Demon Fish

by Juliet Eilperin

  As any shark expert will tell you, seals and sea lions make far more attractive shark bait. The fat that seals contain in their outer coat accounts for half their body weight and has twice as many calories as muscle. Peter Klimley, who has studied sharks for three decades, says there’s a reason great whites bite into humans and abandon them.

  “Sharks don’t eat humans. Humans are not nutritious enough. They are not worth the effort,” explains the UC Davis researcher. “Seals and sea lions, not people, are the Power Bars for the white shark.”50 In fact, great whites engage in a visible form of communication if two of them are targeting the same marine mammal, which Klimley has dubbed “the tail slap.” In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Klimley and his colleagues examined a series of predatory attacks off the Farallon Islands near San Francisco, which boast large numbers of juvenile elephant seals vulnerable to attack between September and November. In more than two dozen cases, one white shark lifted its caudal fin out of the water and then slammed it down, splashing water in the direction of another white: in most cases, the shark with the most aggressive tail slap ended up consuming the elephant seal. While some of Klimley’s peers mocked him at a 1993 scientific conference for offering this “tail slap” account of whites’ feeding behavior (some even made a drawing of two white sharks high-fiving each other), his hypothesis offers the best explanation for how great whites compete for food when they home in on the same object.51

  Three species of shark are responsible for nearly two-thirds of shark attacks worldwide: bull, great white, and tiger sharks. Several factors help explain this: bull sharks have the highest level of testosterone of any animal on earth, and white sharks seek out marine mammals, prey that can be confused with a human on a surfboard when seen from underwater. While great whites only need to eat occasionally, they tend to do their hunting during the day because their retinas have a higher proportion of cone receptors, which are used for daytime vision, than rod segments, which are used at night.52 All three species seek out larger rather than smaller prey.

  There are other factors that seem to heighten a swimmer’s chances of luring a shark, according to the International Shark Attack File compiled by George Burgess, who directs the Florida Program for Shark Research at the Florida Museum of Natural History: the vast majority of attacks involve people wearing black or blue swimwear, even though many divers refer to yellow fins as “yum-yum yellow” for their tendency to attract sharks. Swimming with dogs may also lure sharks to the scene, since the rapid beating of a dog’s heart, coupled with its quick movements, can mimic the signals of a fish in distress.

  Certain parts of the world pose a greater risk of shark attacks than others, giving swimmers ample incentive to avoid them. While surfers tend to flock to Volusia County, Florida, for the great waves off New Smyrna Beach, they do so at their own peril, since the county has ranked number one in the world in shark bites for years. While the precise number varies from year to year, the sheer number of incidents—seventeen in 2007, and twenty-two in 2008—drives the overall trend in shark strikes worldwide. But since many of these amount to minor scrapes—blacktip and spinner sharks congregate in the area, and usually leave their victims with lacerations rather than major wounds—the surfers remain undeterred. “It’s far from being the most dangerous place in the water,” Burgess insists. For that you need white sharks congregating, whether it’s off California, South Africa, or Australia. Historically, half of all reported attacks take place in U.S. waters, with Australia and South Africa jockeying for second place.

  As more people head to the beach and spend more time in the water, the total number of unprovoked shark attacks has increased. The 1990s were the worst decade in the twentieth century for such strikes, according to records, with a total of 470 attacks and 61 fatalities worldwide, and the first decade of the twenty-first century broke that record with 646 incidents and 47 fatalities. While the annual number of attacks dipped after reaching an all-time high of 79 in 2000, the sheer fact that the global population continued to increase and more people flocked to the water helped sustain an overall rise in clashes between humans and sharks. Still, fatal shark attacks worldwide dipped to their lowest level in twenty years in 2007, when just one swimmer in the South Pacific died from a heart attack. By contrast, four people died worldwide from shark bites in both 2005 and 2006, and seven suffered the same fate in 2004.

