Demon Fish

by Juliet Eilperin

  Rachel Graham makes the identical pitch when she lobbies local officials in Belize to put protections in place for sharks. “Think about what would happen to your town if there was no rubbish collector,” she tells them. That would be a problem, they respond. “Now imagine in a month’s time nobody’s arrived in a month, and the rubbish’s piled up,” she continues. “And the policeman hasn’t arrived.” Graham’s point is clear: sharks may not perform the most glamorous function in Belize’s waters, but their role keeps the marine ecosystem humming. Take out the sharks, and the species that Belize’s citizens really care about—the ones that make up the bulk of the commercial fish trade—will suffer.

  In the same way that scientists now use computers to predict how climate change will reshape the planet by the end of the century, researchers are modeling the implications of taking large sharks out of the ocean. One group found that a simulated decline of tiger sharks in Hawaii’s French Frigate Shoals would boost the numbers of seabirds, turtles, monk seals, and reef sharks, thereby triggering a rapid decline in tuna and jacks. A similar exercise showed that taking sharks out of Floreana Island in the Galápagos would harm several commercial reef fish species, since the ranks of toothed cetaceans, sea lions, and other predators would swell accordingly. Just as we are conducting an uncontrolled experiment on the earth by emitting an unprecedented amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we are altering the sea with the same sense of abandon, by yanking out what Francesco Ferretti and his colleagues call “a relatively stable force in ocean ecosystems over evolutionary time.”2

  Researchers have recently discovered this same behavioral ripple effect in the northern Rockies. When Americans wiped out gray wolves in Yellowstone and the surrounding areas in the late 1920s, the willow and aspen trees stopped reproducing. Then, after the Fish and Wildlife Service reintroduced wolves to the region in the mid-1990s, the willows and aspens began to reappear: in time songbirds and beavers came back as well. It wasn’t just that the wolves were eating the elk, but the elk became sufficiently frightened of wolf attacks that they stopped grazing all winter on the banks of streams, where the aspens and willows grow. Even local mountain lions changed the way they roam, and often take longer routes on rougher ground so if a wolf comes along, they can climb up a tree for shelter. Ed Bangs, who heads the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s gray wolf recovery program in the northern Rockies, explains that all the other animals in the ecosystem recalibrated their behavior once one of the top predators returned. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh, yeah, wolves, I remember how to deal with that.’ ”

  A few months before Worm’s paper came out, a group of nineteen scientists, led by Benjamin S. Halpern at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, published an article and map in Science capturing the extent to which humans have left a footprint on the sea. They culled seventeen global data sets for twenty marine ecosystems and came to a stunning conclusion: “No area is unaffected by human influence.” None. Nearly half of all coral reefs experience “medium high to very high impact” from humans, they concluded, with areas in the Mediterranean, the South and East China seas, and the North American Eastern Seaboard ranking among the hardest hit.3

  Sometimes humans’ impact on the sea is visible, like in the aftermath of the April 20, 2010, explosion of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico. The massive oil spill that spewed out of BP’s doomed exploration well not only covered brown pelicans and northern gannets but also soaked sharks swimming well below the ocean’s surface. While it will take years to assess the full extent of the accident’s toll, there is no question that sharks—possibly some of the most imperiled ones, such as bigeye thresher, dusky, and oceanic whitetip—suffered along with other wildlife in the region. Two months after the accident ten whale sharks showed up just twenty-three miles southwest of Sarasota, Florida, raising the possibility that these animals had been forced to seek refuge in a different part of the ocean as pollution contaminated the Gulf of Mexico.

