by Casey, Susan
Even the word shark is sublime, sleek and cutting and without frills, like a stick whittled into a sharp point. Its origins are not known for sure, but one theory traces it to the Mayan word Xoc, the name of a demon god that resembled a fish. Another popular theory holds that shark is related to the German schurke, which means “shifty criminal.” The word didn’t come into usage until AD 1570, though, so it wasn’t available to the ancient Greeks and Romans when they became aware of the concept that a fish could tear you apart. There were references to oceangoing men chewed down to their ankles, and the odd drawing of someone in the water being bitten in half. But they didn’t know much more than that. So they made stuff up.
In Pliny the Elder’s thirty-seven-volume natural history, which appeared in AD 78, the Roman scholar speculated that fossilized sharks’ teeth, which were then (and are still) found in significant quantities on land, rained from the sky during lunar eclipses. Later, a more sophisticated theory came along: The teeth were the tongues of serpents that had been turned to stone by Saint Paul on the island of Malta. They became known as glossopetrae (tongue stones) and were thought to have magical properties, most notably the ability to counteract venom and other toxins. Given that poisoning folks was a favored pastime, the teeth became popular as jewelry and talismans and were often sewn into special pockets in a person’s clothing. It wasn’t until the mid–seventeenth century that a Danish scientist named Steno deduced their true origin: He’d had the unusual opportunity to dissect the head of a great white shark that was captured off the coast of Italy and brought into the Florentine court, and got what was likely one of the first chances to examine its teeth.
About a century later, the great Swedish naturalist Linnaeus created the scientific nomenclature system, a universal language by which all living creatures are classified. Finally, the great white shark had an official title: Squalus carcharias. Later, when more shark species had been identified, this was refined to Carcharodon carcharias, which means “ragged tooth.”
Certainly, no one could have guessed that the ancestors of these raggedy-toothed animals had survived at least four global mass extinctions and been patrolling the seas since the Devonian period, 400 million years ago. That era, 200 million years before the first dinosaurs put in an appearance and 395 million years before our ancestors clomped into the Great Rift Valley, is now known as the “Age of Fishes,” because there were so many oddities swimming and slithering around, as though nature was previewing various designs. There were eel-like fish and fishlike eels and giant sea scorpions and creatures with armored shields wrapped around their heads, and extravagant dentition for all. Bony fishes had been around for a while (150 million years, give or take a few) when a new line of cartilaginous fishes, or sharks, made their debut in the Devonian. The sharks were bad news for the other fish—perfect predators right out of the box. There was the Dunkleosteus (loosely translated: “terrible fish”), over seventeen feet long and sporting protective plating and self-sharpening hatchet jaws; there was the Cladoselache, a six-foot-long tube of muscle fronted by a curtain of fangs. Some of the late Devonian fish made it onto land and evolved into four-leggeds.
And the party was just getting started. The Carboniferous period which followed—now referred to as the “Golden Age of Sharks”—featured such unique creatures as Helicoprion, a shark with a wheel of teeth that precisely resembled a buzz saw, and Edestus giganteus, a twenty-foot-long hyperpredator with teeth that protruded beyond its jaw like a pair of Ginsu pinking shears. But undoubtedly the most impressive set of teeth to have ever graced the Earth belonged to a shark called Carcharodon megalodon, which lived between 20 million and 1.5 million years ago—yesterday, basically, when you put it into perspective. Megalodon is best imagined as a great white blown up to parade-float size. Its teeth, which could exceed seven inches in length, are plentiful enough to have become a fixture on eBay (though the most highly preserved specimens sell for lavish amounts of cash among fossil collectors). A large megalodon tooth is the size and weight of a child’s liver, and they’re broadly triangular, with serrations, just like the white shark’s. But there’s one significant difference: Chompers this size indicate jaws large enough for a quarter horse to stand in without nicking its head.