  While Time magazine declared the “Summer of the Shark” in 2001, its pronouncement stemmed more from the shocking nature of the attacks than their actual human death toll. On July 6 that year an eight-year-old named Jessie Arbogast had his right arm and part of his right leg torn off by a bull shark while wading the shallow waters of Florida’s Gulf Islands National Seashore, prompting a flurry of media coverage. During Labor Day weekend two Americans lost their lives to sharks—Sergei Zaloukaev, who was attacked along with his companion Natalia Slobodskaya off Avon, North Carolina, and ten-year-old David Peltier, who was killed off Virginia Beach, Virginia. But the number of unprovoked shark attacks worldwide actually declined that year compared with the year before.

  Put in a broader context, shark attacks fail to represent a serious threat to humans. Of all known shark species, only 6 percent are known to attack humans.53 According to Burgess, sharks kill between four and five people a year worldwide. To put that in context, you are more likely to die from lightning, a bee sting, or an elephant attack than from a shark’s bite. On average, more than forty times as many Americans seek hospital treatment for accidents involving Christmas tree ornaments than incidents involving sharks. Moreover, with recent medical advances, the chances of surviving an attack have risen dramatically, to 90 percent.

  By contrast, the growing demand for shark fins—the most touted element in shark’s fin soup—has driven such intense shark hunting that even some of the people who have suffered from shark strikes are now lobbying for heightened shark conservation measures. Researchers estimate 73 million sharks are being caught and killed worldwide each year to supply the fin trade, and the act of finning—cutting off a shark’s fins and tossing the fish’s mutilated body back into the water—has sparked opposition worldwide. For years the United States required sharks brought ashore from the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico—but not the Pacific—have their fins attached, deferring to regional fishery management councils. But environmentalists (including those who have experienced shark attacks firsthand) launched an intense lobbying campaign to change the law. As one of its final acts, the 111th Congress required all sharks landed in U.S. waters (with the exception of small dogfish, a concession to win one senator’s vote) to have their fins attached.

  Every shark attack survivor has a different story, though many of the details are the same: usually swimming around sunrise or sunset, they feel a sudden strike—frequently from below—and find themselves losing a tremendous amount of blood. Victims often don’t experience much pain at first; that comes later.

  In 1978, Mike deGruy was in his mid-twenties and working as a marine biologist in the Marshall Islands atoll of Enewetak when he and a friend decided to spend their Sunday diving. Fifty feet down, deGruy saw a gray reef shark engaged in what he now describes as “agonistic display”: the shark was arching its back and raising its snout. Initially, the biologist backed up slowly and tried to be as still as possible so as not to provoke it, but when the shark did not move toward him, he couldn’t resist snapping a picture.

  “When the strobe fired, so did the shark,” deGruy recounts, more than thirty years later. “It just came like a bullet.” While deGruy tried to use his camera to block his attacker, the shark was undeterred, taking his elbow in its mouth and raking the back of his hand when deGruy put it out in self-defense.

  While the shark sailed off, deGruy thought at that moment he was destined to die. Blood was pouring out in three distinct streams, he could see the bones in his hand, and he was well aware of how many sharks inhabited the water he was immersed in at that precise moment. “I thought,
‘Christ, I’m in trouble,’ ” he recalls. “The sharks were there all over. They were everywhere. You toss a little blood in the water, and there are fifty sharks in five minutes.” As he spent twenty-five minutes swimming to his boat anchored fifty yards away, deGruy thought of himself as “a living chum line.”

  DeGruy managed to make it to the twenty-one-foot Boston whaler, as did his diving buddy, who had also been struck. After hastily tying a tourniquet around his arm, deGruy radioed for assistance, help that took an hour to arrive; because the waves were strong, the military helicopter that came to the two men’s aid had difficulty making out the white boat amid the frothy whitecaps.

  In retrospect, deGruy thinks his fatalistic attitude after the attack saved his life. “If I thought there was any chance to make it, I wouldn’t have. I would have panicked; I would have freaked out. I was 100 percent convinced I was going to die.”