  We attack sharks in subtle ways, and in blunt ones. In one of the most telling incidents of just how dramatically the “man bites shark” story has evolved in recent years, a Coney Island lifeguard had to come to the aid of a juvenile shark—most likely a sand tiger shark—that was being attacked by a crowd of Labor Day beachgoers in 2007. As New York’s Daily News put it, “Tender-hearted muscleman Marius Mironescu rescued a 2-foot sand shark from a mob of panicked swimmers, grabbing the wriggling fish in his arms and—in a neat reversal of the usual scenario—swimming out to sea with the stunned animal.” Mironescu estimated that between seventy-five and a hundred people had encircled the small creature and begun attacking it. “They were holding on to it and some people were actually hitting him, smacking his face. Well, I wasn’t going to let them hurt the poor thing,” he told the Daily News. In the end the shark proved less forgiving than the lifeguard who came to its rescue: while it played dead during the attack, as soon as Mironescu began doing a backstroke with the fish in one hand, it revived and tried to bite him.4

  Figuring out where the sea is in the most trouble is not terribly complicated: any decent marine biologist can tell you if you want to see the ocean at its most vulnerable, go to where the people are.

  Bimini, to which I journeyed around the same time Sala and his colleagues first visited the Line Islands, used to be a place where sharks and other big fish ruled. Years ago, Ernest Hemingway used to spend weeks on end here: when he wasn’t writing novels such as The Old Man and the Sea, he spent his days struggling to bring in the massive sport fish exerting overwhelming strength on the end of his fishing line. Pictures of the trophy fish he lured in and showed off at the Bimini Big Game Club used to be on display here, until fire destroyed the museum a few years ago.

  Now the fish aren’t so gigantic, and Bimini isn’t much of a vacation spot. There are a couple of Caribbean bars—the kinds with sand on the floor and women’s underwear hanging from the ceiling—and a few unimpressive condo developments. But Rafael Reyes, president of the Bimini Bay Resort and Marina, and his business partner Gerardo Capo want to change all that. For about a decade the two developers have been building a golf resort that aims to bring as many as five thousand tourists a day to an island with a year-round population of just sixteen hundred residents. In order to do so, they need to rip up the island’s mangroves and replace them with golf turf.

  That dredging and destruction is eroding the vegetation that local lemon sharks depend on for survival. Sonny Gruber, who has spent more than three decades studying lemon sharks in Bimini, has been driven to despair by the development. Based on an eleven-year study started in the mid-1990s, he and his colleagues determined that after March 2001, during the heaviest dredging of the seafloor for the resort, the first-year survival rate for lemon sharks fell 23.5 percent, and it hadn’t fully rebounded by the time the study concluded in 2006.5 The dredging could have hurt the sharks in several ways, including the fact that toxins were introduced to the water, and the fact that the sharks now had to compete for more limited resources within a degraded habitat.

  In Bimini, Gruber and I also headed out in his motorboat to observe Reyes and Capo’s bulldozers do their work. Gruber slipped into despondency as the yellow machines mangled the mangroves, alternately muttering and yelling at me for not expressing more outrage at this environmental travesty.

  “At the end of my career, I get to document the destruction of the species I’ve been documenting for twenty years,” he declared as the machines toppled the vegetation and scattered the remains into the ocean. “Wonderful.” As soon as we returned to the biological station where Gruber resides, he slipped away to his room and remained there for the rest of the afternoon, too depressed to talk.

  But an avalanche of bad press, coupled with elections that have placed the former opposition party in power, ended up turning the tide against the developers. Bahamian officials have rewritten the rules for the project multiple times, seeking to contain the number of units and co
mpelling the developers to set aside land on East Bimini, one of the island’s most ecologically valuable areas. On December 29, 2008, the Bahamian government announced it was creating a new marine reserve on Bimini’s North Sound in an effort to preserve the mangroves on which the lemon sharks and nearly a hundred other species depend. The new protections will make it much harder to build a golf course as part of the Bimini Bay Resort. When I call Gruber at his Miami office to discuss the news, he seems stunned at the turn of events. “It’s a damn miracle,” he says repeatedly.

  Still, the resort’s developers haven’t given up. At the time of the marine reserve announcement, the complex already boasted 250 housing units, three restaurants, two pools, and the Bahamas’ two largest marinas, as well as approval to build a ten-thousand-square-foot casino. Allison Robins, Bimini Bay’s public relations manager, says the creation of a protected area amounts to “a step forward … Basically, they’ll put up a bunch of buffer zones and we’ll develop around that.”

