The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks

by Casey, Susan

  Makos and great whites are cousins, two of the lamnid sharks, with salmon sharks and porbeagles rounding out the family. The lamnids are warm-blooded, unusual for a fish, but great if you happen to be a predator. Tunas are also warm-blooded, and it’s no accident that they, along with the lamnid sharks, are among the ocean’s sports stars—their muscles are always warmed up. So are their eyes, brains, and nervous systems. Makos, for instance, can swim sixty miles per hour and leap twenty feet into the air. Salmon sharks carve away as much as 25 percent of the annual salmon run in Alaska, and white sharks…well, we know what they can do. Warm-bloodedness also revs up digestion and, in particular, fat metabolism—a handy feature for an animal that habitually polishes off two-ton elephant seals. An efficient heating system known as the rete mirabile (Latin for “wonderful net”) keeps the bodies of lamnid sharks up to twenty degrees warmer than the water they’re swimming in, allowing them to hunt and travel in colder regions where they otherwise couldn’t survive. Cooling anything slows it down, so when the water is chillier, cold-blooded fish are at a disadvantage for dodging a souped-up mako with dinner in mind.

  Another characteristic these sharks share is a striking economy of movement. Powered by thick, scythe-shaped tails, their swimming motions appear effortless, almost as though a current was sweeping them along. And then there are the teeth. The lamnids all have serious arsenals in their mouths, arrayed in multiple rows. No spindly needles or snaggly hooks here. Adult white sharks have broad, flat, triangular teeth with distinct serrations, designed to tear twenty-pound gulps of flesh from large mammals. Makos and salmon sharks, with their daggerlike, nonserrated teeth, are better equipped for dining on fish. Because the teeth are embedded in cartilage rather than bone, they fall out with regularity. That’s what the extra rows are for. When a shark loses a tooth, the one behind it simply rotates forward like a bag of chips in a vending machine. An average shark loses thousands of teeth in its lifetime.

  One thing’s for sure: the sharks in these waters were earning a living. There was no lounging on the bottom (nurse sharks, wobbe-gongs) or garbage eating (bull sharks, tigers). Peter gave me his rundown on the locals: “Blues are graceful, the perfect shark. Makos are compact and edgy. Whites are just…cool.”

  Even to me, it was obvious that makos did not have the charisma of great whites, nor their haunting presence, although the fish was beautiful in its machine grace. Peter pulled in his line, not wanting to subject a hapless rockfish to the double indignity of being first hooked and then eaten alive. We watched the mako trying to look inconspicuous for a while, and then, eventually, it faded into the twilight depths.

  We both cast. Almost instantly, Peter pulled in a monstrosity. It was a cabezon, the toad of the sea. The fish was mottled brown and beige, with vicious-looking quills and a great beast of a head atop a long, snaky body. It looked at us with baleful eyes and unmistakable hatred. This one was almost three feet long, the heftiest we’d seen, although the cabezons and lings used to regularly grow five feet long. It was the same sad refrain here, as elsewhere: Those larger fish were gone now.

  Rockfish were especially vulnerable to overfishing because they tend to stay near one spot for their entire lives—and their lives could last more than one hundred years. When the long-liners and the bottom trawlers raked the area, the curmudgeonly rockfish stood no chance. Both fishing methods were still legal within the marine sanctuary.

  I heard the thunk of the gaff. Earlier, I’d halfheartedly expressed the desire to kill and clean my own catch, but after an attempt or two that resulted in fish being flung across the whaler, Peter had quietly taken over this chore and between the two of us there was no more talk of me gaining backwoods know-how.

  He knelt on the deck and cleaned the fish in several swift, almost savage motions. It had little teeth. Peter’s hands and forearms were smeared with dark blood, which he wiped on his pants. The process was fast and surgical—he wanted every last scrap of meat. This, to him, was the only justification for killing: because you needed to eat.

  This attitude put him at odds with some of his fellow biologists. To many specialists, the name of the game was “collecting,” taking a handful of whatever you found, or one of anything that seemed rare or unusual. In the past, being an ornithologist had basically meant being a good shot, striding through the marsh or the tundra or the jungle with a pair of binoculars in one hand and a 12-gauge shotgun in the other. A scientific journal called the Oologist summed up the philosophy in 1892: “The murre, common as it is, is a beautiful bird, and a nicely mounted specimen vies well with most seabirds in one’s collection.”

