Shark Trouble: True Stories and Lessons About the Sea

by Peter Benchley

  For the first few weeks, nothing seemed much different. Fish and lobsters were caught and sold, money was earned and money was spent, and life continued as before.

  Then fishermen began to notice that they were catching fewer lobsters in the pots. Slowly at first, then more rapidly, the number of lobsters was declining. Often lobster fishermen found in their pots not lobsters but octopuses. They had never paid attention to octopuses before. Now the octopuses seemed to be everywhere.

  Within a month or two, the villagers realized that the number of sea lions had increased, too, especially young ones. As the sea lion population grew, the number of fish caught by the village’s fishermen declined. In itself, this was no mystery: sea lions subsist on fish, so as their numbers increased, they took more and more fish from the sea.

  The mystery was, why had the sea lion population exploded?

  Soon there were so many sea lions that they outgrew their rocky point and spread back toward the village. Some took up residence on docks, some on boats moored in the harbor. Normally friendly and playful, the sea lions were not accustomed to being forced to move from their perches, and some showed irritation—even aggression—toward the people who approached them.

  Since sea lions poop wherever they please, boat owners found the decks and cockpits of their boats soiled and stinking.

  When the wind blew toward shore, the stink wafted into the village and made dining an unpleasant experience. Restaurants lost customers; waiters and waitresses were laid off, and some had to move away to find new jobs, leaving houses and apartments vacant.

  Lobster catches continued to drop. To make up for lost income, lobstermen wanted to raise the price-per-pound they were paid for the lobsters they did catch, but the wholesalers refused: catches elsewhere in the country had not declined, so the overall number of lobsters available was, more or less, the same as usual. If the price of local lobsters rose, markets and restaurants would simply import their lobsters from elsewhere.

  Most lobster fishermen had borrowed money from banks to pay for their boats. Some had borrowed to pay for their homes as well. The loans were to be paid back over many years, but payments were due every month. Now, with their income so low, they couldn’t make the monthly payments.

  The banks were as fair and generous as they could be, but their revenues were down, too, and so eventually they had no choice but to take the lobster boats from the fishermen and try to sell them to someone somewhere else.

  Every one of these decisions and actions became a new stone dropped into the pond: ripples spread, affecting businesses and men and women and their families for miles and miles around.

  And always the question lingered: why? What had gone so terribly wrong so terribly fast?

  By the time the answer came the following summer, the village was, by almost every measure, dying. The signs of its demise were visible to anyone: the words FOR SALE printed, stenciled, painted, scribbled, and hung on houses, boats, shops, restaurants, cars in driveways, and lawn mowers on lawns; the silent streets; the nearly empty harbor; and the vast, uncountable population of sea lions that, by now, inhabited every square inch of waterfront property in the village.

  All the sea lions were unnaturally lean. Many were scrawny to the point of starvation. There were not enough fish in the harbor and on the reef to feed them all. Only those strong enough to swim far out to sea and dive very deep were able to feed themselves, and even they expended so much energy catching food that they could barely keep themselves nourished; they had no extra to feed to their young. And so, as nature had programmed them to do, mother sea lions let their pups starve to death; their natural duty was to keep themselves alive so they could breed new litters of pups every year; instinct told them that the cycle of life would eventually turn from scarcity to plenty, and soon there would be enough food for themselves and their pups.

  For now, though, they had to let their pups die, and the bodies of the dead young sea lions rotted on the rocks and washed around in the shallows, not even fulfilling their own natural function of providing nourishment for the larger predators because, you see, there were no predators left alive.

  It was a high school student working on a paper who discovered what had killed the village, and her discovery wasn’t even very complicated. Anyone could have made it; the reason no one had was that no one had known how and where to look. Once the student began to look, answers came quickly.

  She examined the food chain in the sea when the village had been thriving. At the top were the sharks. Some sharks preyed on the fish on the reef; all sharks preyed on octopuses. Octopuses, in fact, were one of the sharks’ favorite foods, which was one of the things that kept octopuses from overrunning the reef. Octopuses lay thousand and thousands of eggs at one time, but nature does not intend that all of them will survive. Many are destined to become food for small fish, many for larger fish, many for sharks. When the sharks had disappeared, the student discovered, the octopus population had boomed out of natural proportion, and many more octopuses than normal were growing to adulthood.

  Now, one of an octopus’s favorite foods is lobster. An octopus will trap a lobster with one or more of its eight powerful arms, squeeze it to death and crack it apart with its arms, and then eat it with its powerful beak. Even small octopuses can catch and eat small lobsters—lobsters too small and young to have had a chance to reproduce—so when the sea around the village became overpopulated with octopuses, the lobster population suddenly crashed.

  Very soon there were no more lobsters for the fishermen to catch.

  Normally, other sharks—larger ones, including great whites—preyed upon the sea lion colony, taking the weak, the sick, the malformed, and the vulnerable, leaving only the strong and healthy sea lions to maintain the colony.

  When those sharks were killed by the big fishing ship, there were no predators left to control the growth of the sea lion colony. And since sharks are not only predators but scavengers as well, even the dead sea lions were not recycled into the food chain but left to rot and become host to flies and other carriers of disease.

