Now half a dozen beaches surrounding Cape Town all have the same warning system. Every day, regardless of weather conditions, from morning until night, one person stands watch above while another remains on the beach, ensuring the proper flag is flying to signal the current conditions. A green flag means no sharks are in sight and visibility is good; a black flag means while no sharks have been detected, visibility is poor; and a red flag means a shark has been sighted within the last two hours. If a monitor detects a shark in the water, he or she triggers a siren that blasts on the beach below, letting people know they need to come to shore immediately. When the alarm sounds, people move. The whole program, which monitors four beaches seven days a week year-round and another six during peak visiting times, costs the city of Cape Town just under $125,000 a year. In addition to giving beach visitors greater peace of mind, it has provided jobs to more than a dozen underprivileged young people in the area.
Between 2005 and 2008, spotters reported 530 white shark sightings off the city’s most popular beaches. This is not even a comprehensive count of the number of great whites that move into and out of False Bay, since scientists have detected many more movements through both aerial spotting and acoustic tagging of individual sharks. Peter Chadwick, who directs the World Wildlife Fund’s Honda Marine Parks Program in South Africa, has seen the animals during his scientific missions: “The great whites are swimming amongst the bathers and the surfers. We see it from the air and everyone’s blissfully unaware, and quite happy.”
In 2005, Kock placed acoustic tags on seventy-eight great whites circling Seal Island near the city’s shores. Monitors registered a hit every time a tagged shark swam by them, making it easy to determine where the sharks spent their time during different parts of the year. Yet when Kock started downloading the data from the monitors, she couldn’t quite believe it when they revealed they had registered such an immense number of hits. “It was a complete mind blow that over 50 percent of the animals tagged at Seal Island were coming inshore, and they were staying inshore for months,” she says. At the very time that people are going to the beaches off Cape Town, the great whites are headed there as well. It’s the unintended consequence of the conservation measures South Africa has adopted over the past couple of decades. South Africa was the first nation in the world to protect great whites, in 1991, and its protection of Cape fur seals has helped the sharks as well, by providing the animals with additional prey. As the sharks thrive, their numbers are growing.
Kock’s and Chadwick’s data also underscore a simple point: if great whites deliberately hunted humans, they would be having a field day every summer off the Western Cape, consuming the many surfers, swimmers, and kayakers in their midst. They don’t, but the chances of an accidental shark attack still loom large.
The South African branch of the Save Our Seas Foundation has launched a critically acclaimed advertising campaign detailing the statistics that put shark attacks in perspective—how 652 people died in chair-related accidents in a single year compared with the 4 killed by sharks. It has made Oelofse’s job slightly easier, but it is only a start, because when it comes to the public perception of sharks, individuals do not always engage in such coolheaded calculations. (As Oelofse puts it, “When you walk into a room, you’re not scared by a chair.”)
Knowing that this is the case, Oelofse has a simple mission: keep the sharks and the people apart from each other, to the extent possible. So far the shark-spotting program has done exactly that: for several years it ensured there was not a single deadly attack off Cape Town. But Oelofse has no illusions about the success the project has enjoyed up to this point: the moment a great white takes a beachgoer’s life, the public’s trust in the shark spotters could evaporate. “We could have two shark attacks in three days next week, and the whole thing could spin back again,” he admits. “To the extent we can keep people and the sharks apart, the better for everyone concerned, including the animals themselves. Things could go badly quickly. It’s very dependent on what happens in the water.”
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For decades a cadre of researchers have tried to develop an effective shark repellent, convinced that they were within reach of this holy grail. During World War II, both the American and the British governments had secret programs aimed at developing an elixir that would prevent sharks in tropical waters from savaging the unfortunate pilots and naval personnel who ended up stranded there. (This effort inspired one of the most memorable lines a politician has ever uttered on the subject, when Prime Minister Winston Churchill told the House of Commons, “The British Government is entirely opposed to sharks.”) In 1942 the U.S. Office of Strategic Services kicked off a research drive that produced Shark Chaser, a chemical repellent that used copper acetate as a deterrent and included an inky dye that resembled what a squid would spray. The powder, encased in a packet and engineered to smell like rotting shark, was attached to life jackets and included in life-raft provisions; troops were told to open the packet and dissolve it in the water if they found themselves in shark-infested waters. While Shark Chaser produced mixed results at best—experiments showed it worked only in certain instances, and servicemen continued to fall victim to sharks in the Pacific—it provided some degree of psychological comfort to the troops headed to sea.
Still, U.S. federal scientists knew they had not solved the puzzle of how to keep sharks away from humans. In 1958 the Office of Naval Research’s Sidney Galler convened a panel of nearly three dozen experts in an effort to devise a more effective repellent.2 In 1972 one of the nation’s most preeminent researchers, Eugenie Clark, determined that the Moses sole, a fish species that lives in the Red Sea, secreted a natural shark repellent. Sonny Gruber, the marine biologist who took me shark diving in Bimini, worked with a team of Israeli and Egyptian scientists in an effort to replicate this milky liquid but found there was a catch: it worked only when they injected it directly into the shark’s mouth. So much for the Moses sole solution.
