficial uniform of Tern Island: a loose T-shirt and shorts over a bathing suit, and earrings in the form of her study animals.
Wedge-tailed Shearwaters, newly arriving, are clustered on the runway in two squadrons. I sit and count ninety-two in the first group, wondering where these shearwaters have been, the millions of square oceanic miles represented by the sight of a few dark bird
s. I know only that they spent the nonbreeding season off Central America then followed the equatorial current westward toward the islands to breed.
Newcomers accrue, gliding in with masterful, shearwatery grace. Fluid though they are in flight, they land with an abrupt halt; their feet seem to stick to the ground immediately upon touchdown, jarringly stopping their forward momentum. After that, they do not seem to walk so much as motor determinedly, head down, with a two-steps-at-a-time waddle. They seem greatly relieved when, after a few steps of progress, they sit back on their pink haunches.
Reticent and awkward though they are in gait, they are avid in ardor. Though most of them sit quietly most of the time, the main activity here is gentle mutual facial preening—and fornication. What the little Wedgies lack in ambulation, they make up in copulation. Most of these birds’ forward movement on the ground results from efforts to get to each other for neck nibbles or decidedly more intimate and energetic contact. They’re not above loving the one they’re with. Watch these two. After perhaps three minutes of vigorous “cloacal kissing” (the polite scientific term for rubbing genitals, which is itself a polite term) followed by a good preen, their bond seems weak. Their passion appears spent only briefly, and when they rejoin the larger flock, they reshuffle the deck. Many copulation attempts degenerate into immediate three-car pileups. Without watching for weeks and knowing the birds as tagged individuals, it would be impossible to understand their complex social dynamics. But at face value, they seem willing to court and preen just about anything that moves. We see presumed males going over to other birds who also seem to be males, judging by who tries getting on top. This is social climbing with a twist. We see a Wedgie preening the face of a Christmas Shearwater. This activity does not appear wrought from strong family values, but you have to admire their lack of bigotry. Between preenings, they sit still for long periods, their long, low, doleful moans rising and drifting on the wind. When I sit and imitate their moaning, four of them come over to me in little hops and pauses. One of them starts “preening” my sandal sole.
Julie, one of those rare people who is always finding something that gets a smile, observes jauntily, “Many people react badly to rejection. But these birds, they don’t get discouraged. There’s a lesson there.”
Shiway suddenly interjects, “I think that all the tube-nosed birds—the petrels, shearwaters, and albatrosses—have a musky smell, and that each species smells differently.” She continues, “The Bulwer’s Petrel has a very strong musky smell that I find very relaxing. I inhale it and it just makes me very happy.” She giggles a little nervously.
I say, “You sniff chicks?”
“Sometimes when we go out at night banding young albatrosses, I just inhale them,” she answers
If she was unashamed about sniffing birds at first, talking about it is only emboldening her.
“The Ashy Storm-Petrels worked with in California—they’re really teeny-tiny little birds—have a stronger scent, kind of oily. And,” she continues stridently, “I really like the way they smell.”
I nod.
She adds, “Not that I go around smelling birds all the time.”
No, no; nothing like that!
“I like to sniff the Ashy Storm-Petrels right around their little bellies, and the albatrosses smell best right around their head,” she says. “But the Bulwer’s Petrel,” Shiway adds, “I’ve never smelled anything like them before. Not ever.”
I’m trying to figure out whether this is a plea for help. But then Shiway says something simple that actually gathers this all together quite sensibly: “Other birds don’t smell as distinct to me as the tubenoses.”
Suddenly, I get it. Scent is important to bonding and individual recognition in many mammals, of course, and it’s important to attraction even in human couples. But tubenoses are among the few birds with a well-developed sense of smell. They use smell to find food, to locate their burrows, and probably to identify each other. Their distinct scents—which Shiway seems unusually sensitive to—help them find the right burrows and identify, and be identified among, their mates and young. It’s particularly interesting that Shiway says the albatrosses smell best around the head. They must think so, too; they spend so much time nibbling there. Some scientists have speculated that albatrosses like to preen each other around the head and neck because it helps them remember their individual scents. Lesson taken: when someone says something that seems crazy, listen carefully and search for the truth that might be in it.
ALL NIGHT EVERY NIGHT, I hear those Wedgies’ low voices from bed, playing the bass line to the Sooties’ frenetic bebop. At times the chorus gathers volume enough to wake me fully. A gecko might announce its presence in my bedroom by uttering an occasional chirp that sounds like a smoke alarm telling me the battery has run low. It can be maddening or pleasant. Choose to make it pleasant; let it blend with the moaning birds outside the window. I almost don’t want to sleep too soundly. I want to savor the soothing of all the call-and-response talking. But almost inevitably, I drift into a deep, pleasant, and richly dreamful animal-animated sleep.
