Demon Fish (13 page)

In the end, he can only hazard a guess as to whether sharks will survive over the long term. “Sharks are cool,” he says, shortly before I head out to catch my water taxi back to shore. “Hopefully, they’ll be here after we’re gone.”

Circumstances belie his wish. The kind of recreational fishing Quartiano promotes is helping ensure the reverse outcome, since these activities take a serious toll on the shark populations that once thrived off the Florida coast. On one level, what these men are doing is nothing new: fishermen have been battling with sharks for centuries, and in the eighteenth century bored sailors often entertained themselves by hooking sharks. The explorer George Vancouver gave an account of these games from Cocos Island in the eastern Pacific during this time, saying:

The general warfare that exists between sea-faring persons and these voracious animals afforded at first a species of amusement for our people, by hooking, or otherwise taking one for the others to feast upon, but as this was attended with the ill consequence of drawing immense numbers round the ship, and as the boatswain and one of the young gentlemen had both nearly fallen a sacrifice to this diversion, by narrowly escaping from being drawn out of the boat by an immensely large shark, which they had hooked, into the midst of at least a score of these voracious animals, I thought proper to prohibit all further indulgence in this species of entertainment.
⁴

The difference is when Vancouver’s men were dangling sharks off their boat, there were plenty of sharks congregating below, so the impact of one animal’s death did not weigh as much. In addition, few people were hunting them at the time. Now the loss of a single shark exacts a far higher price on the population to which it belongs.

Quartiano’s entire business is fueled by testosterone, but he has drawn two opponents who are nearly as brash as he is. While some scientists have earned their deservedly geeky reputations, neither Demian Chapman nor Neil Hammerschlag fits the stereotype. Chapman is a bold New Zealander in his mid-thirties, so exuberant that he started a food fight with his wife at their wedding (before becoming sick from drinking). Nicknamed Pointer—the name for great white sharks Down Under, since the species is mainly gray with white on the tip of its nose—by some of his fellow marine biologists, Chapman spent several years researching sharks in southern Florida before moving to the Institute for Conservation Science at Stony Brook University. He first earned his Ph.D. at Nova Southeastern University and then worked at the Pew Institute for Ocean Science, based in Miami, allowing him to observe the work of Mark the Shark and other fishing operations at close range. One of Chapman’s strengths is that his hail-fellow-well-met demeanor allows him to bond with unlikely allies, which in turn lets him infiltrate enemy territory. Much of Quartiano’s bread and butter comes from killing pregnant hammerhead sharks, since they tend to be large and make for some of the most impressive trophies. The fishing operator frequently fires off e-mails that include pictures of these sharks, strung up and bloody, towering well above his head, to show off his catches.

In 2002, Chapman befriended a taxidermist in South Beach who let him know when a haul of hammerheads was coming in. In April alone Chapman counted more than forty litters that had been killed through recreational fishing: some carried as many as twenty pups each. The toll such fishing takes on a population, he says, cannot be overestimated. “By killing forty pregnant females, you’re killing eight hundred animals or more. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out it’s unsustainable to kill pregnant females of a selected species,” he says, the scorn audible in his voice. “Think if aliens started hunting humans by killing off pregnant females. It wouldn’t take long to wipe us out.”

Chapman isn’t the only young marine biologist who has Quartiano in his sights. Neil Hammerschlag, a research assistant professor and director of the R. J. Dunlap Marine Conservation Program at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, is relentless in the attacks he has launched on Mark the Shark. Hammerschlag uses every forum he can to question the activities of recreational fishermen like Quartiano, debating him in a sportfishing magazine or crusading against him on his Web site,
www.neilhammer.com
. The elaborate Web site features not only a section on how recreational shark fishing is taking its toll (including a photograph of Quartiano displaying two massive dead sharks) but details about conservation efforts and Hammerschlag’s own research.

Hammerschlag has mulled the idea of mobilizing activists to set up a picketing operation near the Marriott to lobby the weekend warriors who patronize Quartiano’s business to eschew his fishing tours, but he’s wary of giving Mark the Shark additional media exposure. “He’s trying to live up to the legend he’s trying to create for himself,” he says. “He kind of likes attention.”

