Demon Fish
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In the end DeGeneres and her viewers didn’t emerge victorious: it was GoldenPalace.com, an online casino, that plunked down $650,000 for the privilege of buying a small Latin American monkey as its mascot. In a press release following the auction, the Wildlife Conservation Society touted the fact it had raised $650,000 to help protect the park, which includes lowland forests and alpine glaciers in an area the size of New Jersey, but declined to name the winning bidder. Eventually, GoldenPalace.com trumpeted its purchase.
Wallace and his colleagues dutifully named the species Callicebus aureipalatii—aureipalatii means “golden palace” in Latin; to the casino’s regret, the “.com” could not be Latinized—and the $650,000 park trust fund has added eight guards to deter poaching. The casino’s CEO, Richard Rowe, rejoiced at his company’s purchase, which far exceeded the $28,000 it had paid in 2004 for a ten-year-old, partially eaten cheese sandwich said to include an image of the Virgin Mary. “This species will bear our name for as long as it exists,” he said in the statement. “Hundreds, even thousands of years from now, the GoldenPalace.com Monkey will live to carry our name through the ages.” And just so people remember, the casino has set up an official Web site, www.goldenpalacemonkey.com, where curiosity seekers can listen to the monkey’s cry as they learn about the species and buy GoldenPalace.com Monkey T-shirts, tracksuits, and thongs.
Erdmann sees the Wildlife Conservation Society auction as his role model. “Golden casino aside, $650,000 for conservation is a lot of money,” he points out as we’re scaling a ladder leading to the dock off Ammer’s Kri Eco Resort. Then again, Erdmann doesn’t want to name a walking shark after a casino. And some scientists and government officials are even more skeptical, declaring it yet another sign of how much merchandizing has encroached upon scholarly pursuits. In their view, it’s one more assault on academic integrity, like Exxon Mobil’s $100 million donation to help Stanford University study global warming. As environmental groups and individual scientists seek new ways of funding their work in an era of dwindling public resources, some ask whether they’re ignoring the inevitable conflict-of-interest questions that arise from such arrangements. Does it bestow legitimacy on certain corporations, especially those with compromised environmental credentials, if they’re allowed to endow conservation initiatives? Should rich people be allowed to name a species just because they have dollars to donate?
These practices have also raised some alarms among officials at the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, the venerable group that has arbitrated disputes over scientific names since 1895. The commission’s former executive secretary, Andrew Polaszek, a chatty wasp specialist who has named more than a hundred species himself, started polling his organization’s twenty-seven commissioners in 2007 to see what they thought of the new trend. Their opinions were all over the map, from praising the idea to decrying it as undermining taxonomy’s scientific credibility, and the commission has yet to take an official position on the matter. For his part, Polaszek sees both sides of the argument.
“If new species start to acquire a commercial value that’s pretty hefty, then there’s suddenly an incentive for people to ‘discover,’ and I use that word in quotes, new species. And the ramifications of that are enormous,” he explains.
On the other hand, Polaszek allowed, there could be advantages to auctioning off species’ names—especially if these auctions were conducted under the auspices of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. “It could be a good thing, depending on how it’s controlled. And we’re just control freaks,” he adds, laughing.
But some scientists are less amused. During dinner one night, a prominent marine biologist and conservationist—after telling me he doesn’t want to be identified—says Conservation International’s strategy should be seen in the context of streetwalking.
“It’s the distinction between a courtesan and a prostitute,” he says. “A courtesan gets a man to fall in love with her, and they enter into a mutually beneficial relationship that has financial benefits for her. A prostitute has a more straightforward ‘rack rate,’ if you will.”
“And in this case, Conservation International is the courtesan?” I ask tentatively.
“In this case,” the marine biologist replies grimly, “Conservation International is the prostitute.”
That assessment is too harsh by any measure. It is the group’s scientific research that drives its fund-raising, rather than the other way around. Moreover, the staff at Conservation International is too smart to be caught in an act of hypocrisy, providing green cover to some environmentally offensive corporation. Rather than placing the Raja Ampat species up for bidding on the Internet, the organization enlisted Prince Albert of Monaco to host the Blue Auction in his country’s world-renowned Oceanographic Museum, with just two hundred invited guests attending the black-tie affair.
