Shark Life: True Stories About Sharks & the Sea

by Peter Benchley

  There are dozens of other stinging jellyfish that are more nuisance than menace. Almost all of them (including the sea wasps and the men-of-war) share a fascinating technology of attack. Their tentacles shoot microscopic harpoons into their victims, and the harpoons inject powerful nerve poisons.

  Humans are never any jellyfish's intended victim. A small fish stung to death by, say, a man-of-war is drawn up under the body and eaten with what Ellis calls “feeding polyps.”

  There are almost as many proposed remedies for jellyfish stings as there are kinds of jellyfish—vinegar, urine, meat tenderizer, alcohol, seawater, and shampoo, to name a few. Many of them work, more or less. It depends on the kind of jellyfish that has stung you, the amount of tentacle matter that has made contact with your skin, and how sensitive you are to the particular poison that has been injected. A woman I know swam face-on into one of the notorious “red jellies” that infest the Northeast every August. She had to be hospitalized for a couple of days. At the same time a cousin of hers dove through a crowd of the same jellies and was stung all over her torso. All she felt was an annoying tingling sensation.

  Many poisonous fish are of the family Scorpaenidae. This includes the scorpion fish, the lionfish, and the stone-fish. They are found in tropical waters and normally live near, on, or in the bottom. That's a blessing for swimmers and snorkelers because many of the family members are deadly. They have highly venomous spines on their backs, which are used entirely defensively, so no one need worry about being attacked by one. Stepping on one, however, is another concern altogether. They make wading around reefs a perilous pastime.

  Scuba divers worry about the Scorpaenidae for yet another reason. Underwater and within the chaos of color that is a tropical reef, they're almost invisible. Stonefish, which according to Ellis are the deadliest fish in the world, can look exactly like a rock covered with marine growth. They lie half hidden in the sand and wait for potential prey to come by. A wader who steps on one or a diver who reaches out to steady herself on this apparent rock may be stabbed by dorsal spines fed by venom glands. Untreated, an adult human can die in less than two hours.

  Lionfish look like gaudy Christmas-tree ornaments. They are bold and armed with long venomous dorsal spines. They don't bother to hide, not in sand or reef, and they rarely retreat at the approach of a human. Instead, they'll seem to aim their spines your way, as if daring you to take your best shot. To me, the prime danger of a lionfish lies in its ability to disappear from view against the background of a particularly spectacular reef. Several times I've blundered up to and among lionfish without seeing them. Only good fortune has protected me from bumping or putting a hand on one.

  I've had very little close contact with poisonous sea snakes, most of which live in the Indo-Pacific. Almost all of them want nothing whatever to do with human beings. There are several species, and most are at least as venomous as the Indian cobra. But their fangs are very short and their temperaments usually placid. During breeding season, however, some species can become aggressive. A couple of friends of mine have been surprised by snakes heading for the surface to breathe that suddenly reversed course, charged, and bit them. My friends’ quarter-inch-thick wet suits prevented the snakes’ fangs from reaching their skin, or at least slowed the bite enough to give my friends time to grab the snakes and fling them away before fang touched flesh.

  BARRACUDAS

  If ever there was a fish that's gotten a bad rap solely for being bad-looking, it's the barracuda. A barracuda can grow to be up to six feet long and is slender, tough, and fast as lightning. It is armed with a prognathous lower jaw (it extends forward beyond the upper one) studded with dozens of jagged, needle-sharp teeth designed to tear prey to shreds. A barracuda looks mean, menacing, and deadly. (I speak here specifically of the great barracuda, the largest of the more than twenty species that roam the tropical waters of the world.)

  The image is a phony. The great barracuda is capable, no question, of causing serious bodily harm to any of us. But it has no inclination to do so. It feeds on fish, and its speed and weaponry are so formidable that it has little difficulty catching and killing whatever it wants.

  There have been very, very few cases of barracudas biting people. All those I've heard of were almost certainly accidents of misidentification. A swimmer wears a shiny watch, ring, or buckle into the surf, where visibility is poor, and a barracuda mistakes a flash of reflected light for the shimmer of fish scales. It bites, instantly recognizes its error, and vanishes. Sometimes the bite is so fast and efficient that the person doesn't know he's been bitten.