  It remains unclear what will happen to sharks in Bimini, as well as elsewhere around the globe. Sala believes the only way these predators will survive is if international officials impose “a global, indefinite moratorium on shark fishing. Otherwise sharks and humans cannot exist together.” And in the places where sharks have been hardest hit, such as in the Mediterranean, he adds, they will never come back.

  In some cases an ecosystem can come back, though it can take decades. Scientists and tourists alike have spotted more great whites off the East Coast, a trend that has led to temporary closings in locales ranging from Brooklyn’s Rockaway Beach to Cape Cod’s Chatham Harbor. While a number of factors may have prompted this trend, including warmer sea temperatures and better observation systems, there’s a clear driving force: more seals for the sharks to eat. There is now a steady increase in the number of gray seals and a growing resident seal population off the coast of Chatham and Monomoy Island, Massachusetts, largely because the state phased out its bounty on seal “noses” in 1964, and protections the federal government put in place in the 1970s. And there still hasn’t been a deadly shark attack off New England since 1936.6

  This sort of recovery will require an extraordinary act of global cooperation. While individual nations can protect the waters within a couple hundred miles of their coasts—right now, 4 percent of the world’s continental shelves enjoy some level of protection7—the high seas are unpoliced when it comes to sharks. Until they are, sharks will remain vulnerable. It has taken humans centuries to create the bizarre turn of events we now face. As the State Department’s David Balton puts it, “For most of human history, sharks have been seen as a threat to us. Only recently are we beginning to see we’re a threat to them.”

  As policy makers continue to postpone taking meaningful shark conservation measures, they may want to consider the historic debt we owe to these animals. With their rituals of ancestor worship, the shark callers of Papua New Guinea may seem quaint to outsiders. But their religious belief is rooted in scientific fact: sharks are our actual evolutionary ancestors. The physical characteristics we’ve inherited from them have helped shape the way we hear, and even swallow. It’s something to think about the next time you gulp down a mouthful of shark’s fin soup.

  Peter Klimley has a sunnier outlook than most marine biologists. Humans are beginning to understand how perfectly sharks have adapted to their marine environment, and they are willing to pay money to observe them underwater. Since sharks congregate in some of the most ecologically diverse regions of the sea, he reasons, government officials could protect them if they wanted and stave off the most dire effects of overfishing and habitat destruction. And with ecotourism, “you have a competing financial incentive to save the sharks.”

  Perhaps Klimley is right, and we will end up saving these fish so we can sell whale shark tchotchkes like the ones on Isla Holbox, and squeeze pudgy tourists into metal cages off Guadalupe Island in Baja. Having swum with sharks a couple dozen times, I can attest to the allure of watching their perfectly adapted bodies glide through the water, giving just a hint of the power they could unleash at any moment.

  But the best example of how we should treat sharks came from perhaps the unlikeliest conservation hero of them all, George W. Bush, in June 2006. For years environmentalists had been pressing the White House to fully protect the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. Another remarkable series of Pacific atolls stretching fourteen hundred miles long and a hundred miles across, the uninhabited chain boasts more than seven thousand marine species, at least a quarter of which are found nowhere else on earth. In the sea the Northwest Hawaiian Islands serve as home to species such as the endangered Hawaiian monk seal and threatened green sea turtle; on land they provide a rookery for fourteen million seabirds.