  As a rule, Peter was opposed to “collecting” and had butted heads with other biologists at the Farallones who’d wanted to bag some of the off-course migrants. However, he once worked on a Pacific seabird survey where it had been unavoidable, where the taking of a few individuals would truly help the entire species, and when that was the case, his rule was this: waste nothing. Every last snip of information needed to be gleaned. “We looked at every feather,” he recalled. “Took their stomachs out. Analyzed the contents. We learned everything we possibly could out of every death, and that was really important to me.”

  Peter simply hated waste of any kind. He was the island’s leftover king, and when it was his turn to cook dinner he’d make a kitchen-sink hash of whatever was languishing in the refrigerators. Sometimes meals would make three or four appearances at the table before people finally balked on the grounds of potential food poisoning. Only then would Peter throw the food out—which meant feeding it to the gulls. Scot had the same inclination, but on the mainland he took it even farther, pulling his truck over to the side of the road to scrape up roadkill deer. “If it’s warm, I’ll take it home,” he’d said to me, describing how he would skin and dress the squashed and dented critters, making jerky out of them, or vacuum-packing the meat. One time, he had actually discovered a dead great white shark washed ashore at nearby Limantour Beach and, research permit in hand, had performed an impromptu dissection. Afterward, he’d brought chunks of its meat to a barbecue. I was beginning to understand that people who lived this close to nature couldn’t afford to be sentimental about it. When you got right down to it, animals were food. In the aftermath of one particularly bloody shark attack, Peter had grabbed an abandoned morsel of elephant seal, taken it back to the house, and grilled it up with a few onions. “It was steaklike,” he recalled. “Very rich and oily with a bit of a liver aftertaste. Not bad, but you’d get tired of it quick.”

  He put the rockfish meat into a cooler built into the whaler’s side, flipped the carcass over the side, and wiped his hands on his pants again. “You know, I was always a little uneasy about eating the bottom fish around here. But I think it’s okay. No way am I eating the mussels though, man.” I understood his concern. We were fishing in the middle of America’s first and largest undersea nuclear waste dump.

  ONE OCTOBER EVENING IN 1980, PETER AND TWO OTHER BIOLOGISTS were cooking up some freshly caught rockfish and watching the news. Walter Cronkite came on. “Plutonium has entered the food chain,” he announced, with even more gravitas than usual. As he said it, the camera cut to an aerial shot of Southeast Farallon Island, panning right in on the roof of the house they were sitting in. The story had just broken, Cronkite reported, that a UC Santa Cruz biologist had discovered elevated levels of radiation in fish swimming among some of the 47,500 barrels of nuclear waste that the navy had dumped in a 540-square-mile area around the Farallones between 1946 and 1970. One fish registered ninety times the normal levels of plutonium, and another had five thousand times the “allowable” amount of radioactivity in its liver.

  Dinner preparations came to a halt. Peter took the rockfish outside and fed it to a gull named Pukey.

  The radioactive debris came from Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, near San Francisco, home of the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, and Los Alamos, birthplace of the atomic bomb. Hunters Point, in particular, had been s
o sloppy with its toxic byproducts that, since 1989 when it was declared a Superfund site, $338 million has been spent trying to clean it up. And the work continues.

  Although no records of the clandestine dumping were kept, the navy has claimed that the drums contain “low level” radioactive waste, things like the carcasses of test animals, paint scraps, old clothing, tainted lab equipment, gloves, and uniforms. Later, however, it was let slip that approximately six thousand barrels contained “special waste,” a euphemism for very bad news. Plutonium and uranium were most likely present in this high-potency batch, as was cesium, which is less toxic than the other two but still not something you’d want to sprinkle on your breakfast cereal. Even the “low level” stuff was known to contain phenols, cyanides, mercury, beryllium, tritium, strontium, thorium, and radioactive lead.