  Divers are used to seeing barracudas appear from nowhere. These fish hang around and gaze with fixed eye at whatever's going on, then disappear with the same impossible speed. Sometimes they come very close and hover, motionless, watching. Usually, they establish and somehow maintain a precise distance from the divers, advancing and retreating without appearing to flutter a single fin.

  I have never heard of a barracuda seeing a human being, watching, studying, and evaluating him, and then turning on him and biting him. Never.

  Which was no comfort at all when one day I took Wendy and then-twelve-year-old Clayton drift diving off Palm Beach, Florida.

  Drift diving is diving in—and with—a strong current. It is done in circumstances where swimming against the current is difficult, dangerous, or downright impossible. Divers leave the boat in one location and drift along with the current. They hold a line tied to an inflated ball that bobs on the surface so the captain of the boat can keep track of them. Then the boat picks them up far down-current when the dive is done.

  Palm Beach is perfect for drift diving because one of the world's great currents, the Gulf Stream, touches the shore right there. The Gulf Stream then sweeps north and eventually northeast, warming the Atlantic waters all the way from Bermuda to Newfoundland and points east. Dive boats can deposit divers only a couple of hundred yards offshore. They are instantly seized by the warm, four-knot current and carried along with the entire movable feast that inhabits the Gulf Stream.

  Four of us jumped into the choppy water—we three and a dive master, who held the line tied to the floating ball. We quickly sank to the calm and quiet thirty or forty feet down. The water was so rich in nutrients that it was cloudy. Visibility was terrible, and Wendy and I made sure to keep our eyes on both Clayton and the dive master.

  There wasn't much to see, however, and Clayton soon became impatient. We weren't roaring along fast enough for him, so he sped up by kicking with the current.

  Within thirty seconds he had vanished into the gloom.

  Though Wendy and I were both concerned, we weren't particularly worried. He couldn't stray too far, and he could only stray in one direction because he couldn't possibly swim against the current.

  Then there he was, suddenly, chugging directly at us. He was swimming against the current, kicking as fast as his fins would flutter and breast-stroking with his arms. He stared at us through the faceplate of his mask, his eyes wide with fear. He was actually making headway, and when he reached us, he kept swimming until he was behind me. Then he stopped struggling, grabbed me, and climbed aboard my back.

  I looked at Wendy, who was looking at Clayton. Clayton was pointing somewhere ahead. He was exhausted, and he breathed so fast that bubbles exploded from his regulator in a constant stream.

  We looked, following his finger, but saw nothing. I was beginning to assume that Clayton had come up behind and perhaps startled a shark that had turned toward him, scaring him out of his wits. Then I saw Wendy pointing and then the dive master pointing. There, a few yards ahead and below, was what looked like a big school of big sharks. They were just cruising along in the current, as if waiting for food to be carried to them.

  But they weren't sharks. As we drifted closer and closer, they slowly rose to meet us until we were actually drifting among them. I saw that they were barracudas, and not merely great barracudas, for the word great doesn't do them justice
. They were super-, mega-, Moby Dick barracudas, barracudas on steroids.

  I couldn't believe it. Even allowing for the fact that, underwater, everything looks a third again as big as it really is, these monsters couldn't be real. They looked at least twelve feet long, which meant that they were really nine feet long.

  Nine-foot barracudas! They were two feet high and one foot thick, and each one's mouth looked like a Swiss army knife open for display. Their eyes stared at us with the blank serenity of the invulnerable.

  As we continued to drift together, these great creatures paid us no attention whatsoever. In fact, they moved aside to avoid contact with us, and I could finally see them in proper perspective.

  There were probably a dozen of them—it was hard to tell, for they drifted in and out of sight. Each one was probably five or six feet long and very high and very thick. As I gazed at each silver giant, I now saw, instead of ugliness, the beauty of perfection. For in their world these creatures were supreme. They went where they wanted, ate what they chose, and feared no living thing.

  When at last we surfaced and were back on the boat, Clayton said, “I think I'd like to be a barracuda.”

  RAYS

  The oceans are full of rays of all kinds, colors, shapes, and sizes. All are “cousins” of the sharks, in that they're technically elasmobranchs. That means that their bodies are structured not with bones but with cartilage. They include everything from sawfishes to guitarfishes to manta rays, eagle rays, and stingrays. Except for the most bizarre of accidental circumstances, they're harmless to humans.

