For the most part, what we're talking about when we use the words shark attack are really shark bites. They are a part of the shark's normal feeding pattern, motivated not by rage, fear, or frenzy but by curiosity, confusion, and hunger.
I'll repeat, the chances of your being bitten by a shark are ridiculously small. But if you swim in the sea, the possibility does exist. The good news is that there are ways to reduce the odds to very close to zero.
Over the past twenty-five years, in the United States and many other countries around the world, there has been a vast shift in population toward the seashore. In the United States alone, some 50 percent of our 280 million people now live within 50 miles of the shore. Millions of people who did not grow up near the sea and who know nothing about it are now exposing themselves to the sea, with all its beauty, power, mystery, and danger.
Many people who swim in the sea do not give it respect for what it is: the largest environment on the planet, home to more animals than any other. All of those animals must eat in order to survive. It is an environment in which most of us are aliens—clumsy aliens who are ill equipped to survive.
And yet on every glorious day of every summer, boys, girls, and adults around the world plunge into the sea. They take risks that they shouldn't, most involving drowning but some involving creatures that sting, pinch, and bite—including sharks.
That's why I believe that practically no shark bite is un-provoked. We provoke sharks simply by going into the water, entering their feeding grounds, becoming fair game.
There are some practical guidelines to follow to reduce the risk of a shark bite. The first requires a bit of a change in the way we look at the world.
These days, most of us are rarely in danger from anything in nature. As a result, we've come to assume we're safe everywhere. We tend to see every animal as warm, cuddly, and friendly, or sometimes simply afraid of us. So little are we exposed to wild animals that we have no real knowledge of how to behave around them.
On land, our ignorance is rarely tested. Deer eating flowers in the backyard aren't a threat to life and limb. But when we choose to go into the sea, we can't afford to make mistakes. Many millions of creatures live in the sea. Among them is a large, free-roaming predator that poses a real threat to humans: the shark.
And sharks can be anywhere: in shallow water or deep, even in the surf itself. They can be in the little dips between the shore and sandbars just offshore, where low tide sometimes traps them. They can be in murky water or clear, rough water or calm.
While only a few species of sharks are considered dangerous to humans, all sharks—especially those more than three feet long—should be respected and avoided by swimmers. I've been hassled by a school of three- and four-foot-long sharks. What began as a game of push-and-shove soon turned into a terrifying mass mugging from which I barely escaped, with bite marks on my fins.
Before you enter the water, stand for a moment and look at the sea around you. Are there birds working offshore— swooping and diving into a school of baitfish near the surface? That's a sign that larger predators are underneath, driving the baitfish upward.
Perhaps those predators are bass or bluefish. But a shark or two could be stalking the bass or bluefish. Any signs that schools of fish are in the neighborhood might mean that sharks are there, too. If you see a concentration of ripples on the surface of the water, or silvery flashes as feeding fish roll out of the water and their scales catch the sunlight, or a patch of action anywhere in an otherwise calm sea, don't go into the water. Nature's food chain is in progress. There's always a chance that the apex predator is out hunting, too.
Don't go into the water if you're bleeding—at all, from anything, anywhere on your body. The same salt water that may heal your cut will carry away the scent of your blood. The senses of sharks are so finely tuned that they can receive and analyze the tiniest bits of blood imaginable. And the shark can home in on the source of the blood from far, far away.
Blood is not the only thing that attracts sharks to us humans. We emit sounds, smells, pressure waves, and electromagnetic fields—all of which a shark can detect. That shouldn't surprise you. A dog or cat hears and sees in spectral ranges far beyond ours, so why shouldn't a shark? After all, sharks have been around, and have been very successful, for scores of millions of years longer than cats, dogs, and people.
Don't swim or surf in water near seal or sea lion colonies. These playful mammals are the prime (and favorite) food source for great white sharks, among others. When seen from below, a surfer on a board looks just like a sea lion that has gone up for a breath of air. Great whites are, by nature, ambushers—they prefer to blindside their prey. They attack from below and behind, and with such speed and force that they sometimes bite through surfboard and surfer before they realize they've made a mistake.
