Demon Fish
Authors: Juliet Eilperin
Also by Juliet Eilperin
Fight Club Politics:
How Partisanship Is Poisoning the House of Representatives
Copyright © 2011 by Juliet Eilperin
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eilperin, Juliet.
Demon fish : travels through the hidden world of sharks / Juliet Eilperin.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37979-5
1. Sharks. 2. Sharks—Anecdotes. I. Title.
QL638.9.E43 2011 597.3—dc22 2010030264
Jacket photograph © Hermanus Backpackers
Jacket design by Brian Barth
v3.1
To my mother, Sophie C. Cook, my father, Stephen F. Eilperin,
and my husband, Andrew Light, all of whose
parenting skills put sharks to shame
Contents
1 The World-Famous Shark Caller
Introduction: Shark
The sharks are almost glowing as they pass by, gently nudging each other as they jostle for the bloody pieces of barracuda that the ichthyologist Samuel “Sonny” H. Gruber has thrown in the sea minutes before. Their whitish underbellies reflect the beaming Caribbean sun above. They are shimmering, even as their steel gray upper bodies dull the light and provide them a measure of camouflage. The pearly glow and stealth of these creatures confirm what I have long suspected: sharks operate in a separate universe.
They glide, these lemon sharks, Caribbean reef sharks, blacknose sharks, and nurse sharks. But unlike the pretty tropical fish beside them, which travel in neat, compact schools, these sharks swoop in from all directions. They display no attempt at coordination: each one is out for itself.
Before I enter the water, a researcher warns me I should rely on peripheral vision to make sure I can sense whether a shark is approaching me from the side. Unlike a character in the movies, I cannot scan the surface for the telltale fin that juts out right before the cinematic climax: sharp points appear from an array of angles, making such clear distinctions impossible. While I’m no expert in scuba maneuvers, I do my best to keep moving in this rapidly shifting underwater feeding frenzy so as not to collide with one of the sharks by accident. I am more alert than a highway driver checking her blind spot while cruising at seventy-five miles per hour. It’s as if I have crashed an amazing, bizarre party with several friends and need to be on my best behavior at all times, for fear of offending our intriguing but menacing hosts.
——
This is the first time I’ve entered the surreal world of sharks. It’s the summer of 2005 off the shores of Bimini, a small island fifty miles from the Florida coast. I am viewing sharks as a journalist, venturing out with several researchers from the Bimini Biological Field Station. In the Bahamas this pastel-colored institution is better known by its longtime nickname, the Shark Lab. This moniker gives it the same casual feel as the rest of the island: many locals are bemused by the fresh-faced, budding marine biologists who rotate in and out of its cramped quarters with clocklike regularity. The entire enterprise seems more like a
Real World
episode than a real science mission. In Gruber’s boat I’m surrounded by about a dozen tanned—in some instances pierced and tattooed—twentysomethings from various countries in skimpy bathing suits. They all appear unfazed at the prospect of taking a dip with creatures that terrify most sane swimmers. These young men and women don’t appear to be geeks who have temporarily traded in their polyester white lab coats for black neoprene wet suits: they’re casually chatting about their evening plans as we prepare to enter the water, not arguing about the finer features of elasmobranchs—a subclass within Chondrichthyes—or shifting water currents.
Unlike my companions, however, I cannot adopt the same casual pose this summer afternoon. I have painstakingly developed several rationales to keep myself from panicking before scooting off the boat at Triangle Rocks, a gathering place for several shark species:
- All the biologists on this trip have an interest in keeping me alive, since they’ll never get their message out if I die here and fail to publish my work.
- I’m among the skinniest folks on this outing, so surely I’m less appetizing than the chunkier divers.
- As long as I act as if I know what I’m doing, and don’t deliberately pick fights with these hulking animals, they’ll leave me alone.
Calm for the moment, I jump into the water without much fuss and focus on keeping my wits about me as I slip down below the surface. But my feigned nonchalance dissipates the moment my eyes open, as I see dozens of the kinds of mythical creatures that have dominated the human psyche for millennia, long before
Jaws
hit American movie screens in 1975. Swarming the area looking for food, the sharks come within a few feet of where I am swimming. I don’t need to worry about being eaten, it turns out, much to my relief. They are more focused on their catered mealtime than on the human in their midst. Mingling in this congregation are some nurse sharks—among the most harmless sharks divers typically encounter—which only latch onto humans if they’re deliberately provoked, in which case their jaws can remain clamped on for some time. But for the most part these are not namby-pamby sharks, the kind that pose no harm. So I gently circle these ancient creatures, thrilled at the idea that I’m surviving on their turf.