  The most discouraging discovery the student made was that, in all likelihood, the village would never recover. The damage done was irreversible and permanent. Although no entire species of sharks had yet been fished to extinction, what had been done to the village was being done to thousands upon thousands of towns and villages all over the world, so shark populations were being devastated worldwide. Because sharks breed late in life (some species not until they are twenty-five or thirty years old) and produce so few young, of which even fewer survive to maturity, their former numbers would never return.

  The marine food chain had been altered forever.

  The student turned in her paper, and she received a good grade. She would have received the highest grade, but her teacher said the report lacked solutions for the problems the student had discovered.

  But there are no solutions, replied the student.

  Nonsense, said the teacher. There are always solutions, for everything.

  In this case, however, the teacher was wrong. He did not recognize the truly significant discovery the student had made: that nature is not invulnerable, the ocean is not infinite and eternal, and that now, for the first time in history, mankind has the power to destroy the ocean that gives life to the planet that gives life to us. We can actually affect the fundamental functioning of the earth, altering the mechanisms that give us the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat.

  What the student knew in her heart but was loath to believe and afraid to articulate was that unless mankind changes its ways—and soon—we have all begun a leisurely stroll down a seductively gentle slope to eventual self-destruction.

  All this she had learned by studying the events that followed the day when the sharks died in the waters off the seaside village that used to live in harmony with nature.

  * * *

  Part III

  13

  Dangerous t
o Man?

  Moray Eels, Killer Whales, Barracudas, and Other Creatures We Fear

  We humans live on the edge of the world’s largest primal wilderness, the ocean. We venture onto and into it for recreation, relaxation, and exercise, without appreciating the fact that the ocean is the hunting ground for most of the living things on planet Earth.

  No matter how peaceful the sea may seem on a warm and sunny day, it is in fact always—always!—a brutal world governed by two basic rules: kill or be killed, and eat or be eaten.

  Sharks are by no means the only predators that haunt the wilds outside our back door; they’re just the biggest and most spectacular. Every living thing, of every size and shape conceivable, possesses weapons with which to defend itself and tools with which to feed itself, and when we enter into alien territory—startling, frightening, or, occasionally, tempting creatures that are minding their own business and behaving as nature has programmed them to behave—we shouldn’t be surprised if we get into trouble.

  Many years ago, the late Roger Caras wrote a book I liked titled Dangerous to Man, in which he examined many of the animals perceived as threatening to humans and explained why, and in what circumstances, each one should or shouldn’t be feared. His underlying premise, of course, was that no animal is dangerous to man if man will leave it alone. Believing that Caras’s book could be translated into an excellent series of informative half hours for television, some friends and I almost succeeded in getting the project made. It was not to be, but the premise of the book is still valid. In the next pages I’ll describe the marine animals most commonly thought of as being dangerous to man. I hope you’ll conclude, as I have, that the animal truly most dangerous to man is man.

  The list that follows is incomplete, for it includes only the animals of which I or friends of mine have personal knowledge, or which I’ve studied so much for so long that I think I know them pretty well. (For technical details about some of the creatures, I have drawn liberally from Richard Ellis’s superb Encyclopedia of the Sea.)

  Moray Eels

  There are a great many kinds, colors, and sizes of moray eels, most of which live in tropical and subtropical waters. Morays range in size from under a foot to nearly ten feet long, and I know from experience that a seven-footer—as big around as a football and displaying its long, white, needlelike fangs—is as scary-looking a monster as there is under water.

  A significant contributor to its frightening appearance is its manner of respiring. Its mouth opens and closes constantly, which forces oxygen-rich water over its gills but which also, when accentuated by its wide, blank, maniacally staring eyes, makes the eel look as if it can’t wait to rip your head off.

  Morays aren’t poisonous, but their bites can carry so much toxic bacteria that they might as well be. They’re scavengers as well as predators, and they have no aversion to rotten flesh. A moray bite is usually ragged (thus difficult to suture), exceedingly painful, and quick to become infected. It is also usually a mistake: the eel confuses a human digit for a piece of food. Usually, that is. But not always.

  David Doubilet, the incomparable underwater photographer with whom I’ve worked for more than twenty years, was once severely bitten on the hand by a yellowish-colored moray off Hawaii. The eel, he says, literally charged him—zoomed out of its hole, bit him, and went home. The wound not only took forever to heal but left considerable residual damage to David’s hand.

  Al Giddings, the underwater cinematographer who worked on Titanic and The Abyss, was bitten by a moray in 1976 during the filming of the movie based on my novel The Deep, of which he was codirector of underwater photography. Columbia Pictures had built a two-million-gallon tank to contain its underwater sets in Bermuda and stocked it with live animals, including a shark and some eels, one of which took a liking to one of Al’s toes. Al kept his toe, but the wound became infected immediately, and he lost some diving time.

  There’s no reason for swimmers, snorkelers, or scuba divers to get into trouble with morays, and there are only a couple of circumstances in which people do get bitten.

  The eels live in cavelets, crannies, and holes in reefs, and an incautious diver who goes poking around—searching for lobsters, perhaps—risks having a probing hand mistaken for a fish, seized, gnawed on, and shredded.

