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Demon Fish

Page 30

by Juliet Eilperin


  Finally, I managed to plunge into the water near the animal’s head. Within seconds, I found myself facing an enormous, blunt-nosed creature, heading toward me at what seemed like a shockingly rapid rate. While I marveled at its massive nostrils and the eyes tucked on either side of its head, I was also cognizant of the fact that I was set for a head-on collision with a three-thousand-pound shark. It doesn’t matter that it didn’t boast sharp teeth, since I was simply going to get smushed. I ducked.

  The whale shark cruised by, seemingly unperturbed by my last-minute bailout. It was on its way, and I was now on the sidelines.

  By the time I scrambled back onto the boat, everyone was ready with their quips about my sudden evasive maneuver. I did not care. I had seen a whale shark, face-to-face. And I began to think that maybe whale shark tourism in Mexico has a future after all.

  To get a sense of what this sort of sightseeing looks like when it becomes truly big business, one must travel thousands of miles away from the Yucatán Peninsula to South Africa. It has capitalized on shark tourism better than almost any other country, in part because it serves as a part-time home for the iconic great white. While scientists can predict when the white sharks will show up—they congregate around areas such as Dyer and Seal islands during June, July, and August and come closer inshore during September through December—it remains slightly unclear what draws them to the area. Food is the most obvious explanation: young seal pups are just beginning to venture out into the water during South Africa’s winter months (what is the summer for the Northern Hemisphere), making them vulnerable to predation.

  The improbable idea of charging tourists for jumping into the water with lethal animals began on February 5, 1976, when the underwater filmmakers Valerie and Ron Taylor agreed to guide four Americans on an expedition to Port Lincoln, South Australia, to see white sharks in what Valerie Taylor later described as “their natural element.” The trip—organized by the U.S.-based See and Sea Travel—cost $4,000 a person, plus airfare, and generated significant publicity. Judging from Taylor’s diary of the trip, it’s miraculous that everyone emerged unscathed from the adventure. As she wrote on February 8 at 7:30 p.m. of the first great white the group encountered, “That poor shark. He must have wondered what kind of creature this wall of black eyes looking at him belonged to. Every pass of the boat was heralded by the excited cries from the Americans and a dozen clicking cameras. Never was a shark so photographed … The shark rammed into the far cage. Everyone yelled and cheered. From our boat, it looked chaotic and probably was. But the visitors were so happy it made us natives happy just watching them.”2 The events on Dangerous Reef were captured on film, not only by Ron Taylor, but also by some of the Americans, and sparked an unexpected backlash. Shark hunters flocked to the reef and killed at least twelve sharks, while some members of the public recoiled at the idea that great whites were that accessible. A similar trip planned for the following year was canceled.3

  For years, cage diving was the exclusive preserve of the very rich and the occasional adventure-documentary filmmaker. But around 1989, Kim Maclean—who at the time was earning extra money on weekends taking people out fishing on a small jetty—was strolling along the harbor in Hermanus, South Africa, when she saw a little Afrikaner boy fishing with a rod and reel. He happily plunked one fish after another into his bucket, until he reeled in a small sand shark. That one he tossed aside and left to die on the sand.

  Maclean—who had grown up “shark mad,” as she describes it, with shark posters covering her bedroom walls—was horrified. “This little boy had been trained the only good shark is a dead shark,” she thought to herself. And she decided there was a straightforward way of convincing people to think otherwise. It just meant getting them into water with great whites.

  Maclean is a blunt-spoken, stocky bleached blonde who’s spent years taking on the fishing boys’ club. She started Shark Lady Adventures in 1992, and she’s still the only woman running her own great white diving operation on the Eastern Cape. Maclean can operate in every position on a ship, and isn’t shy about saying so. But while she’s not above a bit of self-promotion, she also is a genuine conservationist. There’s a visible divide among the eight cage-diving operators who work out of Gansbaai, the impoverished town two hours away from Cape Town. Several of them have brochures that picture a great white with its mouth agape (the typical shark money shot), with phrases like “The JAWS … of LIFE.” While nearly every operator touts its eco-friendly credentials, several highlight the scarier aspects of getting in the water with white sharks.