Catching sharks as a hobby is, by definition, about getting attention. As Quartiano points out, you barely have a story if you don’t have a big hulking shark dangling beside you at the end of the day. Nothing embodies this phenomenon more than shark-fishing tournaments, which are thriving up and down America’s East Coast. They have become annual summer rituals, another way beach towns can lure tourist dollars to their area.

There’s nothing subtle about these contests: each one of them plays up the danger of sharks and the manliness of those who catch them. There’s the “Swim at Your Own Risk Mega Shark Tournament” in Pensacola, Florida; the South Florida Shark Club’s “Big Hammer Challenge,” with contestants such as “Team Vile” and “Reel Boyz”; and the “Newport Monster Shark & Tuna Tournament” in Rhode Island. Only brave and flamboyant contestants need apply, and their willingness to flout political correctness has begun to stir controversy.

Jack Donlon spent years organizing fishing tournaments for grouper, tarpon, and other species before he hit the jackpot with his “Are You Man Enough? Shark Challenge” in 2007. He remembers how he and his business partners fretted over attracting attention for their previous ventures: “The problem we always had was, how do you make fishing for grouper exciting? How do you make fishing for tarpon exciting? When you talk about sharks, it’s exciting, then and there.”

From Donlon’s perspective, the explanation is obvious. While
Jaws
helped glamorize shark fishing by making the fish a public target, it’s the perceived risks involved that make the sport popular. “It’s something that can eat you. There’s danger there. It’s different from going out deer hunting. One misstep, and it can eat you.”

Before Hammerschlag and his allies started making a fuss, Donlon’s Fort Myers competition was thriving undisturbed. He looked down on nearby catch-and-release tournaments, where none of the sharks were taken back to shore, as boring. “They die of loneliness,” he explains. The “Are You Man Enough? Shark Challenge” had significant backing from local businesses and had expanded to encompass a street fair, boat show, and kid fishing derby by the summer of 2009. Donlon took pains to describe the contest’s “eco-outlook” on its Web site, writing, “There are laws on the books for recreational and commercial fisheries. We responsibly abide by these laws and we respect the legal decisions of anglers to keep or release their quarry in accordance with those laws … We are proud that after several years and hundreds of anglers, the tournament has had only 7 shark
[sic]
harvested.”

But the contest required its participants to land their sharks if they wanted to vie for the winning title, and that drew the ire of conservationists. These large sharks were inevitably the pregnant females that had come into the area each year to give birth, just like the ones Quartiano finds in Biscayne Bay. The Shark Safe project, a group Hammerschlag helps direct, threatened to hold a rally two weeks before the June 6 and 7 contest. The unwelcome publicity prompted some local businesses to have second thoughts: for a region that’s economically dependent on tourism, highlighting the fact that sharks swim close to the shore is not a selling point.

Then the Lee County commissioner Ray Judah weighed in, decrying the tournament’s shark-killing policy. Judah first heard about the contest from a friend who has devoted her career to saving sea turtles, and then got an irate e-mail from a marketing agent the county had hired to promote the area to German vacationers. “I got an e-mail from Vera [Sommer] saying, ‘What the hell are you thinking? Here we are trying to market our beaches for tourists, and here you are showing pictures of battered and bloody sharks!’ ” Judah mobilized his fellow commissioners, who voted unanimously to stop the tournament. While the move had no legal standing, it sent a message. At the last minute Donlon changed course and adopted a catch-and-release policy for much of the contest, awarding just $1,000 for the retrieval of one shark. He had little choice, faced with opponents he refers to as “e-mail jihadists.”

Donlon is blunt about why he switched gears: he is no environmentalist. “The real decision came because of pressure. Not because of conservation,” he says now.