  President Theodore Roosevelt first recognized the atoll’s value in 1909, when he established a bird sanctuary there and provided federal protections. Bill Clinton used executive orders to create a coral reef ecosystem reserve in the area during the final months of his administration, but stopped short of making it a permanent federal sanctuary. Eight Hawaiian fishermen held licenses to fish in the area, and several of these men, along with their powerful political allies, had blocked efforts to preserve the reef even though it was a minor fishery that required a two-day boat journey from Honolulu to reach. (One of the permitted commercial anglers, Zenen Ozoa, broke with the others and lobbied to shut down the fishery on the grounds that it was too environmentally harmful to the region.)8

  Ocean advocates waged a tireless campaign to convince Bush that he could burnish his green credentials by making the islands a marine reserve, lobbying not just his top environmental adviser, James L. Connaughton, an avid diver, but First Lady Laura Bush, an enthusiastic bird-watcher. The filmmaker Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of the renowned explorer, spent a month and a half filming on the archipelago and produced two one-hour documentaries on the subject. He showed one of them to the president in the White House movie theater. In the end Bush surprised even his own advisers by declaring the islands the Papahānaumokuāwakea Marine National Monument, making it the largest marine protected area in the world, one that will remain untouched for generations. Tourists as well as fishermen will not be able to make the trip out there; federal enforcement officers will ensure only a handful of scientists will be able to conduct research on the reef. (Less than three years later the British government snatched the record of the world’s largest marine reserve away from the Americans when it afforded protections to the Chagos Archipelago, a string of fifty-five islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean.)

  Just two weeks before leaving office on January 6, 2009, Bush made one last offering to conservation activists by creating three separate marine monuments in the Pacific that will protect some of the most pristine parts of the sea. The three reserves—which include the islands Sala has chronicled in the central Pacific and a long stretch along the world’s deepest underwater canyon, the Mariana Trench—total 195,280 square miles, an area that even surpasses the Papahānaumokuāwakea Marine National Monument. The waters surrounding the Mariana Trench and those at Kingman Reef boast some of the highest densities of sharks on earth. And while the new monuments, like the one in Hawaii, didn’t amount to a very heavy political lift, it meant Bush had to defy Vice President Dick Cheney and the U.S. recreational fishing lobby. These groups, and the vice president, argued the president had no right to deny American citizens the right to take their rod and reel to the farthest corners of U.S. territory. In the end Bush decided that he did.

  I have wanted to visit the Northwest Hawaiian Islands and the northern Marianas for years: now I will likely never go. But that’s beside the point—the sharks will be there. They were here long before we arrived, they are unlike anything else on earth, and they, more than any other living thing, embody what is profound and beautiful about the sea.

  In 1858, Lieuenant Joseph Christmas Ives, the first American official to visit the Grand Canyon, made a comment about t
he vista before him that seems quaint in retrospect. “The region last explored is, of course, altogether valueless,” he said. “It can be approached only from the south, and after entering it there is nothing to do but leave. Ours has been the first, and will doubtless be the last, party of whites to visit this profitless region. It seems intended by nature that the Colorado river, along the greater portion of its lonely and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed.” Ives was terribly wrong about the idea that the Grand Canyon would be “forever unvisited and undisturbed.” But perhaps those words can still be applied to places like the Northwest Hawaiian, the northern Mariana, the Phoenix, and the Chagos islands.

  ——

  Boris Worm, a child of the 1970s, grew up in Hamburg. When he went scuba diving, he had a simple choice: dive in either the Baltic or the North Sea. Both had been degraded in the centuries before he was born. As Worm puts it, “I just grew up with these really low expectations of the ocean.” He lives in Nova Scotia now: while it’s the New World, so to speak, its seas have been plundered as well. But Worm has traveled to places like the Line Islands, diving deep until the sharks surround him in the way that they encircled Enric Sala.

  “It’s like growing up in a really poor neighborhood, and then you begin to see what else is out there,” he says now. “You’re being continually surprised by how rich the world can be.”

  Even some of the most remote areas of the ocean have come under assault. Scientists have determined the abundance of sharks in the Chagos Archipelago declined 90 percent between 1975 and 2006, mainly due to illegal poaching.9 The area has not been tightly patrolled, historically, and the incentive to steal sharks will stay high as long as the price for shark fins continues to hover at exorbitant levels. But the area is still relatively pristine, and experts estimate that the new protections will save at least sixty thousand sharks a year. So it stands a real chance of recovering.