  Shark Lady Adventures, by contrast, appeals to the higher-end, tree-hugger crowd. With catchphrases like “We care, protect and educate” and “This time, it’s you in the Zoo,” the operation navigates the line between typical thrill-seeking tourism and environmental protection. Maclean has established strict rules for the dive master, including making sure the bait is at least six feet from the boat so that the sharks don’t come into contact with the divers. In 2009 she constructed the White Shark Embassy, an attractive building right on the water that includes educational panels on sharks prepared by the Save Our Seas Foundation as well as plenty of stuffed animals, sweatshirts, and beaded wire sculptures. Maclean has little patience for backpackers, or the tourists who have put cage diving on their to-do list, right after bungee jumping and skydiving. “I’m not there to entertain people who just want to tick it off their list,” she says. “They want to see the gory blood, and want to see the fierce teeth.”

  That said, everyone who decides to cage dive with a great white is looking for thrills. And all of them are at least a little bit scared when they show up at the Shark Lady’s launching point.

  Gansbaai—the so-called White Shark Capital of the World—is a grim town. The largest local commercial establishment appears to be Dit and Dat Trading, and the most cheerful roadside signs all feature sharks. There are none of the usual trappings of a destination spot: small bed-and-breakfasts, restaurants, or curio shops. Tourists come first thing in the morning to head out to sea, and they depart in the afternoon for either Hermanus or Cape Town. Maclean tried to put on a white shark festival one year, to generate a little income for the town, but her competitors weren’t interested in cooperating. While cage diving might support more than half a dozen tour businesses, it’s done little to lift the standard of living for these operations’ departure site.

  By the time I arrive at the White Shark Embassy—a freshly whitewashed building with clipper ship chandeliers and ocean views—a small group has begun to assemble on the building’s second floor, where there’s a hot breakfast being offered. It’s an eclectic mix of people: a professional South African cricket player and his girlfriend; a Scottish business consultant and his daughter, fresh out of university; a Brazilian sales representative for Caterpillar, his wife, and their nine-year-old daughter; and a Malay-British couple with two teenage sons.

  “It was his idea,” Jeanne Kietzmann says bluntly. Kietzmann’s boyfriend, Dale Steyn, is one of the South African national cricket team’s star players. After seeing a show about great whites on a sports channel, he decided they needed to go. “I’m just being dragged along,” Kietzmann offers, glancing out the window at the boats docked below. “I’ve actually got a massive shark phobia. So it’s going to be interesting.”

  Lance Coetzee, the dive master, is a cheerful sort, sunburned all over his face except for the strip of white skin protected by his sunglasses. He gives a decent lecture on the white shark basics—their anatomy, different senses, feeding habits—and does his best to reassure the most jittery customers. “It will not come up on the boat and attack it just because you’re afraid and your heart is beating,” he lectures, just after describing how the sharks can detect the heartbeats of other creatures underwater. “These animals have been portrayed by the movie Jaws as bloodthirsty monsters. They’re not.” (Later, Coetzee confides, “I’m sure Jaws sells the product for us. I’m sure it helps, sensationalism. But se
nsationalism isn’t going to keep the sharks here.”)

  Then we’re off, with Coetzee shepherding us gently on the boat. Stuart Richardson, the Scottish businessman, relishes the idea of crossing paths with a dangerous animal underwater: “The ultimate is swimming with something like that. It’s almost a religious thing. If God wants to meet you, he’s going to meet you.” This is what sustains the cage-diving industry—the idea that one is doing something theoretically dangerous, even though every possible precaution is taken to minimize risk.

  After motoring for fifteen minutes, we’re within reach of Dyer Island, a well-known congregating spot for sharks. Several other boats have already made it out there, and from the cries we can hear nearby, they’ve presumably found what they’re looking for. As one of the mates starts chumming the water with a reddish fishy soup, Coetzee lowers the cage into the water. It doesn’t look anything like what I had envisioned: black rubber covers the metal contraption, which has four separate chutes divers can lower themselves into simultaneously. And only the most rudimentary gear is required—a hooded wet suit and snorkeling mask—since once in the cage, divers keep their heads above water until a shark comes close enough to observe.