  Back in the early, heady A-bomb building days, no one really understood what kind of poisons they were dealing with—it didn’t help that even lethal doses of radiation were quiet and invisible and undetected by human senses. Attitudes were heart-breakingly nonchalant. Also, much of the work at places like Los Alamos and Hunters Point was conducted beneath such a cloak of secrecy that most of the staff were unaware of what was underfoot. A woman named Janie Gale, who worked in the Hunters Point nuclear lab’s library in 1948, outlined her degree of awareness in a newspaper interview: “They’d say ‘Oh, we had a spill today.’ I didn’t know what a spill was. I had no idea there was anything toxic at the shipyard. I never heard the word ‘decontamination.’ It was a shipyard and they repaired the ships, I thought.”

  They were repairing the ships, all right. In the late forties, at least sixty warships that had been used for atomic target practice in the South Pacific were towed back to Hunters Point for decontamination. After they were sandblasted and scoured with chlorinated lime, flushed with detergent, and doused with solvents, a dozen were still so hot they were deemed beyond hope, and plans were made to secretly sink them far out at sea. Present on this roster of lost causes was the USS Independence, a ten-thousand-ton aircraft carrier, one of the navy’s largest. In 1955 it was quietly scuttled in the Gulf of the Farallones.

  Originally, the navy maintained that it was buried in a classified “safe” place four hundred miles offshore. But people claimed to have seen the ship going down right outside of San Francisco Bay, and sure enough, a precisely warship-sized and -shaped object was identified by sonar only twenty miles from the Golden Gate Bridge. To make matters worse, before it was sunk it had been loaded up with extra nuclear waste, crammed from stem to stern with “mixed fission” products. Though no one can tell you exactly what “mixed fission” means, it’s likely to have included the most noxious remnants of the ship-cleaning operation. And some of the boats, including the Independence, had been so close to the mushroom clouds that their steel hulls had burst into flame.

  There has never been a thorough study of the effects this nightmarish payload might have on the neighboring marine life, which includes at least five commercial fisheries. The most commonly cited reason was lack of cash. Poking around among the barrels was a multimillion-dollar proposition and the money never seemed to be available. Nor were the expensive submersibles required to do the job. Locating the barrels posed another problem. They’d been dumped in water three hundred to six thousand feet deep along the edge of the continental shelf, an area threaded with submarine canyons and gullies, sheer drop-offs, and crennelated rock. Recently, new sonar technologies helped pinpoint the nooks and crannies where the barrels lay, and in 1991 the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spent a million dollars to hire a deepwater submersible named Sea Cliff. Three people could make the dive. Ed Ueber, head of the marine sanctuary and himself a former navy man, was one of them.

  When I’d first heard about the nuclear waste, I’d been stunned. Surely, I thought, even back in the clueless forties and fifties they’d known that there were better spots for atomic dumping than one of the world’s most fertile patches of ocean, a place that the government itself—going back to 1909 when Theodore Roosevelt had first declared the area a refuge—had designated worthy of extraspecial protection.

  The mystery of what was percolating its twenty-four-thousand-year half-life on the ocean floor at the Farallones grabbed me, and I’d sought out Ed Ueber to ask him what he’d seen down there. We met for beers at San Francisco’s Cliff House, sitting by the window on a day so clear you could make out Great Arch rock. Ueber, in his sixties, looked dapper in shirtsleeves and suspenders, and he gave off the warm vibe of your favorite college professor. He was completely, charmingly frank. In part, this might have had something to do with timing: he’d just stepped down from his post. Yet a survey of every interview he’d given on the issue proved him to be a straight-talking antibureaucrat by nature. He explained that despite pressure from environmental groups clamoring for an investigation, the government had shown a lack of enthusiasm for examining the barrels or the hot warship in any great detail. It was much easier to ignore them. (Anyway, it wasn’t like the fish were glowing.) Given how difficult it was to study the dump, there wasn’t enough data to prove that the marine life was dangerous to eat, or that the decaying barrels were anything to get alarmed about—and many parties preferred it that way. “We don’t know the basis of the situation, so we can’t say there’s a problem,” he said. “That’s like saying we don’t have mad cow disease because we haven’t tested for it.”