It’s hard enough to conjure up the true scale of a Sister, a twenty-foot-long, eight-foot-wide, six-foot-deep animal. Consider for a moment a fifty-foot version of same. Megalodon is candy to the cryptozoological set, who love to imagine that somewhere in the unexplored Challenger Deep, skulking in the Marianas Trench or some such unfathomable abyss, it still lives. After all, other long-lost and unknown creatures have been retrieved from the depths. When a brand-new shark called the megamouth, a fourteen-foot weirdo with Jaggeresque lips the size of Chevrolet bumpers, was hauled up in 1976, no one had ever seen anything like it. And when a coelacanth, member of a species thought to have been extinct for at least eighty million years, was caught off the South African coast in 1938, people began to wonder what else was still out there.
But sadly for monster lovers, by general consensus megalodon has flatlined. Hiding, even in the pit of the sea, would be tough for a fifty-foot fish, but more important, megalodon never adapted for the deep water. If Meg was still around, she’d be more likely to hang out near pods of whales, her primary food source. Anyway, a piece of good news for surfers: There’s not a shred of evidence pointing to megalodon’s present-day existence.
And so it has fallen to great white sharks, which appeared in their current form about eleven million years ago, to occupy the bean-shaped niblet of our cerebral cortex reserved for fear of being eaten by something—particularly something that lurks, hidden, in another element, waiting to burst into ours. Great white sharks, emerging out of lightless depths with a maniac smile, neatly encapsulate every fear on our list. And given that they’ve lived far longer than we have, it seems reasonable to think that in some way these sharks shaped human evolution, that megalodon coming at you like a bullet train was a very good reason for quickly crawling out of the ocean in the first place.
In any case, it’s not just me that’s a little bit fascinated by them. Throughout cultures sharks have been worshiped as gods and feared as devils without much neutral ground in between. Pacific islanders considered sharks to be reincarnations of the dead and offered them human sacrifices served up on underwater altars. Religious wars occasionally broke out between tribes when one of them barbecued the species of shark that was another tribe’s sacred totem. The Hawaiians were in on this too; they had several shark gods, including Kamohoali’i, whom they credited with the invention of surfing. And when the navy began to construct its base at Pearl Harbor, workers stumbled across underwater remains of pens where, it was discovered, men faced off against sharks in aquatic gladiatorial matches. The largest pen covered approximately four acres and was encircled with lava stones. Given that the shark was in its own element, playing with a full deck of teeth, and the men had to hold their breath and fight with a weapon not unlike a sawed-off broomstick, odds favored the shark.
Which was for the best, perhaps, because pissing off a shark was considered extremely bad juju. Pearl divers in the western Pacific covered themselves with tattoos intended to placate the shark gods and purchased the blessings of a “shark charmer” before entering the water. Samoans specifically worshiped the great white and hung its effigies from trees; Vietnamese fishermen referred extra politely to sharks as Ca Ong (Sir Fish). European sailors believed that sharks had the power to foretell disaster; when one was seen trailing a ship, it was cause for alarm. As usual, the ancient Aztecs went farther than anyone. They believed that planet Earth actually was a shark named Cipactli.
There are 460 known species of shark swimming around today, and they’re almost as preposterous and diverse as they were in the Carboniferous. We’ve got angel sharks that are flat, like shark bath mats; green lantern sharks the size of goldfish; reclusive Greenland sharks living under ice with their odd, mottled skin and thei
r poisonous flesh; goblin sharks with what looks like a pink letter opener affixed to their heads; sawfish with their chainsaw noses—it’s a circus of evolutionary panache, a wild bonanza of fish. We’re scared of most of them, though many look more frightening than they really are (thresher, nurse), and it would be silly to fear the likes of a tiny houndshark, which has flat teeth and is thus referred to as a “gummy.” Much of the cultural angst centers on the four shark species that have repeatedly ingested humans: the tiger, the bull, the oceanic whitetip, and, of course, the great white.