As Erdmann sees it, auctioning off a species’ title for conservation purposes is not any different from the old system of patronyms, which dates back to when Linnaeus first invented the modern system of taxonomic classification in the eighteenth century. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, explorers would frequently name the flora and fauna they found after whoever funded the trip—usually a king, duke, or other royal. “Now you’re going to name something after people who are paying after the fact, but they are paying for the conservation of those species,” he says. “Same difference.”
In the end, the Blue Auction raised $2,015,000, half a million of which came from a spirited round of bidding over Raja Ampat’s walking shark. (An American named Janie Gale bought it and named it Hemiscyllium galei, in honor of her husband, Jeff.) This money has translated into direct benefits for Raja Ampat’s villagers: a vessel called the MV Monaco now patrols the area around Wayag twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The region is once again a nursery for baby blacktip reef sharks, and shark finning has disappeared. For Conservation International’s chairman and CEO, Peter Seligmann, the auction proceeds amounted to “an enormous shot in the arm for the community that lives in Raja Ampat” and a testimony to the environmental riches CI’s scientists have identified in the region’s murky waters. “When you go beneath the surface, it’s indescribable,” Seligmann says. “They’re the discoverers.”
Having waters teeming with sharks, however, is not an economic asset if they’re the sort that can launch deadly attacks. Gregg Oelofse, head of environmental policy and strategy for Cape Town, didn’t see sharks as a major part of his portfolio when he started his job in 1999. But Oelofse is an ardent surfer, and he and one of his colleagues at work started picking up word through their surfing and social circles that more great whites were showing up just off the city’s shores. One day while he was surfing with three friends in 2001, Oelofse saw it for himself. The group was surfing at a break called the Wedge off the city’s harbor wall. A white shark appeared out of nowhere next to one of his friends and then swam at the surface around Oelofse and three friends, about forty-five feet away. As they scrambled to paddle back to the beach, the shark came in front of them, then circled around back before disappearing. “It was really not pleasant,” Oelofse says now, in a dry voice.
On November 15, 2004, Oelofse assigned an intern in his office to stand up on the mountain above Muizenberg Beach, in order to do an assessment of how many sharks were in the water. That same day a seventy-seven-year-old grandmother, Tyna Webb, was killed by a great white off a nearby beach, Fish Hoek. All that was left of Webb—who had swum daily at dawn there for nearly two decades—was her red swimming cap, and people began to panic. The incident was one of four fatal attacks in less than two years, and one of fifteen attacks that took place off Cape Town’s beaches in the space of four years. Suddenly Oelofse needed to come up with a shark policy.
He convened a task force of experts to examine every possible shark control measure the city could adopt. South Africa has been the world’s pioneer in shark nets, first erecting this type of barrier i
n 1904 around a beach in Durban. Cape Town officials looked at establishing the kinds of mesh nets that ring much of the KwaZulu-Natal coastline to the north, which have protected the area’s beaches since a spate of attacks between late 1957 and 1958 that became known as Black December. The KwaZulu-Natal Sharks Board—originally dubbed the Natal Anti-shark Measures Board—is charged with reducing the number of attacks on visitors to the area’s popular beaches, and netting has helped achieve its goal. Between 1978 and 2008 these barriers caught close to 33,700 sharks, and the number of incidents involving sharks dropped by 91 percent since the nets were first installed in the 1950s. But this indiscriminate sweeping up of sea life comes at an environmental cost: only 12.5 percent of those nearly 33,700 sharks were released alive, and a number of more beloved marine animals have become entangled and perished in the nets. Every year since 2004, according to the board’s chief scientist, Sheldon Dudley, the nets have caught an average of 237 rays, 58 turtles, 53 dolphins, and 5 whales. (It’s also worth noting that about a third of the sharks caught in the nets are actually trapped as they’re heading out to sea—in other words, the barriers don’t prevent every shark from entering the swimming and surfing area.)