  As deGruy is recounting his brush with death, he’s sitting in the gleaming white offices of the Pew Environment Group in downtown Washington. Flush with money from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the group is both well financed and creative: its employees are constantly devising campaigns aimed at influencing both national and international ocean policy, along with a handful of other green issues. In July 2009 they came up with one of their boldest salvos, bringing roughly half a dozen shark attack survivors to Capitol Hill—deGruy among them—to lobby for the anti-finning bill.

  DeGruy doesn’t look, or act, like your typical lobbyist. Now a professional underwater filmmaker living in Santa Barbara, he’s ebullient even when he’s describing what it was like to feel the life draining from his body. He shows off his scarred arm, repaired after he underwent two skin grafts and eleven separate operations, without reservation. “It looks pretty good now,” he declares with a bit of pride, looking at his lumpy but intact appendage.

  And while he admits his attack made him more cautious about entering the sea, deGruy says it didn’t shift his fundamental view of sharks. “My attitude before I was attacked is there isn’t a creature in the ocean as adapted to the ocean and as beautiful as the shark,” he says. “It is unchanged.”

  Wearing matching white T-shirts that bear a black fin jutting out of the water and the slogan “Shark Attack Survivors for Shark Conservation,” deGruy and the other survivors made their way to the Senate for a brief handshake with Barbara Boxer and a longer conversation with her aides. By the end of the day, it was unclear how much headway they’d made in Congress, but they scored more press coverage than the Pew staff had ever imagined. Their story made the front page of The Washington Post, as well as featured segments on CNN, Fox News, and National Public Radio.

  Mike Coots, a native of Hawaii who lost his leg to a tiger shark while surfing in October 1997, isn’t surprised that he and the others managed to make news. “The media loves shark stories,” he says matter-of-factly, relaxing at the end of the day in a Senate cafeteria, the American Grill. While most of those stories undermine the cause of conservation, Coots adds, this particular campaign has challenged the conventional wisdom.

  “This is actually helping the sharks,” he says, looking over at a reporter interviewing one of his fellow survivors. “The sharks are smiling today.”

  These survivors are effective, in part, because they make us face an unpleasant truth: sharks will always threaten us, in an unpredictable way. But if deGruy, Coots, and others can make their peace with that, why can’t we?

  From the moment Jaws became a hit, Peter Benchley made it clear he did not advocate killing sharks. Benchley spent years filming underwater adventure specials for a variety of production companies, highlighting the virtues of ocean exploration. But it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the best-selling author decided to become an environmental crusader.

  In the immediate years after his book and movie came out, Benchley was fairly defensive when it came to the question of sharks: as reporters repeatedly called him for comment on incidents involving either human attacks on sharks or vice versa, the author became skilled at deflecting the idea that he started the war of man versus shark. “He had various ways of explaining to people why he shouldn’t be responsible for everyone who was bitten by a shark, or afraid of sharks,” Wendy Benchley recalls.

  Toward the end of his life, Benchley became an environmental crusader, making short educational films for the New England Aquarium and conducting a speaking tour in Asia, and he started telling reporters he couldn’t have written Jaws knowing what he now understood about sharks.

  “He was looking for ways to get involved and use his reputation and his clout,” says Greg Stone, chief oceans scientist for Conservation International and senior vice president for exploration and conservation at the New England Aquarium. “It’s pretty much the way he spent the last ten years of his life.”

  Benchley died with this work unfinished. Even after a decade of advocacy, he had just begun to erase what seems like an indelible mark on the public consciousness. And even decades after the release of his book, plenty of people devote their careers to keeping the Jaws myth alive. As long as the myth persists, shark hunters will have many reasons to go about ridding the sea of them. How can you fault someone for wiping out a killer?

  3

  A DEMON FISH

  In terms of the numbers of sharks we’ve killed, nobody comes close to us. We’ve caught just about everything there is left to catch. Sharks are fascinating, but we’re trophy hunters. I get paid to kill fish. Some people don’t like it, but too bad.

  —Mark “the Shark” Quartiano, Miami fishing tour boat operator

  The massive scalloped hammerhead, swaying over the deck of Striker-1, brings Rosie O’Donnell to an abrupt halt in the middle of Biscayne Bay.

