In recent years the concept of biomimicry has become increasingly popular: venture capitalists have started eyeing everything from whales’ circulatory systems to the way leaves photosynthesize as a model for commercial products. Sharks’ unique adaptive qualities, honed over millions of years, offer a range of possibilities that we’ve only begun to explore.
I didn’t grow up obsessed with sharks, as many small children do. But once I got in the water with sharks in Bimini, I started to think about them quite a bit. Part of my interest stemmed from the fact that they were incredible to look at: the muscular power they can convey just moving through the water makes them formidable swimming companions. The dizzying array of shark-related scientific papers that flooded my e-mail in-box at The Washington Post also piqued my interest. As I learned about how researchers are beginning to piece together how sharks live and operate, it became clear that their work is far from complete. But just as significantly, I began to see how sharks’ lives reveal much about the ocean: how it functions, and why it is now in peril.
Some like to describe sharks as “the lions and tigers of the sea,” while Rachel Graham, a Wildlife Conservation Society scientist who works in Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico, calls them “jaguars” to appeal to Central Americans’ pride. Sharks are the kinds of predators, not unlike masters of the savanna and grasslands, that are beginning to tell us about a largely invisible world to which our lives are inextricably tied. Their ancient lineage teaches us how creatures, including ourselves, have adapted to changing environments over millions of years; the toxins that now pervade their bodies show us how what we emit from industrial smokestacks permeates the air and water throughout the globe. They show us not just how we may be heading toward the abyss but also how the natural world functioned before we started undermining it. As one of the most dominant forces underwater, sharks help maintain the balance of marine ecosystems by keeping midlevel predators in check. One of their most valuable qualities, from a strictly human perspective, is that they hint at how the ocean would look if we invested in its resilience instead of plundering its depths.
While it sounds odd, for much of the twentieth century humans saw sharks—along with most other fish—as meat. They were something to be caught in a net or by hook, hauled overboard, and shipped off to market. Even scientists saw them as static creatures, for the most part: they might dissect them to examine their stomach contents, but they didn’t observe their underwater lives and contemplate how their actions affected the rest of the ocean over time. But in the same way researchers and land managers now understand that reintroducing gray wolves into Yellowstone has a slew of cascading effects along the region’s food chain, experts now understand that healthy shark populations restore the historic balance of marine life. Rather than selectively picking apart the ocean’s natural system—blasting corals in one area, fishing out tasty large fish like groupers in another, and pulling up sharks in another—we could commit ourselves to repairing this ravaged system. We have declared less than half of 1 percent of the ocean off-limits, compared with the roughly 14 percent of the planet’s terrestrial surface that enjoys protection.8 We set aside more land for conservation than for farming,9 but marine reserves don’t begin to compete with the areas where fishing lines stretch and trawlers scrape.
Plenty of evidence now exists that if we curb our worst excesses—overfishing, trawling, and polluting—when it comes to the sea, we can give it at least a chance of resisting the broader environmental threats that are well under way, such as climate change. While it’s impossible to restore the entire sea to health, protecting the most ecologically rich areas will produce diverse pockets of the sea in which a range of creatures and plants can thrive. And sharks represent an essential part of the mix.
To better understand sharks, and the men and women whose lives are inextricably tied to them, I ventured across the globe to examine places best described as the water’s edge: the areas where humans mingle with sharks. Sometimes this place was literally the land-sea boundary: the place where a Mexican shark fisherman is pulling his catch of mako and blue sharks up onto the beach, or where a Papua New Guinean elder is shoving his canoe off the shore to search for the fish that reconnects him to his ancestors. Other times the water’s edge is abstract. The place where I crowd in with shark fin traders to get a better look at the wares at a Hong Kong auction, a Fort Lauderdale lab where I examine the results of a genetic analysis of shark samples in Mahmood Shivji’s office, or the New Orleans bar where I listen to aides to a prominent American politician joke that sharks deserve to be wiped out before they claim another human life all represent different intersections between our lives and those of sharks. In some cases these moments show how we are slowly disassembling the natural world; at other times these incidents exemplify our fight to understand it and preserve it. The extent to which these individuals recognize their dependence on these creatures, of course, dictates the extent to which they are invested in sharks’ survival.
In every instance, however, I began to see how we are coming nearer to the monsters of the sea that have terrified us for centuries. This is an actual fact: because of recent advances in technology, some researchers are discovering that sharks live much closer to us than we’ve ever suspected. And the relentless push toward our coasts, whether it’s to live full-time or to spend our holidays, drives us into even closer contact. But that doesn’t mean we understand sharks better, or appreciate them more, than we did before.