Don't go swimming at dawn, dusk, or night. Many sharks—tigers, for example—come into the shallows at night to feed. On some islands, locals swear that sharks can tell when six o'clock in the evening comes along. That's when fins can be seen crisscrossing the bay or cruising along the beach. Dim light also makes it harder for a shark to see. Then it must rely on its other senses, which increases the chances of a random bite.
The same holds true for swimming in murky water. A shark may sense nearby movement of a warm-blooded animal it can't see. It may decide to take a bite to determine if the animal is tasty.
Don't swim alone, and don't swim far from shore or other people. As a lone swimmer you are vulnerable prey— and the farther you are from rescue if something does go wrong, the lower your chances of survival.
Don't go swimming where people are fishing from boats. They've probably put bait in the water, or even chum, which is a mixture of blood, oil, guts, and fish bits. (Even if you're not set upon by a shark, you'll stink for days, especially your hair.)
Finally, and most obviously, don't go swimming in areas where sharks gather or feed. These include steep drop-offs, where tide and current sweep prey to waiting sharks, and the passes in tropical lagoons, where every six hours, the change of tide brings new feeding patterns to the entire chain of wildlife in the water. Avoid channels into harbors, where fish are cleaned and their remains tossed overboard from returning boats.
There are also a few don'ts for when you do go swimming.
Don't wear jewelry or any shiny metal in the water. It flashes and shines and can, in murky water, look to a shark like a wounded fish. A friend of mine went swimming wearing a bathing suit with a brass buckle. As he was wading out of chest-deep water, he felt something brush between his legs. When he reached the beach he found that he'd been slashed open from thigh to knee—by something with extremely sharp teeth, either a barracuda or a small shark, for he never felt any pain. If there hadn't been a lifeguard handy to put a tourniquet around his leg, he might have bled to death.
Another friend wore a gold cross on a gold chain while he was snorkeling. A shark rushed him from below, ripped cross and chain away, and, with the same slashing bite, tore open his chin.
Don't swim in the ocean with your dog. Dogs swim with a jerky, ungainly motion that can attract curious sharks.
And don't you make any jerky movements, either, such as splashing, kicking, or tussling with your buddy. All of those send out signals that say Wounded prey … worth investigating.
Despite all these cautions, it's important to remember that no matter what you do, the odds are in your favor. Whether or not a person acts carefully and with common sense, the chances of being attacked by a shark remain somewhere between slim and none.
10
When Good Dives Go Bad
Usually when you're diving, you don't want to see sharks any more than you want to meet up with a bear while you're walking in the woods or with a pack of wolves while you're cross-country skiing.
Apex predators are the creatures at the top of the food chain that generally have no natural enemies except others of their own species (and, of course, humans). They
have a way of spoiling your whole day, even if they don't chase you down and tear you to bits in a bizarre fit of madness or hunger.
If you've had good training or a lot of experience as a diver, you know how to cope with common emergencies. No matter how experienced or well trained you are, however, you can never be completely prepared for the sudden appearance of one or more aggressive sharks. The reason? Here it comes again: No matter how much we think we know, the truth is, none of us knows for certain what any shark will do in a given situation.
The tiger sharks I dove with in Australia were interested in nothing but the bait laid out for them. Luckily for me, they dismissed humans— these humans, at least—as of no interest.
In the Sea of Cortez I dove with vast schools of scalloped hammerheads. There were so many that seen from beneath, they blocked out the sun. Not once did one of them express anything more than idle curiosity about us.
In deep water off Rangiroa, an atoll in the Tuamotu chain of islands in French Polynesia, photographer David Doubilet and I pursued five enormous great hammerheads. Great hammerheads are a species unto themselves, very different from the schooling scalloped hammerheads. These five were hefty, robust females, all fifteen feet or longer. Any one of them could have consumed either of us in two bites. But not one would pause long enough for David to take a photograph.