TRACKS IN THE SEA
AMELIA HAS RUN OUT of ocean. Now, instead of water in every direction, the snowcapped volcanoes of Kamchatka’s heavily timbered continental coast pierce the horizon dead ahead. She swings along the lonely shore of this Russian wilderness frontier, passes through the Commander Islands, where Steller’s Sea Cows once grazed, and, on the longest day of the year, she enters the Bering Sea. Her chick, over twenty-five hundred miles away, no longer occurs to her.
Amelia’s chick remains here of course, near the porch steps, getting more handsome and grown-up looking every day. He has become a sleek young albatross with just a little ruff of down around his head and neck. When he vigorously exercises his now-long wings, they look like they could carry him. You get the feeling he has merely a psychological barrier to confront: the realization that he can fly. He daily gets closer and closer to cracking the flight code. One morning he begins flapping and hopping, as in the last few days, but then runs forward a little bit. And suddenly he lifts off, seeming effortless, and flies slowly, with very shallow wing beats, mostly lofted by wind. He lands about fifty feet away, easily and without ceremony. This is the first powered, forward-moving flight I’ve seen a youngster accomplish. Even this first little flight seems so graceful and right. He repeats the performance. Now there is no more hopping straight up. Now there is just running into the wind and actually flying forward, though never more than about fifty feet. Other albatrosses are still jumping vertically and flailing. There is a trick to getting purchase, to pitching the wings just right for digging into the air. So far, of the chicks I’ve noticed, he alone seems to have gotten the idea of how to go forward on those wings. It must be like being on skates the first time, where you simply shuffle your feet back and forth until you learn how to push off.
Amelia’s chick is still a few days away from leaving. His hunger is working both as a motivator and a constant reminder that he still can’t really go anywhere. For the time being we, too, are stranded and abandoned at French Frigate Shoals. But we don’t mind, because even by French Frigate Shoals standards, we have a very interesting day to look forward to. Today’s plan is to visit East Island in an effort to get a transmitter into a Tiger Shark, and to film it all for Greg Marshall’s National Geographic Television documentary.
Greg, Birget, cameraman Bill Mills, shark researchers Chris and Brad, and I—and a lot of gear—will crowd into two seventeen-foot outboard-powered skiffs for the crossing to East Island. Helping us ready the boats are albatross researcher Anthony Viggiano and seal researchers Mitch and Melissa.
Just loading the boats takes quite a while. Much of the gear is fragile and expensive. Bill is shooting with a $90,000 camera. He has a $4,000 soft waterproof case for shots shallower than eight feet deep. For deeper shots he has a hard aluminum housing costing $50,000. Meanwhile, everyone is talking sharks. Anthony, counting life preservers, is
saying, “From what I’ve seen, sharks are very deliberate animals. They are very wary and they notice things. Like, if you stand up in a boat they notice that. I don’t really see them as mindless feeding machines. We do a lot of snorkeling here, and I’ve never seen a Tiger Shark in the water with me; but many times when we anchor the boat a shark will come up and circle. So you know that they’re in the area. But they keep their distance.”
“They’re not shy if you’re a seal pup,” says Mitch. “During the most recent Galapagos Shark attack at Trig Island there were three sharks—five- to six-footers—with fins out and tails thrashing. Seeing it was both exciting and terrible. What got our attention was the mother at the shore, calling. The mother knew exactly what was going on, but there was nothing she could do about it. She went into the water and bit one of the sharks, which swam off a short distance, then came back. And then the pup appeared on the beach, lying very still, with flesh exposed and a pink line of blood running down the sand. The sharks were almost beaching themselves trying to drag it back into the water. One finally succeeded. Then another grabbed its entrails and swam away with them. They consumed the whole pup, and left a big slick of oil and a cloud of blood. The mother kept calling. She sounded pitiful.”
Melissa adds, “Another time I saw two sharks come in and the mom make a lunge at one of them and the other immediately try to grab the pup.”
That’s reminiscent of a time I saw two jackals separate a gazelle from her newborn calf by having one jackal fake an attack to draw the mother away, only to have the other rush in and actually grab the baby. Cooperative and group hunting is normally considered the domain of just a few mammals and birds, but certain fish sometimes do it—for example marlins, whose colored markings often light up to communicate to each other the beginning of an attack, and Bluefin Tuna, which sometimes swim in parabola-shaped bunting formations that probably represent the most organized grouping pattern in any fish. It’s interesting that these sharks might at times hunt cooperatively.