Often we value things in the natural world because we see ourselves in their reflection: in how they sing, raise their babies, or travel across the countryside. On rarer occasions—when we marvel at the improbable journey of the albatross or the way male lions live apart from females—we prize them because we define ourselves by how different they are from us. But sharks matter because they exist apart from us, not because of how they stand in relation to us. Henry Beston, writer and naturalist, put it best when he wrote of animals, “They are not brethren, they are not underlings. They are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travails of the earth.” Sharks, and their surroundings, merit as much exploration as the moon, but we only devote a fraction of the same resources to them. Not for reasons of conquest, or even because our fate is in part linked to theirs. Sharks are worth understanding in their own right, a source of revelations about a foreign world that abuts ours.
For the most part we still see the sea as a source of valuable commodities we can extract, whether it’s the fish we eat or the oil we drill. And for all of the modern techniques we now use to conduct it, the act of fishing itself is pre-agrarian: it’s hunting and gathering. Sharks and other commercial fish are something for humans to capture, not cultivate. We seek to defeat their wildness, rather than admire it.
Ancient myths about sharks are fascinating, mainly because they reveal how we—rather than the animals—have changed over time. They underscore how we used to be closer to the natural world, and were more invested in it. We have doggedly viewed sharks through our own prisms, immune to the revelations that have emerged in recent years, and our popular view of them has become more, not less, simplistic over time. This book looks at how humans began by worshipping sharks and grew to hate them, then started to hunt them en masse, before deciding it might be worth fighting to keep them around. This evolving relationship between humans and sharks illuminates how we have sought to submit wildness to our will, with varying degrees of success. But these beasts themselves, and the subterranean world they inhabit, are affecting human society even as it seeks to shunt them aside.
Sharks’ power over us has always stemmed from the fact that they are largely unseen. They can strike at any time and can disappear just as easily as they can arrive at the surface. This book is an effort to explore the mystery that surrounds them and decipher it. It attempts to discover what these sea monsters are at their core, the complex and contentious community they help rule, and wheth
er they can continue to exist alongside us. If we pay attention, sharks can tell us about their watery world and its implications for the land we inhabit. How we negotiate sharing the planet with sharks could help determine what our own future looks like, not just theirs.
1
THE WORLD-FAMOUS SHARK CALLER
Sun come up, my shark come up.
—a shark caller’s chant in Dennis O’Rourke’s 1982 film, The Sharkcallers of Kontu
For a brief moment, I despair that we’ll ever get to Tembin.
Three of us—myself, my friend Laura Berger, and our driver, Paul Vatlom—had successfully made the trek from Kavieng, the biggest city in the Papua New Guinean province of New Ireland, to the outskirts of Tembin, one of the three most renowned shark-calling towns in the world. The problem: a storm had washed away the bridge to Tembin several years ago, and no one had ever bothered to fix it.
Some of the villagers had heard we were coming, so they decided to pile onto the back of our white Toyota 4×4, further complicating our task. Now we are facing crossing a river and navigating a swamp, all without tossing several uninvited hitchhikers over the side.
Luckily, Vatlom happens to be one of those people who manages to be fearless, deft, and cheerful at the same time. “We will do it,” he says, nodding, speaking as much to himself as to Laura and me. And then by shifting gears, gunning the engine a bit, and weaving back and forth, he manages to coax the truck through first water and then mud. The truck rocks slightly, but no one falls off, and within minutes we have arrived in a settlement that looks like a throwback in time, the sort of village in which a Peace Corps volunteer would have arrived in the 1960s.
As the hitchhikers leap off the truck, our welcoming committee comes out to meet us. It is led by Selam Karasimbe, a lean, wiry man sporting a broad smile, a single piece of cloth wrapped around his hips, and a black sweatshirt emblazoned with the words “New York.” Trailed by a few women, several small children, and an assortment of pigs, Karasimbe looks like the kind of man who has answers. He is the strongest living connection to the way humans used to see sharks hundreds of years ago. And despite an array of modern-day pressures, he has kept this worldview intact, in a place that seems much closer to our past than our present. It is one of the best ways to understand how the worlds of sharks and humans intersect, and what happens when this relationship is thrown off balance.
Karasimbe is, in his own words, “the world-famous shark caller” of Kontu. “World-famous” may be a bit of an overstatement: most people have never heard of either shark calling or the remote island province, New Ireland, where it is practiced. But the Australian filmmaker Dennis O’Rourke did feature Karasimbe in his 1982 documentary, The Sharkcallers of Kontu, an anthropology cult classic. And when it comes to Papua New Guinea, that qualifies for global exposure.
In a world where most humans view sharks with a mix of fear and loathing, Papua New Guinea is one of the few places where people embrace them. For the villagers in Tembin, Mesi, and Kontu—the three towns that still practice shark calling—sharks are an integral part of their creation story, a religious faith that has endured for centuries.