Rangiroa is also home to a small but healthy population of silky sharks. Silkies are a particularly “sharky”-looking type of shark, with a supersleek body and a perfect shark profile. They are considered dangerous to humans, but I've dived with the ones around Rangiroa half a dozen times or more, and I've never had trouble with any of them. Once there was a misunderstanding of signals between David and me. He was signaling that he was ill and about to vomit into his regulator. But I thought he was signaling me to get closer to the shark. So I let a large silky come so close to my head that I could count the pores on its snout and see the texture of its yellowish eyeball. When at last I realized what was happening, I shrugged one of my shoulders, nudging the silky in the jaw, and it sped away.
Nor have I had trouble with any of the various kinds of bull sharks. But I know that many people—divers as well as swimmers—have. If I see a bull shark underwater, I never take my eyes off it. I am convinced that bull sharks are dangerous to human beings, and they deserve a bigger dose of fear than most other species.
I'm just as wary of makos, though they're so fast that keeping them in sight is nearly impossible. Not only are makos the fastest sharks in the sea, and armed with a mouthful of scraggly knives, but they also have a reputation for crankiness.
I've been in the water with a mako only once. It appeared as if by magic and paused no more than two feet in front of cinematographer Stan Waterman. Before Stan could focus his camera, his safety diver—whose sole job is to watch the cameraman's back—panicked. He whacked the mako with his “bang stick,” a steel tube fitted on one end with a twelve-gauge-shotgun blank and a detonating mechanism. The explosion of the gases inside the cartridge blew a hole the size of a silver dollar in the mako's head, killing it instantly. We watched the beautiful metallic blue body swirl away into the darkness of the deep.
Stan was furious. He had detected no danger, he had had the mako in sight at all times, and it hadn't threatened him once. The gorgeous animal had died for nothing. Stan's safety diver was embarrassed and apologetic.
And then, finally, there is the shark for which no amount of instruction, training, warning, or anticipation can prepare a diver: the great white. Yes, there are a few helpful things to know. For example, you can reduce the creature's advantage by letting it know that you know it sees you. Great whites are ambushers, preferring to attack prey from below and behind. Theoretically, if you face down a great white, you may convince it that you're too much trouble to bother with. Theoretically.
I know someone in South Africa who snorkels and scuba dives with great whites in the open (that is, with no cage). He sometimes carries for protection a weighted piece of wood painted to look like an enormous great white's head in “full gape”—mouth yawning open, upper jaw down and out in bite position. He claims that his bluff has several times deceived great whites and discouraged them from attacking him.
Still, nothing in the world can prepare the average scuba diver for an unplanned encounter with whitey. I know it to be true, for it happened to me several years ago.
I was on a trip with Teddy Tucker, a man with a vast knowledge of the sea. Teddy was asked to journey to Walker's Cay in the Bahamas, to study a pile of ancient cannons that had been discovered on the sandy bottom. The finder of the cannons wanted Teddy's opinion as to whether the guns were signs of a shipwreck in the immediate vicinity. If they were, he might finance an archaeological expedition to preserve the ship's remains. On the other hand, the cannons might only be a “dump.” That is, they might have been tossed overboard centuries before from a storm-wracked ship trying to lighten itself enough to pass over the reefs and shoals where it was trapped. Teddy would scour the rocks and coral nearby for river stones that might have been used as ballast. He would search for bits of wood or metal and for corals that could signal iron, bronze, silver, or sections of a ship's skeleton concealed beneath.
I went with Teddy not because he needed me but because I knew that a trip with Teddy was an adventure guaranteed. His trips were always fascinating, often exciting, and sometimes dangerous. I had already written two novels inspired by escapades with Teddy, The Deep and The Island, and more were to follow.