  Before heading out, Coetzee warned that great whites don’t just circle in the water with their fins jutting out. But within minutes of our anchoring and throwing out bait, an ominous, nearly black fin appears just yards away from the boat. The shark we had been anticipating—and fearing—had arrived.

  By the time I manage to get an underwater look at a great white, my fear has dissipated. Maclean isn’t exaggerating when she says, “It’s you in the Zoo.” The cage is a solid piece of equipment, an assemblage of firm, crisscrossing bars that show no sign of failing. As Coetzee shouts, “Divers, look left,” I draw a deep breath and push myself down, whipping my head around to catch a glimpse of the shark heading for the tuna head Coetzee is dangling on a rope before it. The shark moves slowly, making lazy figure eights in and out of range of the cage. While there are plenty of whites in the area, they never congregate. One fish will come in for the bait, give up after a few attempts, and swim away. Then another will do the same.

  The great whites that parade before us are elegant despite their size. They lack the hulking mass of the whale shark, along with the cartoonish markings. There is a seriousness to the torpedo-shaped bodies that slice through the water, a wedge of muscle ready to flex when necessary. And then the moment comes: a white lunges for the fish head, its teeth bared. While much of the diving experience smacks of being in a glorified aquarium, this is the one time when it feels, for an instant, as if we’re witnessing nature in its element. The shark’s teeth are jagged, and it manages to snatch a bit of the head before shoving off. It’s the money shot.

  Everyone makes it into the cage but Kietzmann, who is held back not by fear but by seasickness. And the tourists go away with exactly the impression Maclean had predicted they would: reverence, and affection. It’s an odd sort of adventure tourism, whose proprietors depend on long-held stereotypes to lure customers but harbor a hidden agenda to unravel them at the end of the day.

  Boarding a flight out of Cape Town a few days later, I happen to run into Richardson as he and his family are embarking on the same plane. “I loved it,” he reminisces about our dive. “It was surreal. There you were, in with the shark. You felt like you could reach out and tickle its tummy.”

  Climbing up the stairs on the Jetway, he pauses to contemplate why sharks have such a terrible reputation. But even if it’s unjustified, he notes, it’s what brought him to Gansbaai. “Of course, if they didn’t demonize it, we wouldn’t have come. Now I get to go back and tell my friends, ‘I’ve been with a shark,’ and they’ll think, ‘What a man.’ ”

  And with that, he makes his way with his wife and daughter to their designated seats, headed home to tell his fish tale. He has managed to conquer a formidable predator while allowing the animal—like himself—to live another day.

  CONCLUSION: SHARK NIRVANA

  I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.

  —George W. Bush, campaigning as a presidential candidate in Saginaw, Michigan, September 29, 2000

  I am still optimistic about sharks.

  —Peter Klimley, professor at the University of California at Davis

  The northern Line Islands are, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere. It is a place where sharks rule.

  A series of Pacific atolls lying roughly one thousand miles south of Hawaii, the Line Islands remind us of what the sea used to look like. To get there from Honolulu, you must ride on a motorboat or ship, on open ocean, for five days. Its uninhabited Kingman Reef is pristine; the other islands are slightly more populated in quick succession until you reach Kiritimati, or Christmas Island, with a population of fifty-one hundred.

  National Geographic’s Enric Sala led an expedition to the atoll in 2005 and returned in 2006. What he saw was something unlike anything he had ever seen: a reef so dominated by sharks and other top predators that other fish were nowhere to be seen, since they know that to be seen is to be eaten.

  “There is a landscape of fear,” he tells me as we sit on a beach in the Dominican Republic. He is drawing in the sand, to try to give me a sense of how bit by bit humans have degraded the world’s oceans. The other fish are elusive at Kingman, he explains, because they know the risks if they come out.