  Driving a motorboat with a gaggle of female friends, the well-known comedian pulls up next to Mark Quartiano’s fifty-foot Hatteras and begins peppering him with questions. Pointing to the now-lifeless body, she asks, “Is that for real?”

  Mark “the Shark” Quartiano, who has operated a fishing charter here in Miami since 1976, is pleased with the attention. He works hard, seven days a week, and it’s strangers’ fascination with sharks that keeps his operation humming.

  While the captain assures O’Donnell that the nearly nine-foot fish is genuine, one of the Texans who’s spent the morning fishing with Quartiano has a question of his own. Dustin Self is a twenty-six-year-old roughneck who works on an oil rig for a living, but he’s savvy enough to spot the celebrity who’s just pulled up. “Are you Rosie O’Donnell?” he shouts.

  She is, and it turns out O’Donnell’s son, Blake, is a shark aficionado who has spied Striker-1 before. The family has a vacation home on Star Island, the exclusive Miami enclave where the pop singer Gloria Estefan and the NBA star Shaquille O’Neal also own manses, and Blake O’Donnell has pointed out Quartiano’s boat as it’s cruised past their home on multiple occasions. In the past, O’Donnell told her son the vessel couldn’t possibly hunt sharks, but she’s happy to stand corrected. “My son’s going to flip out!” she exclaims, before hurrying back to the island.

  Within minutes, O’Donnell has returned on a gleaming dark red Jet Ski with Blake in tow. She is unabashed in her admiration of the hulking mass hanging by a rope, its black eyes on opposite ends of its rectangular head now glassy.

  “We can’t believe it!” she tells the Texas family, as she and Blake stroke the creature. “Oh my God. He feels like rubber.”

  O’Donnell wants to know who caught the shark—it is Self’s girlfriend, Stephanie Perez, a recent Texas Woman’s University graduate who’s about to pursue her master’s degree in speech therapy. This brings another flurry of praise from O’Donnell. “And you’re the one who caught it,” she marvels. “Girl power!”

  Women are showing up more often on Striker-1 nowadays. Shark fishing used to be an almost exclusively male sport, and Quartiano traditionally hosted bachelor’s parties on his boat along with the usual businessmen’s outing. Now he’s booking
bachelorettes as well, giving them equal billing on his Web site.

  The captain—who has a deeply tanned, weathered face and the sort of blond-streaked hair that seems almost required for men and women alike in Miami—has no problem with this demographic shift. He is focused on maintaining as robust a clientele as possible, especially in the midst of a major economic downturn. “I’d rather have a woman than a man in the chair, because they listen to everything you say,” he says, referring to the fishing chair off the stern where clients reel in their prize catches.

  Quartiano can no longer count on Fortune 500 companies such as Coca-Cola, IBM, and Microsoft holding lavish conventions in Miami where gaggles of executives were anxious to head out for an afternoon of fishing. And on top of that, it’s harder to find sharks. “I spend all day long trying to catch a shark, when twenty years ago, forget it. Ten minutes,” he reminisces as he pilots the boat away from the Miami Marriott, where his ship departs. “It’s a grind. It isn’t easy.”

  “But you love it, right?” pipes up Perez’s father.

  “It’s a lot of pressure, when you think about it,” Quartiano muses, his eyes scanning the ocean’s surface. “It’s no fun fishing for somebody else. I’ve got to catch you a fish, and I’ve got two hours to catch it. Isn’t that right?”

  Perez’s father has no rejoinder; the entire group is quiet. They’ve come out here expecting to see a big shark, and they’ll go away disappointed if they don’t.

  Perez is a perfect example of the newer clients Quartiano’s started serving: it was her idea to book a charter this morning, bringing along her parents, boyfriend, brother, and brother’s friend for the ride. The men spend a while catching shark bait, including bonito, kingfish, and barracuda, but when it becomes clear a shark is on the line, she’s the one who settles into the fishing chair for a half-hour tug-of-war.