It took him only a few dives over a couple of days to conclude that the cannons were a dump. No ship had sunk with them—no ship big enough to carry so many guns, anyway, and none right there. Perhaps the ship had lightened up enough to clear the reefs and sail on to the safety of the open sea. Perhaps it had made a few hundred yards of headway and then come to grief on another reef. Perhaps the storm had broken the ship apart, sending different sections to float away to different destinations. Perhaps the ship had made it all the way home to England or Spain or France or Holland. Unless the finder decided to spend the time and lavish sums of money to search naval archives and mount a proper underwater expedition, no one would ever be sure of the ship's fate.
One day, while Teddy was examining a stretch of reef, I returned to the cannons. I was going to fan away the sand at the base of the heap of encrusted iron. I hoped to find some small telltale sign of a wreck. Maybe an emerald ring or a gold chain. Something modest.
The water was clear and the visibility seemingly endless. The cannons were in plain sight from the surface forty or fifty feet away. I remember the pile as being higher than I was tall and twenty-five or thirty feet long. A friend of ours was snorkeling on the surface. He waved to me as I sank to the bottom. I began to creep along the sand, fanning with my hand here and there. I couldn't wait to expose a crack that might be hiding what had, by now, become in my mind the Gem of Gems.
After a few pleasant but fruitless minutes of fanning, I heard a smacking sound from above. I looked up and saw that my snorkeling friend was slapping the surface and pointing down at me—or so it appeared. I looked at him for a moment, to be sure that he wasn't in trouble. Then I waved at him and continued on my way.
The slapping stopped, and now I heard the sound of swim fins churning through the water. I looked up and saw the snorkeler swimming—no, racing—toward the boat. He'd become bored, I assumed, or cold (though the water was soup warm). I kept going.
Not till much later did I learn that what he had been doing with all his noisy slapping was trying to save my life.
From his prospect high above, he had a clear view of the entire area: not just the cannons, but the sand plains that spread out from them on all sides. Seconds after I had begun to creep along the sand, he had seen, emerging from the gloom on the opposite side of the cannons, a great white shark. Not a big one—ten or twelve feet at most, probably a young male—but a great white shark nonetheless.
Anyone who has ever
seen a great white in the water will never mistake it for any other species of shark. Seen from above, the great white has a unique profile. Its hefty, jumbo-jet fuselage is distinguished by what's called its caudal fin. The caudal fin is a curved horizontal fin that sticks out just before the tail on both sides of its body. It gives support to the tail, and streamlines the shark. Caudal fins exist in bill-fish and a few other species of sharks, but in none are they so large and noticeable. Seen from the side, a great white is thicker and more robust than, say, a silky. Its snout is perfectly proportioned, not as sharp as a mako's, not as blunt as a tiger shark's. Seen head-on, a great white is broad-shouldered and neckless. Its lower jaw stays slightly open, showing grabbing and tearing teeth. Its upper lip looks puckery, as if the upper jaw were toothless. It isn't really, of course. The upper jaw is home to row upon row of big, ser-rated triangular cutting teeth that lie relaxed, nearly horizontal, against the upper gums.
Seen from anywhere, it is a big shark, long and bulky— a seventeen-foot female can weigh over two tons. And it moves with the ease and confidence of the toughest dude on the block.
My friend the snorkeler had been with us in South Australia, and he knew what he was seeing.
He told me later that from his vantage point the pile of cannons looked like an almond. He could see me swimming along the right side of the almond and the shark swimming up the left side at approximately the same speed. He calculated that the shark and I would meet at the point of the almond, as precisely as two characters in a Warner Bros. cartoon. He had slapped the water to warn me and pointed not at me but at the shark. Suddenly the thought had occurred to him that causing a ruckus on the surface might possibly attract the shark up to him. He figured that I at least had the advantage of being completely submerged and on apparently equal turf with the shark. But floundering on the surface, he was nothing but bait. So he departed, hastily, for the boat.
Shark Life: True Stories About Sharks & the Sea Page 7