  Sharks make up 75 percent of the fish biomass at Kingman Reef. At Kiritimati, by contrast, top predators make up just 19 percent. While diving at Palmyra, an island not quite as unpopulated as Kingman, Sala witnessed firsthand what it meant to exist in a perfectly honed predatory system. In an effort to conduct a comprehensive survey of the marine organisms on the reef, he caught a damselfish and tucked it into a Ziploc bag, which he in turn deposited into the nylon mesh bag he was holding at his side. Then he reached for a grouper about half a foot long, hoping to fit it into another Ziploc bag. During the course of this tussle the fish began to shake, and suddenly—whoosh—a couple of blacktip sharks came along, aiming for the grouper. “They started biting at it,” he recounts. “Then a whitetip and gray reef shark came.” At this point Sala decided to abandon the mesh bag with the two fish still inside it and swim away to a safe distance where he could observe the scene. “They destroyed the mesh bag and ate the fish, right through the Ziploc. These guys were really hungry. There’s a lot of competition. Everything that is injured or sick is eaten within seconds there.”

  Kingman Reef looks like few other atolls in the world: the only ones that rival it are those that help compose the Phoenix Islands, another Pacific archipelago that, like the Line Islands, is split between the American and the Kiribati government. Not only is Kingman Reef supremely healthy, with corals covering the seafloor to such an extent that it’s nearly impossible to see the sand, but the fish have been so sheltered from human beings that they view them as a curiosity. When Sala and his colleagues began diving there, the snappers and groupers appeared to be fascinated by the strange sight of these alien creatures, checking out the Spaniard’s ponytail and the other scientists’ equipment.

  “I bet it was the same feeling Darwin had when he stepped on Galápagos for the first time,” Sala says. “It was a totally new experience.”

  There’s just one problem: as soon as you add humans to the mix, the sharks start disappearing.

  Sala and his collaborators published the results of their expedition on February 27, 2008, in the online edition of Public Library of Science Biology. It is the most comprehensive analysis ever of what they call “reefs without people.” That same edition included a commentary from Nancy Knowlton and Jeremy B. C. Jackson, coral experts affiliated with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Smithsonian Institution, saying the study has redefined the way we should view corals worldwide. Examining coral reefs without taking into account what they were like before humans degraded them, they analogized, was like “trying to imagine the ecology of tropical r
ainforests by studying environmental changes and interaction among the surviving plants and animals on a vast cattle ranch in the center of a deforested Amazon without any basic data on how the forest worked before it was cleared and burned.”

  When you imagine the coral reefs of old, or even the sea just a hundred years ago, sharks play a starring role. We think of oceans, and wild landscapes in general, as a neat pyramid in which there are a small number of big predators on top and many small predators below. The study Sala and his colleagues have published suggests just the opposite: an undisturbed ecosystem resembles an inverted pyramid with plenty of large predators on top and fewer small predators below. The animals at the top clear out the weakest animals in the population and keep the midsize predators in check. Without the top predators, the waters begin to look completely different.

  Ransom Myers provided the first evidence that it was worth keeping sharks around, and his students continue to build the case for it. Boris Worm, one of Myers’s closest collaborators, co-authored a 2008 paper in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution that elaborated on this phenomenon. Worm and his colleagues identified how the “landscape of fear” that Sala talks about reverberates throughout ecosystems worldwide. In Prince William Sound, Alaska, harbor seals are so scared of Pacific sleeper sharks that they forage in shallower areas, which in turn keeps the walleye pollack population intact. The tiger sharks in Shark Bay, Australia, intimidate large herbivores such as sea turtles and dugongs enough that these prey species shift their distribution depending on the season: that keeps the area’s sea-grass habitat from being overgrazed.1 Sharks, Worm explains, “have a huge impact on the ecosystem because they were there before everything else. When everyone came into the system as an evolutionary baby, sharks were already there and had figured it out.” Nowadays sharks keep other, smaller predators in check. “Sharks are being kind of ‘the cop on the street’ in the ecosystem,” Worm analogizes.

 

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