The KwaZulu-Natal Sharks Board has experimented with a range of deterrents over the years, including electrical ones. Since sharks have such sophisticated electroreceptors, the theory goes, a pulsing electric charge surrounding a diver could keep them away. This research has produced the Shark Protective Oceanic Device, or Shark POD, which divers can wear while underwater. In two series of tests conducted on great white sharks off the Western Cape of South Africa, scientists concluded that the probability of an attack within a five-minute period declined from 70 percent to 8 percent when the unit was powered on, and within a ten-minute period the chances dropped from 90 percent to 16 percent. Since the experiments simulated a worst-case scenario—the researchers were offering bait to the white sharks at the very moment they are in their most aggressive predatory state, during their annual pilgrimage to the area in search of Cape fur seals—the chances of facing an attack while wearing a Shark POD are even less likely.3 However, the Shark POD has its limits: it can’t protect an entire bathing area, the unit is not mass-produced, and it’s not as if every recreational swimmer is going to take a dip wearing a bulky electrical unit.
A few inventors based in Oak Ridge, New Jersey, have been experimenting with a range of potential repellents since 2001, the so-called Summer of the Shark. Eric Stroud serves as managing partner of Shark Defense Technologies, and he and his colleagues have been trying out their material on Gruber’s lemon sharks for years. They discovered by accident that magnets made of neodymium, iron, and boron can rouse sharks from a catatonic state known as tonic immobility and prompt them to flee, but the magnet works only if it’s ten inches away from the shark in question. The firm won $25,000 from the World Wildlife Fund’s annual International Smart Gear Competition in order to develop magnets that could keep oceangoing sharks from being caught on fishing lines aimed at attracting swordfish and tuna, and they are also exploring the possibility of embedding metals in nets that could repel the sharks instead of having them entangled in the nets and killed.
Th
is work holds considerable promise, though it’s yet to be fully realized. A group of scientists have already tested whether electropositive metals could repulse juvenile sandbar sharks in a lab, the first step in proving that electrical hooks could deter sharks from going after unintended bait. The researchers, led by Richard Brill at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, determined these types of metals did put off groups of sandbar sharks attempting to feed and altered the swimming patterns of those that were not seeking a meal.4 Some of these effects were not always long-lived, however, and a team of researchers—which includes Stroud—are still trying to determine what size, shape, and exact metal composite would work best as a deterrent.
Shark Defense has already developed a prototype of a circle hook that could potentially work. The hook, which has a gleaming metal composite wrapped around it, almost looks too gorgeous to sit out at sea on an industrial fishing line. But if it works, the industry could face pressure from environmental activists and regulators to incorporate it into their gear. And these rare earth metals, worn as an anklet, could also help humans avoid shark strikes.
In many ways, the inventors at Shark Defense are using the sharks’ own biology to protect them from harm. They are working on a chemical repellent based on the scent of rotting sharks, a closely guarded, slightly sweet-smelling combination of a dozen compounds known as A2. Patrick Rice, a partner in the company and its senior marine biologist, explains they’ve mixed a more effective version of the repellent, which does not have to be injected directly into a shark’s mouth. The fact that this scent repels all types of sharks suggests it stems from a primitive instinct that evolved before sharks radiated into an array of species. At the same time, the scent attracts the very bony fish that sharks seek out as prey. “It’s sending a chemical signal to sharks: get out of here,” Rice says. “It’s sending another chemical signal to bony fish: the predators are gone.” They’ve already packaged the repellent in a number of forms: as a pressurized aerosol spray and as a “pop-pouch,” both of which can spurt out underwater at a moment’s notice, and as a hard waxy gel that can be injected into bait and seep into the water over time. The latter method would work best for fishing vessels, giving anglers an incentive to keep sharks alive. And while Rice is an unabashed booster of the repellent’s powers—“It fires out, and the sharks are gone!”—even he knows these safeguards have their limits. “Just like anything else, nothing’s 100 percent effective. If a shark’s in a frenzied state, if they’re hungry enough, they’ll start eatin’.”
We are often unwilling to acknowledge that experiencing nature carries a risk as well, one that might be a little harder to calculate. Every wild ecosystem operates on a cycle of life and death, and it’s naive to assume that one can enter it without, on occasion, falling prey to those forces.