It’s now becoming clear that white sharks are not malevolent, indiscriminate robohunters—in fact, they exhibit certain behaviors more appropriate for mammals than fish. For instance, they can discern shapes. Over the years, Scot had determined that the sharks wouldn’t attack a square decoy, nor one designed to look like a mola-mola sunfish, but when a surfboard or the ill-fated Buoyhead Bob or a seal-shaped piece of carpet were set out, these things would at least be investigated, if not, to quote Peter, “whaled on.” A great white’s vision is obviously far more developed than anybody realized—no other shark lifts its head out of the water as if to size up its surroundings. The ability to see well, on top of their hair-trigger sense for detecting the subtlest electrical impulses, enables white sharks to tweak their hunting strategies on the fly. And then there’s the image-defying aura of gentleness they give off when they’re not hunting. Everyone who has ever encountered one—except, of course, for those who’ve been attacked—mentions it with a puzzled shake of the head.
More intriguing still to the biologists was the relationship the Farallon sharks seemed to have with one another. They weren’t organized pack hunters, like orcas, but they were definitely keeping an eye on their neighbors and staying in what Scot referred to as “loose aggregations.” Thus, when an attack took place, all the sharks in the area knew about it, and they went straight to the scene. Even if there was a bit of a traffic jam at the carcass, they didn’t get worked up into a feeding frenzy. Rather, they did something more interesting. They established a firm but polite buffet line according to hierarchy: the larger the shark, the more preferred its position. Oh, there might be attempts to cut the line, with smaller sharks trying to dart in and grab a quick mouthful, but this was a chancy strategy and some of the Rat Packers had missing pieces of fins to prove it. According to the great white shark rules of the road, Sisters had the right-of-way at a kill, with Rat Packers orbiting at a respectful distance, cadging leftovers.
Admittedly, the sharks weren’t doing quadratic equations out there and no one was suggesting a snuggle, but every day at the Farallones these animals were demonstrating far more nuance and intelligence than they were supposed to have. Another thing they weren’t supposed to have is a personality. And yet one of the most intriguing discoveries of the Shark Project was that they did. There were aggressors and there were clowns; there were mellow sharks and peevish sharks and sharks that meant absolute bloody business. Scot and Peter knew this to be true firsthand, as did Ron; it wasn’t some anthropomorphic fantasy born of being whapped in the head one too many times by the gulls. I found the notion of shark character irresistible and raised the subject at every opportunity.
In an Animal Planet show about the Farallon sharks filmed in 1999, Scot admitted to the camera crew that he and Peter were emotionally involved in their study: “It’s unexpected to get on a personal level with the sharks,” he said, looking a bit sheepish. “It’s turned into more than just research. We’ve actually got a relationship with them.” Later in the same program, Scot and the South African shark researchers Chris Fallows and Rob Lawrence discussed this subject at some length. “So what do you think of this personalities-in-white-sharks thing?” Scot asked them. “Did you expect to see this? Because it kind of surprised the heck out of us.” The two South Africans agreed entirely; every shark was different. They went on to describe one of their study animals, a big Sister named Rasta, as “the sort of shark you want to just jump in and hug. It’s the greatest animal on Earth. Whenever it comes to the boat you’re just so happy, like a little kid.”
Don’t look to read an academic paper about this anytime soon, though. Scientists tend to squirm when the question of individual personalities in animals is introduced, even though anyone who owns a dog or a cat knows they can be as different as Caligula and Santa Claus, tightly wound little beasts with long lists of quirks and habits and moods. But great white sharks?
Or how about western gulls?
The subject of animal character came up again at dinner that night, probably because I brought it up. As the fajitas were being assembled and the wine was being poured, I asked, “So, do you think the gulls have individual personalities?” Everyone began to talk at once. As it happened, chronicling gull notoriety on Southeast Farallon made for hours of memorable dinner conversation, though perhaps not the kind of thing you’d want to discuss over squab at Le Cirque. Like the sharks, the same gulls returned here annually, and over the years some had become known for sociopathic behavior. Peter, who’d been watching the resident flock for more than twenty years, had seen it all.
There was Manson, who ate his own chicks, and Troll, who exacted a hefty penalty on anyone who passed by. The Silent Stalker was one of the few gulls that didn’t scream threats; he would sneak up stealthily and then, without warning, go for the back of a person’s head. Each gull had its preferred attack technique. The Nibbler favored a sharp bite to the Achilles tendon, while the Shitmeister would swoop low, unloading his special delivery. And then there was Spike.