For years, the men and women who maintain and manage the nets have tried to fulfill the board’s legal obligations while minimizing the nets’ environmental impacts. They have been swapping out some of the nets for drum lines, where baited hooks are strung along lines attached to drums that rest on the seafloor, and have explored other forms of deterrence. This approach dramatically reduces the number of animals that are accidentally caught: drum lines replaced half of the nets along the Hibiscus Coast in February 2007, and in the space of two years nonshark bycatch fell by 50 percent. The board also removes the nets during the annual sardine run and warns swimmers and surfers that they face a heightened risk during that time. Still, Dudley knows there’s no chance of radically changing the region’s shark control policy. Given the board’s mission, he says, “there would be resistance to removal of all forms of protection.”
Even if Cape Town officials wanted to set netting or drum lines, however, the area’s rough seas and the fact that white sharks don’t spend all year close to shore make it a less than ideal location for such measures. The 2005 task force rejected outright culling of the area’s shark population as well, on the grounds it was inhumane and ineffective and would violate the white shark’s protected status under South African law. This is one of the most startling aspects of Cape Town’s shark control policy: it is based on the idea that the white sharks have as much of a right to live in the region as people do. “What we were trying to say up front to people is we don’t consider it as a problem animal. We don’t even want to use that word,” Oelofse says. “We see white sharks as an asset and a value.”
Oelofse was trained as a conservation biologist, but sounds more like a psychiatrist when he describes his office’s campaign to manage the threats great whites pose to residents and tourists who enter the water. Lean and angular, he reclines in his chair as he explains that he is facing a psychological challenge, not just one of public safety. “A lot of what we’re trying to drive is a value system,” he elaborates, sitting in his cramped, nondescript office in downtown Cape Town. Oelofse and his colleagues must convince people that these animals are an asset, rather than a curse, but they also need to have people take individual responsibility for the very act of entering the water. When it comes to surfing, swimming, and kayaking, he says, “people must realize that taking on those activities is a personal choice, and no matter what we do, there will always be risks.”
Part of the problem is that people often have difficulty processing certain kinds of risks, particularly ones associated with activities they don’t do on a regular basis. Studies have shown we’re very good at calculating the chances of things that we see as quite possible: elderly people know how likely they are to break a hip, while trained equestrians have a good sense of the chance that they’ll be thrown from a horse they’re riding. It’s much easier to contemplate the dangers you can estimate with some degree of accuracy, rather than a murky unknown. Humans accept the risks associated with plenty of mundane and unusual activities—one’s daily commute could end in a car accident, while skiing or skydiving can produce a broken leg—because they think they can predict how likely it is.
One of the best examples of this phenomenon occurs among the spearfishing community, the only group of humans that competes directly with sharks for prey. Janette and Jacques du Toit make their living by targeting game and reef fish off the coasts of South Africa and Mozambique, and they’re well aware of the danger they face in the water. They’ve had friends attacked by sharks—a spear fisherman was even killed by a white shark off Cape Town in July 2005—and both of them have faced these predators firsthand. In 2007 a ragged-tooth shark came straight at Janette while she was fishing—when she pushed it away with her spear, it spun around and came at her again. She pushed the animal away a second time, and it slapped her with its tail as it left her. Du Toit escaped without a significant injury. A year later she spotted an eight-foot tiger shark while fishing off the Eastern Cape: she managed to shoot the fish she was after, but when she went to pull it up, the shark “just went berserk, and I thought, ‘Okay, you take it.’ I just thought, ‘I’m not even going to argue.’ ”
Both Jacques and Janette describe spearfishing as a mind game where practitioners must constantly calibrate their behavior in order to ensure their self-preservation. A twenty-year veteran of the trade, Jacques recognizes what it means to share space with sharks. “You’re part of the food chain when you jump in there. That’s what makes it so exciting,” he says. “You never know what you could encounter.” While he tends to adopt a more aggressive stance toward sharks than his wife, du Toit makes just as many underwater assessments as she does and considers swimming with sharks “a calculated risk.” He knows diving in dirty water is more dangerous because it’s harder to detect what sharks might be swimming there, and if he does encounter one, he looks for any unpredictable or jerky movements. In an odd way, he is applying rationality to the most irrational of situations.