Average citizens in the United States, and most other industrialized countries, have resisted this message for decades. Instead, they tend to blame people in power for not protecting them adequately. In a fascinating piece of electoral number crunching, the Princeton University politics professors Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels found that voters tend to punish incumbent politicians for natural disasters, including floods, droughts, and shark attacks. “As long as responsibility for the event itself (or more commonly, for its amelioration) can somehow be attributed to the government in a story persuasive within the folk culture, the electorate will take out its frustrations on the incumbents and vote for out-parties,” Achen and Bartels write. “Thus, voters in pain are not necessarily irrational, but they are ignorant about both science and politics, and that makes them gullible when ambitious demagogues seek to profit from their misery … In most cases, incumbents will pay at the polls for bad times, even in situations where objective observers can find little rational basis to suppose that those incumbents have had any part in producing the voters’ pain.”5
To test this hypothesis, Achen and Bartels analyzed the impact of America’s seminal shark attack incident—the killings off the Jersey shore in 1916. The attacks took place just a few months before the 1916 presidential election and generated a spate of negative press for President Woodrow Wilson at the time, including an editorial cartoon in which a black fin titled “defeat” slashed through America’s Northeast. Wilson, the former governor of New Jersey, was alarmed enough to call a cabinet meeting in the wake of the attacks, but his advisers were at a loss to offer any preventive policy response. Wilson did command the Coast Guard to patrol and survey the beaches where the attacks had taken place, but at that point the damage was done.
Wilson managed to hold on to the White House in the fall, but he lost New Jersey. More important, he suffered a noticeable dip in the four beach counties—Monmouth, Ocean, Atlantic, and Cape May. Achen and Bartels estimate “the negative effect on Wilson’s vote in the beach counties is a little more than 3 percentage points … The shark attacks indeed seem to have had an impact—about one-fourth the effect that the Great Depression had on Herbert Hoover’s vote in New Jersey 16 years later.” He did even worse in two of the townships hardest hit by the shark attacks—with an eleven-point decline in Beach Haven and a nine-point drop in Spring Lake, far more than the negligible changes in the Wilson vote in these townships’ broader counties and in the state. As the professors explain:
Shark attacks are natural disasters in the purest sense of the term, and they have no governmental solution. Yet the voters punished anyway.
Of course, it is possible that the voters did not blame the government for the attacks themselves, but did blame it for not helping them with their economic distress. In that case, retrospection might not be blind. No doubt voters told themselves something like that at the time. Yet in the case of the sharks, it is not clear what the government could have done to help the local economy. The truth could not be covered up. The vacationers could not be compelled to come to the beach, nor could the sharks be forced to stay away.6
With every fresh shark strike, politicians often scramble to show voters they are taking concrete action to protect them. Virginia’s former Republican governor George Allen formed a shark task force in the wake of the 2001 attacks, in large part to ensure that his state’s tourism industry would not suffer a serious downturn. In the end, however, the task force failed to spur any significant changes in state policy. The group did offer commonsense advice in a public report, warning beachgoers who fear being attacked that they should avoid swimming at times when sharks may be feeding: late afternoon, evening, and early morning. But Virginia Institute of Marine Science emeritus professor Jack Musick, the task force’s lone scientist, says public officials have to accept the limits of their influence as well. “What the hell are you going to do?” he asks.
Most politicians, and their aides, have a very low tolerance threshold when it comes to sharks. Since I was covering the 2008 presidential campaign for The Washington Post at the same time I was writing this book, the idea that I was scribbling about sea monsters in between rallies provided considerable amusement to some of the political junkies riding along with me on John McCain’s Straight Talk Express. On April 25 a shark, most likely a great white, killed sixty-six-year-old Dave Martin off San Diego’s Tide Beach in a single bite. It was the first recorded attack in Southern California since 1959, and it came on the heels of a report on the most shark-infested beaches in North America. Steve Schmidt, one of McCain’s top strategists, e-mailed a news article about the attack to me, and within minutes Mark Salter, another senior McCain adviser, added his own, gently mocking note: “As u can see, this is v distressing to both schmidt and me. Pls reconsider publishing your testimonial to the virtues of these vicious creatures.” When the news hit less than a week later that a U.S. surfer in Mexico had fallen prey to yet another shark, Salter kept firing off messages. “Jeez, we settled the West abt 130 years ago. Every place in America should be purged of vicious predators. what kind of country are we?” he wrote in one. Then, in a separate missive, “Holy shit, Juliet. These
beasts must go. It’s us v. them. Better hurry up and publish. This time next year, they’re going to be as rare as a wooly mammoth.” While they were joking on one level, their banter also carried a clear message: Why would anyone give a thought to keeping these creatures around?
Just as McCain’s aides were firing off these e-mails, some surfers down in Mexico decided to take measures into their own hands. Eager for vengeance, they waded into the water where their compatriot had been killed. And they began murdering sharks.
Fascinated by Schmidt and Salter’s preoccupation with sharks, I decided it was worth polling the man they worked for, McCain, on the issue. As one of our bus rides came to a close, and his press secretary, Brooke Buchanan, was doing her best to shoo reporters off the bus, I piped up that the next ride should be entirely devoted to a discussion of shark policy, but in the meantime I wanted to know where the senator stood on the question of sharks.
He looked at me, and the other journalists gathered around me, smiling. Pausing for a moment, he declared his allegiance in the Campaign Shark Wars. “I gotta be pro-shark,” McCain said, with a little shrug. “They’re important to the whole chain.”
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