  Another risky business involves morays that have been conditioned to accept and be fed by humans. As dive masters and other sea-savvy folks know, conditioning is not the same as taming, and eels, fish, sharks, and other marine creatures (except for some of the mammals) cannot be tamed. No one should ever try to treat a moray eel like a pet.

  The danger in conditioning morays is rarely to the conditioner or the conditioner’s customers. They, after all, play by established rules: they arrive at the dive site, bringing fish scraps or other savory dead things for the eel (or eels, though to deal with more than two at once is to court serious danger); the eel emerges from its hole, expecting to be fed; it is fed; it permits itself to be touched and handled; sometimes, if the ritual has been repeated enough times that it has become imprinted as part of the eel’s repertoire, it will hunt for morsels concealed on the diver’s person, slithering in and out of his buoyancy-compensator vest, between his legs, around his neck.

  For the paying customer, the performance looks truly impressive, and, in fact, it is.

  The most remarkable morays I’ve ever seen lived on a reef off Grand Cayman. They had been conditioned by Wayne and Ann Hasson, who at the time ran a successful diving operation in the Cayman Islands. (You’ll have noticed by now that I persist in using the word conditioned instead of trained. It’s because I’m not certain that what the eels are taught to do constitutes training: they don’t jump through hoops or play volleyball or do anything else they’re not accustomed to doing. They eat—though, granted, in an unnatural way, that is, from the hands of humans, whom they have been taught to tolerate and, to an extent, trust. Is that training? I don’t think so; I think it’s conditioning.)

  Wayne and Ann had arbitrarily anthropomorphized the two green morays into a heterosexual couple named Waldo and Waldeen. Both were enormous: six and a half or seven feet long (longer than I am tall, that much I know for sure), at least a foot high, and as thick as a large honeydew or a small watermelon.

  David Doubilet and I were doing a story on the Caymans for National Geographic, and Wendy and our daughter, Tracy—both certified divers—had come along to enjoy a couple of weeks of the best diving in the Caribbean.

  Tracy has always had a mystical, almost spooky, ability to communicate with animals both terrestrial and marine. I don’t mean “communicate” in the Dr. Dolittle sense; she doesn’t talk to animals. Nor do I mean it in the Shirley MacLaine sense; she doesn’t channel Amenhotep through turtles. She and animals merely appear to trust each other.

  That kind of trust isn’t uncommon for humans to have with dogs, cats, horses, and other mammals. But with fish? I have seen big groupers come to Tracy—while avoiding every other human in the area—and almost snuggle up to her. I’ll forever retain a vision of her in the Caymans, walking slowly along the bottom, with two groupers swimming beside her, one under each arm.

  The only person I know with a greater affinity than Tracy for marine creatures is Valerie Taylor, the legendary Australian photographer, diver, and marine conservationist, who truly is spooky—off the scale. I believe that Valerie could wordlessly convince any fish, eel, or dolphin to fetch her newspaper, pick up her laundry, and wash the car.

  One day, Ann Hasson introduced Tracy to one of the giant green morays—Waldeen, I think—and when the eel had been fed and stroked by Ann, it took immediately to Tracy, snaking all around her, in and out of her buoyancy-compensator vest, seeming not to be seeking food so much as getting acquainted. Tracy never moved, except to raise her arms slowly to give Waldeen another platform around which to slither.

  After a few moments, the eel calmly slid away from Tracy and returned to its home in the reef. We all puttered around
for another minute or two, then prepared to move on. When I signaled to Tracy to follow us, however, she shook her head, calmly but definitely saying no.

  I was bewildered: what did she mean, no? What did she plan to do, stand there all day? Then I saw her point downward with one index finger, and I looked at her feet, and there was Waldeen, halfway out of the reef, with its huge, gaping jaws around Tracy’s ankle. The eel’s head was moving gently back and forth, its jaws throbbing open and closed on my daughter’s bare flesh.

  Waldeen was mouthing Tracy, the way a Labrador retriever will mouth your hand to get you to play with it. Labradors, though, are known for having a “soft mouth”; moray eels aren’t.

  Tracy’s expression was serene. Clearly, she was neither hurt nor afraid. She stayed still. I stayed still, too, paralyzed with fear and wondering what I’d do if I suddenly vomited into my mask.

  The eel played with Tracy’s ankle for perhaps another thirty seconds, then withdrew into the reef.

  We moved on.

  When we returned to the Cayman Islands a couple of years later, I learned that both Waldo and Waldeen were gone. One had been caught and killed by local fishermen—illegally, of course—and the other was said to have vanished. I’d bet that he or she, whichever it was, had been killed, too, for the most prominent danger attendant on conditioning eels to trust humans is not to the humans but to the eels. Their fate is familiar and almost inevitable; I’ve seen it happen all over the world, from the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean to the Tuamotu Islands in French Polynesia.

  An eel is conditioned to associate humans with food. Sometimes the betrayal is simple. A spearfisher will descend to the reef, maybe carrying food, maybe not. The eel will emerge from its den. The fisher kills it. More often, though, the eel’s demise is more complex.