But the average human reaction to the prospect of a shark attack is anything but rational. Alison Kock, a born-and-bred Cape Town native who works for the Save Our Seas Foundation in addition to pursuing her own academic research, sensed the backlash as soon as Webb lost her life in 2004. “I almost didn’t want to tell people what I was working on, because people were so anti-sharks,” she says. The following year Kock decided to put her fears aside and hold sessions with local residents to discuss possible responses to the shark threat, but found herself fielding questions on everything from outright shark hunts to the idea of attaching a helium balloon to every shark’s tail so that beach visitors could see the animals from shore. “It felt like a witch hunt, people were so scared. When I got home one night, I told my boyfriend at the time that I wouldn’t be surprised seeing people running around town with pitchforks.” After one incident in August 2006 the city’s major paper, the Cape Argus, ran a front-page story on the subject every day for three weeks. An article in a South African scientific journal put it best: “Even though shark attacks are a minor cause of mortality for humans, this phenomenon receives an inordinate amount of media cover and interest, probably due to humans’ psychological abhorrence of being eaten alive.”1
The public pressure on the Cape Town task force was enormous. The group reviewed and tossed out all the traditional methods of shark control—exclusion nets that are so finely meshed they keep out all marine animals, physical barriers that create a similar exclusion zone—as impractical. The more innovative methods of shark control, such as erecting some sort of electrical barrier or employing sonar detection, were too expensive and still unproven. City officials were “left with nothing,” in Oelofse’s words. Which is why they turned to shark spotting.
At nine in the morning, high above Cape Town’s Muizenberg Beach, Et
hel Tshandu is standing on alert. Muizenberg Beach, a spot one surfing veteran calls “the biggest nursery of surfing in South Africa,” is a place that attracts an array of people—swimmers and kayakers, along with aspiring and experienced surfers. And it also lures great whites.
Standing about five feet tall, Tshandu doesn’t look imposing, but with her binoculars, polarized sunglasses, and black Windbreaker she’s fully outfitted to do her job: shark spotting. Filling out her official data book as she stands watch in a small hut with a corrugated tin roof, the former restaurant cook is all business. She has just noted there are nine surfers, two kayak paddlers, and six bathers in the water, which only boasts 5 percent visibility at the moment. She has instructed her counterpart standing on the beach far below to raise a black flag for everyone to see, so they can know that it’s difficult to determine whether any of the great white sharks that frequent False Bay are in their midst. But she is still scanning the sea, methodically working her way from left to right across one horizontal swath after another, to see if she can detect the sharks’ black shadows in the water.
For all her precision—Tshandu’s careful recording of wind temperature, her refusal to take phone calls from friends while she’s at work—the young woman knows her job requires an enormous leap of faith. The men and women who are tugging on their wet suits and heading out to sea are banking on the fact that a single person, perched on a mountain up above them, will keep them safe from a predator whose very survival depends on its ability to commit surprise attacks from below.
“Before I start work every day, I prefer praying and saying, ‘God, I put this in your hands,’ ” she explains. “Sometimes you do get nervous. What if something happens to someone? But I just put it in God’s hands.”
The shark spotting Tshandu practices started not as a government program but as an informal system surfers employed for self-preservation. When you drive up to Muizenberg Beach, which is also known as Muizenberg Corner or Surfers’ Corner, a couple of men are constantly strolling back and forth along the sidewalk eyeing the cars parked in front of them. Known as car guards, the men expect a few coins in exchange for making sure your car remains safe; most people pay them rather than risk any sort of damage to their vehicle. For years surfers had paid the car guards while they went to sea, even leaving their keys behind with them. From time to time they paid them to look out for sharks as well, and in October 2004 Greg Bertish, the owner of a local surfing and travel business, decided to establish a formal shark-spotting operation. Bertish raised money from both corporate and local sponsors, bought some equipment, and made sure the guards got first-aid training.