  The Sea Cliff’s dive concentrated on a nine-hundred-square-meter area that was estimated to be the resting place for 3,600 of the barrels. As expected, the underwater terrain was rugged, and as Ueber and the others dropped down 2,900 feet, the sinister-looking barrels loomed into view, fringed with barnacles, sponges, sea cucumbers, and anemones, and colonized by rockfish, bursting with all the reclaimed glory of an artificial reef. The report later stated that the drums ranged from intact to “completely deteriorated,” imploded by the pressure of the depths. A photograph on the adjacent page showed a sablefish, a commercial species, nestled up against one of the barrels. When the picture became public, suddenly the Japanese market no longer wanted these fish. Damage to the sablefish industry was estimated at ten million dollars.

  So it was not the biggest surprise to discover that since then, no large-scale studies had been undertaken. It didn’t help that the Sea Cliff had come up from one barrel site hot with radiation and had to go through decontamination itself. While there are no patently disastrous results in what’s been measured so far, only 15 percent of the dumping region has been examined. In some of the bottom-dwelling creatures that were sampled, background radiation levels were hundreds of times higher than normal. Furthermore, Ueber told me, the EPA had averaged those samples, combining readings from animals that lived closer to the barrels with those that didn’t, diluting much of the data.

  Maybe dropping atomic waste at sea will prove to have no obvious or devastating effects; maybe the ocean manages to just gulp it all down like a sour-tasting pill. More likely, though, the underwater radiation has been trickling up through the food chain. “No one knows what’s in those barrels,” Ueber had reminded me. “No one.” The U.S. Geological Survey report on what is now known as the Farallon Islands Radioactive Waste Dump spells it out chillingly: “The potential hazard the containers pose to the environment is unknown.”

  AS THE WEATHER TURNED, THE PERFECT WAVE BEGAN TO CURL ACROSS Shark Alley in a way that caught Peter’s eye. “I’ve seen my wave,” he told me. “I’ve seen it five or six times.” I’d heard him discussing plans over the radio with Brown, who, unlike Scot, was also itching to tow into Mirounga Bay. We were experiencing the season’s sweetest surf, and all over Northern California the big-name, big-wave surfers were out trolling around, looking for epic and undiscovered breaks. Mavericks, the surf mecca just south of here, near Half Moon Bay, was “kind of like old school now,” Peter had concluded. “It’s done. It’s crowded. Let’s make sure we get our
rides in before those guys get here.”

  There had been a Farallon reconnaissance mission by a group of surfers in November 2000, during a week when Peter was off the island. It so happened that the perfect wave was showing off when they arrived, and as they were watching it, growing excited, Groth had approached and warned them against trying anything, mentioning that he’d seen sharks on that spot only an hour before. As a test, a surfboard was placed in the water. Almost instantly the board was hammered—and not gently. The surfers had left abruptly, the story had made the rounds, and, according to Peter, “Nobody from the outside has thought about it since.”

  But the first-ride honors wouldn’t go unclaimed forever. As a sport, surfing was ever more competitive, the pressure to one-up the last guy was excruciating, and, furthermore, there were always the insiders to worry about. “Don’t scoop me on it man,” I’d heard Peter say to Brown, with a bit of an edge to his voice. After all, Brown and Nat were now spending more time out here during the fall than anyone. And they were both expert surfers.

  “No man, you’re the first guy.”

  But for the time being, Peter had his hands full on shore. An attempt to plug in a power washer had blown out the island’s electricity. And earlier, some bricks that were piled upstairs in the coast guard house had fallen through the floor to the kitchen below. Peter radioed in a cranky mood, grumbling about the sudden spate of emergency repairs. To be fair, lately things had been running more smoothly than usual, thanks to recent upgrades to the power system and the house, and a strict maintenance regime. Even in its finest shape, however, the island produced a laundry list of fix-it headaches: faulty valves, panels blown off by storms, sudden disasters involving plumbing, leaks, clogged filters, flashing warning lights on balky generators, contaminated fuel, corroded paint, busted pumps, snapped cables, endlessly malfunctioning batteries. There was propane to hook up and solar panels to be scraped of gull droppings and ozonator filters to be cleaned and a gravity tank, whatever that was, to be pumped. The houses got coated with a green algae that had to be blasted off with a high-pressure hose. After a day or two, the algae returned.