In a colony where any shoebox of space was apportioned by vicious thuggery, Spike’s territory ranged across the entire front of the house, an area wide enough for half a dozen gull families. He was an auklet serial killer and a relentless PIH heavy, and when the PRBO biologists came in or out the front door they’d inevitably encounter Spike shrieking hysterically, his entire face covered in blood, surrounded by an array of little carcasses. His auklet victims were meant to feed his chicks, but he would regurgitate them whole, so that the meal the baby gulls encountered was a solid, slimy mound approximately their own size. Spike’s chicks usually didn’t make it.
Even the average gulls demonstrated the same variety of behavioral patterns you’d find in any cross section of humans. There were birds that were conscientious parents and others that seemed wholly unconcerned when their chicks went missing. There were extramarital gull affairs and bitter gull divorces, homosexual gull couplings, gull spinsters and rapists and nerds. There were, of course, countless thieves. Neuroses and insecurities were especially obvious on the concrete helipad near the coast guard house where the single gulls hung out, hoping to bag a mate. Because this was such a lousy place to breed—fully exposed, no nest materials handily available—only the lowliest misanthropes skulked around, hoping to trade up and out at the earliest chance. Peter compared it to the sidelines at a high school prom.
I’d noticed that, while all the biologists had encountered stand-out characters, they grappled with the notion of the animals as individuals. In large part this seemed like a defense mechanism. So many animals died, inevitably, that caring about them one-on-one—rather than simply noting down the numbers on their tags or the study plots in which they lived—simply hurt too much. But the alternative, adopting an attitude as dry as a six-month-old auklet carcass, made science itself seem callous.
Peter approached the issue with a sort of big-tent philosophy. “They’re animals. We’re animals,” he said. “We have opposable thumbs and a brain but as far as life on Earth goes, no one thing is better or worse than another.” He paused to pour a glass of organic merlot. “I hate the word anthropomorphism. It should be the other way around. Not how animals are like humans, but how humans are like animals.”
MORNING SUN WASHED ACROSS EAST LANDING. I STOOD HOLDING MY paintbrush as Peter opened two cans of a rubbery, barnacle-resistant paint intended specifically for boat hulls. Black had been the only color in stock
, and as we began slapping it onto the whaler, covering the sunnier blue that had been there before, the boat underwent a personality change. After a few strokes, Peter stood back and admired the transformation. “Now it looks more like a real workboat and less like a yuppie fishing boat,” he said with satisfaction. The word yuppie was Peter’s deepest insult, synonymous with every cultural wrong, aimed at those who behaved like spoiled, soft-palmed candyasses with misplaced superiority complexes. People who fit that description possessed only a fraction of the character strength of the average working Joe (or selfless biologist), Peter felt; they had their priorities all wrong and wouldn’t last a day at a place like the Farallones. It was a harsh generalization, and though I knew that Peter lived simply and had struggled with lack of means in the past, I was struck by the force of his dislike. While chasing birds he had hitchhiked through some of the most desolate places imaginable—Nicaraguan jungles, Indian slums, Samoan fruit bat colonies—but when asked to name the least likable place he’d seen in the world, he instantly pointed to an affluent California suburb: “Walnut Creek. No question.”
He lay on his back beneath the whaler, brushing the center of the hull as toxic paint dripped down onto his clothes, hair, and skin. My sunglasses were flecked with black, and I was marveling at my painting ineptitude when, out of nowhere, Peter mentioned that he intended to surf the Farallones this year. During shark season. At some point, apparently, the idea had gone from an unlikely fantasy to a full-on plan. I was shocked by the matter-of-fact way he announced it, but then I remembered a conversation I’d had with another biologist whom I’d called to check some information, a woman who was familiar with Peter’s work. She seemed amazed to hear that I actually knew him, and gave the impression that his reputation was larger than life. “He’s a wild man!” she’d said. I was beginning to understand this assessment.