The following year two entertainment promoters, Sean and Brooks Paxton, decided to retool the tournament. Rather than fighting with scientists and activists, they enlisted the aid of Robert Hueter, who directs Mote Marine Laboratory’s Center for Shark Research, and the Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation. They opted for a more upscale, high-tech catch-and-release tournament, “The Guy Harvey Ultimate Shark Challenge,” which has won the unprecedented blessing of the U.S. Humane Society. The contest allows only fifteen teams to compete at the outset: the first weekend narrows the field to five finalists, and in the finals streaming video allows fans to watch the fishing dockside in real time. Since the public can watch the sharks hauled on board and then thrown in the water, it compensates for the fact that they won’t be able to stare at the shark carcasses that typically hang at marinas at the finale of any fishing competition. After all, shark fishing still has to be a spectator sport if it’s going to turn a profit—the question is how to make it a bloodless spectator sport. In its first year 1,660 people showed up to watch the nonlethal contest, proving sharks still have allure even if they are allowed to escape at the end of the day.

These activists have succeeded, in part, because they sought to preserve something that helps sustain the local economy, rather than abolish it outright. “At the end of the day, the community didn’t want people going out and slaughtering sharks off their beaches, and pulling up catches and hanging up sharks,” Hammerschlag says. The community needed a little prodding, and Hammerschlag was willing to provide it. In many ways he and Chapman represent the new breed of marine biologists, who are researcher-activists. Faced with the dramatic decline of the fish they have set out to study, they have little interest in staying on the sidelines when it comes to policy debates. And while both remain focused on publishing academic work, they have consciously crafted research projects that aim to show the importance of keeping sharks around.

For years, activists and scientists have enjoyed a sort of symbiotic relationship, in which environmental advocates took the research academics had done and used it as ammunition to lobby for policy changes. But even as this went on, many researchers took great pains to distance themselves from the activist community, because they feared it would undermine how other academics viewed their work and could jeopardize their chances for promotion. “The word ‘activist’ is kind of taboo within the scientific community,” Hammerschlag says, adding that when it comes to many of his colleagues, “They’re kind of scared to use that word. It’s a shame … Everything’s agenda-driven anyway.” Within the last decade or two the line between these two camps has blurred, with many scientists deciding they cannot afford to stay neutral on policy questions that affect the future course of the planet.

It’s also not limited to the United States. Even as a Ph.D. student at the University of Cape Town, Alison Kock made the news many times for her work on the great whites that swim not far from her university. Kock believes that sometimes she has a duty to publicize her data even before she’s submitted it to a peer-reviewed journal, a radical notion for a scientist who’s hoping to ascend to academic heights. “There’s a huge generational gap,” she says, pausing for a moment. “
Huge
. Huge.” Kock has studied under and collaborated with more senior scientists who feel differently, but she has become comfortable with the idea of bucking convention. “Given what’s happening in the marine environment, if you have information and you just put it in a scientific paper years from now, from my perspective, it’s not responsible.”

This radicalization among conservation biologists is beginning to redefine scientific research. Not only are researchers such as Chapman, Hammerschlag, and Kock pursuing studies aimed at producing a specific policy outcome—an end to shark fishing—they are actively working to shift popular sentiment, through either the media or public protest. As federal dollars for nonmedical scientific research have shrunk, some nonprofits with a conservation agenda have stepped in to fund this sort of work. The Pew Environment Group, headquartered in Washington, D.C., not only pays for academics to research the overfishing of sharks but also publishes attractive, easy-to-read brochures summarizing the scientists’ findings and pitches these results to reporters in order to generate favorable press coverage. While these groups are invested in promoting scientific inquiry, they view it as a means to achieve a policy end. And they can find several willing partners within academia, because these researchers have seen firsthand what’s happened to their case studies. In the same way that many climate scientists have decided they have no choice but to push for limits on greenhouse gases in order to avert drastic global warming, shark researchers argue they cannot afford to remain silent while shark populations decline.

Dalhousie University’s Boris Worm, a German who has helped drive international media coverage of ocean issues and befriended journalists across the globe, has published a number of studies that suggest sharks and other top ocean predators have declined much faster than others have thought. The evidence has been out there, he argues, but scientists were not looking for it: they were paying attention to whales, sea turtles, and other compelling marine animals.