Humans—regardless of their culture, era, or geographic location—have been fascinated with sharks from the beginning of time. They predate us by so many hundreds of millions of years but are a remote cohabitant of this earth rather than a familiar one. Sharks were swimming our seas before the continents took their current shape, when oceans covered Bolivia, South Africa, and Montana. Despite their considerable numbers, they remain elusive. Many of them don’t travel in schools: they roam the seas on their own, as adventurers. Their murderous power, their ancient lineage, their aloofness—all these attributes have given them a place within human culture where they are simultaneously worshipped and loathed. It’s an unenviable position, one that is helping propel their rapid decline.
Historically, sharks represented gods in ancient societies, where their power to destroy us demanded respect. Sharks played a role in these cultures’ rituals and their creation stories, helping explain humans’ relationship to the natural world. In Fiji the people had a shark god called Dakuwaqa that was seen as the direct ancestor of their high chiefs; the Japanese paid homage to a shark they considered the God of Storms; the Hawaiians still view the shark as an animal deity that serves as their most powerful guardian angel, ‘
aumãkua
.
1
But just as sharks are beginning to vanish from our oceans, these tales are starting to fade from human memory. Panama’s Kuna Indians used to worship Tío Tiburón, or Uncle Shark; now they view sharks solely as a threat. The Maori people of New Zealand no longer discuss the shark legends they used to prize. Fijians on Beqa Island still respect their shark god enough to insist his name only be written, rather than uttered aloud, but their marine protected areas serve more as a tourist attraction than as a place of worship.
2
As these societies have modernized, they have forgotten why they prized sharks in the first place.
There are still some places left around the globe, like a few small island villages in Papua New Guinea, where this sort of worldview continues to hold sway. In these remote outposts a select group of men are trained in the ritual of shark calling: after performing elaborate rituals, they hunt them by hand, bring them home for feasts, and end up earning more respect than anyone else. But even here relations between humans and sharks have undergone a shift, because it is shark conquerors who hold a special place in these societies. Worshipping sharks alone is no longer enough.
Over time sharks have become a commodity to be consumed and a threat to be contained. Those who succeed in these efforts see their status among their friends and colleagues rise: In China, the businessmen who can afford to order shark’s fin soup are the ones who can impress their clients. And in southern Florida, athletes and celebrities such as Shaquille O’Neal pay the tour operator Mark “the Shark” Quartiano hundreds of dollars so they can take a cruise and catch a hammerhead or two.
Killing sharks conveys status to those who slay them (or, by inference, to those who can afford to buy the fruits of these battles) because they inherently pose a mortal threat to us. This shift has enormous implications, since humans have been able to harness technology to destroy sharks in unprecedented numbers. The way we deal with sharks pushes the boundaries of how comfortable we are with danger and taps into our tendency to view the wild as exotic. But it also underscores how globalization and scientific inquiry are transforming our understanding of the sea.
Ironically, we now pose the primary threat to sharks’ existence, rather than the other way around. We are helping banish them from the earth at the very time we’re learning more about them and their vast seas, which cover two-thirds of the globe. While humans have engaged in deepwater exploration for only the past sixty years, we’ve barely made a dent in the ocean: 75 percent of its massive terrain remains largely unexplored. About 80 percent of marine life also remains uncataloged. It is the last frontier. When scientists began focusing on marine creatures in the first place, moreover, they didn’t pay much attention to sharks, because at the time they lacked the commercial value of other species, like tuna. Until a few decades ago most fishing records didn’t even make a distinction between the different species of sharks that were caught in a given batch, as if all sharks were the same. In the words of Enric Cortés, a scientist who helps oversee sharks at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, they are the “ugly ducklings” of the sea.
Now scientific revelations about sharks have begun to emerge, frequently raising as many questions as they answer. Just a few years ago researchers discovered that great white sharks leave the California coast and journey as far away as Hawaii, spending time in an area between Baja California and Hawaii that scientists now call the “White Shark Café.” But they still have no idea what sharks do there, aside from possibly meeting members of the opposite sex, eating, and socializing with other sharks (that’s why they call it a café). It wasn’t until the mid-1990s, when Taiwanese fishermen pulled up a whale shark, the world’s largest fish—with a few hundred eggs inside it at different stages of development—that scientists began to grasp how many offspring this enormous fish can reproduce at any one time. But they still can’t comprehensively describe how a whale shark mates and reproduces, or where this takes place. And while researchers can examine a Galápagos turtle’s shell and declare how long the creature has been roaming the earth, no one can make the same confident estimate when it comes to sharks. They do have bands in their vertebrae, and it appears this is a good way to measure whale sharks’ longevity, but species such as the Atlantic angel shark apparently lay these bands down at random. Even when we possess them, sharks can still manage to elude us.