In many ways, New Ireland—the province that is home to shark calling—is a microcosm of Papua New Guinea itself. At least seventeen distinct languages are still spoken there, and while humans have lived on the islands for at least thirty-two thousand years, it was only colonized by the West when Germany claimed it as a colonial protectorate in 1885. Charted in 1767 by the British navigator Philip Carteret, who named it on the basis of its relationship to another, larger nearby island (New Britain), New Ireland served as a port for American whaling ships in search of water and provisions during their voyages.
Missionaries have worked relentlessly to make Papua New Guinea into a Christian country: according to the 2000 census, 96 percent of the populace identifies itself as Christian. While missionaries are a rare sight in much of the South Pacific at this point, they are still ubiquitous in even the most isolated of Papua New Guinean villages. They often provide basic services, including schooling. And in exchange, they demand fealty to a Christian god.
Many Papua New Guineans have reconciled this Western religion with their traditional ancestor worship. In this traditional faith, the spirits of their ancestors inhabit the current natural world, offering them a way to connect to those who preceded them in their everyday surroundings. These spirits communicate to them, watch over them, and guide their choices: it’s a much more immediate connection than the one that typically defines Christian faiths.
But faced with this contrast to Christianity, Papua New Guineans like Karasimbe have deftly fudged the difference. Going to church while also maintaining ties to his ancestors through shark hunting, Karasimbe reasons, is not contradictory. He and others can do this in part because the traditional Papua New Guinean faith has a creator, Moroa, who is from their perspective essentially synonymous with the Judeo-Christian God. While the myth of Moroa predates Papua New Guineans’ contact with missionaries, it bears a strong similarity to Christianity. Moroa created the world in a series of steps just like the Judeo-Christian God did, for example, but his instructions are a bit more detailed than some of the early guidance contained in the Old Testament.
Take sharks, for instance. According to legend, Moroa made Lembe the shark before he made man but after he had made the sun and the moon and put fish and dolphins in the sea. Moroa made Lembe “in the time of tulait, the time between the end of the night and the beginning of the new day,” and in doing so, he divided the shark’s belly into two parts.1 The left side of the belly could sense danger, but the right side would let the shark approach a canoe without fear.
After creating this divided creature, Moroa held Lembe by his tail (Papua New Guineans say you can still see the mark of Moroa’s thumb and forefinger on every shark in the sea) and explained to the shark the conditions on which he could approach man. He said he would tell man to catch the shark, and that if man broke any of the tambus (taboos) set out for him, Lembe must listen to the left side of his belly and stay away.
As one might imagine, at this point Lembe was getting tired of Moroa’s lecture. So he jumped in the sea, just as Moroa was going to tell him about the bait fish man would use to try to lure him. In retaliation, Moroa threw white sand at Lembe, which has given him rough skin until the end of time. “Moroa threw his hands in the air and yelled after the disappearing shark he was truly stupid,” Glenys Köhnke recounts. “For now that his skin was rough man would be able to snare him in a specially prepared noose which Moroa would show him how to make.”2
When Moroa created humans, he went through the elaborate rules for catching sharks and the mechanics of making special equipment for the task, such as the coconut rattle Karasimbe uses today. And when he was done, Moroa had given the shark callers of Papua New Guinea something no one else on earth possesses: the ability to communicate with the scariest creatures in the sea. On a certain level, shark calling is a form of resistance against Western colonizers, since these authorities told Papua New Guineans they could not worship Moroa any longer. The missionaries tried to discredit locals’ traditional beliefs altogether, telling them they needed to renounce their old faith and accept Christ instead. But many Papua New Guineans see no reason to abandon ancestor worship. Karasimbe wears a rosary with white disks and black beads and considers himself a Christian, but he points out that when the missionaries argued ancestor worship was essentially godless, they failed to grasp the fact that villagers viewed Moroa as an overarching deity the same way Christians view their own God. Missionaries, he recalls, suggested that the faith traditions they had practiced for centuries were contrary to Christianity and were “fucking up people” because “they don’t know about God.” But they overlooked an obvious point, he says: “Moroa is God.”
At this point many Papua New Guineans see shark calling as a divine right, one of the few skills they boast that no other civilization can offer. They argue that
their ability to lure sharks from the deep—and catch them by hand using snares—represents a unique culture that should not be snuffed out by either colonization or modernization. Just because outsiders might not understand the practice, they say, doesn’t mean it lacks value. Henry Bilak, a retired soldier living in Mesi, says outsiders don’t fully appreciate what his people can do when it comes to connecting with sharks. “This is the oldest form of human communication with sharks,” he says, sitting in a village garden blooming with yellow, white, red, and pink hibiscus. “The bottom line is this is what human beings can do. This is what God has given us.”
Spending time with Karasimbe, I realize that he and other shark callers hold on so tightly to this part of their faith because it differentiates them from their colonial conquerors. The Germans and the Australians may have brought currency, modern goods, and other advances to Papua New Guinea, but shark calling is something that cannot be replicated by the West. It delineates roles within Papua New Guinean society and anchors these people’s conception of the universe.
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