  But what about stingrays? I hear you yowling. They have stingers, don't they? They can sting you, can't they?

  Yes, they can, if you step on them. But so can bees. And a bald eagle can claw your eyes out, and a German shepherd can rip your throat out, and a raccoon can give you rabies. But the chances are, they won't.

  Anyone who needs convincing of the gentleness of stingrays need travel no farther than the Cayman Islands. Local dive groups there have established a dive site called Stingray City in the sand flats off Grand Cayman. Stingrays gather there in numbers far too large to count, and they wait patiently for the boats that arrive daily with divers and food. The rays swim up to you, under your arms, between your legs, and around your head. They envelop you with wings as soft as satin. They feed from your hand, and if you have nothing for them, they move on to someone else. (Even stingrays can make mistakes, however. A few years ago, one mistook my son-in-law's wrist for a tender morsel and actually bit him. The hard cartilaginous plates in the ray's mouth caused a nasty bruise but didn't break the skin.)

  It's very tempting to anthropomorphize stingrays. Not only do they behave calmly and comfortably around humans, but when seen from underneath, they can even look humanoid, if you'll let your imagination ramble a bit. The nostrils look like eyes, the mouth is a mouth, and the point of the head can become a nose, and … well, you have to be there.

  Twenty years ago I had an experience with a ray that changed my life. Literally. I hurried home and wrote a book about it— The Girl of the Sea of Cortez. It altered forever my perception of animals, people, the sea, and the interconnectedness of everything on earth.

  I was in the Sea of Cortez, doing an American Sportsman segment on hammerhead sharks. For reasons no one has ever been able to explain, hammerheads gather there periodically in huge, peaceful schools of hundreds, perhaps thousands, at a time. The gatherings seem to have nothing to do with either breeding or feeding. The hammerheads are simply there, in crowds so thick that seen from below, they block the sun.

  The underwater cameramen on the shoot were old friends, Stan Waterman and Howard Hall. Howard's wife, Michele, who's now a producer, director, and partner in Howard's film company, was along as both nurse and still photographer.

  One afternoon we returned to our chartered boat, the Don Jose, full of macho tales of death-defying diving among the sea monsters. We were interrupted by a very excited Michele, who directed us to look beneath the boat.

  There, basking in the boat's cool shadow, was the largest manta ray any of us had ever seen. (We'd soon learn that it measured eighteen feet from wingtip to wingtip. At the moment, all we knew was that it looked as big as an F-16.) A manta has fins near its head that unfurl during feeding and become supple sweeps to gather food into its immense mouth. Now they were rolled up tightly, and they looked exactly like horns—thus, the manta's age-old traditional name, devilfish.

  For centuries the manta was one of the most terrifying animals in the sea. It is huge, horned, and winged, with a mouth big enough to swallow a person whole. It also has a habit of leaping clear out of the water, turning somersaults, and slamming down upon the surface of the sea. Obviously it's daring any foolish sailor to fall overboard into its ghastly grasp. Equally obviously, such hideous monsters deserved no fate better than death. Spearing mantas used to be a popular sport among the few, the bold, and the brave.

  In fact, mantas are harmless. They eat only plankton and other microscopic sea life. They breach (soar out of the water) for reasons no one knows for certain. They probably do it to rid themselves of parasites but possibly, as I prefer to believe, do it just for the fun of it. Usually, they avoid people, swimming— flying seems more accurate—slowly away from approaching divers.

  Sometimes, however, they seem to seek the company of people, like the manta that now rested peacefully beneath our boat. Before any of us could ask, Michele told us how she had discovered the magnificent creature.

  The air temperature was well above a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The Don Jose was not air-conditioned. To keep bearably cool, Michele went overboard frequently. On one of her plunges she had seen the enormous ray hovering motionless beneath the boat. She swam toward it. It didn't move. As she drew near, she saw that the animal was injured. Where one wing joined the body there was a tear in the flesh, and the wound was full of rope. Michele supposed that the manta had swum blindly into one of the countless nets set by fishermen all over the Sea of Cortez. In struggling to free itself, which it had accomplished not with teeth (they have none) but with sheer strength, it had torn its wing and carried pieces of the broken net away with it.

  Michele kept expecting the manta to ease away from her as she approached. But by now she was almost on top of it and still it hadn't moved. She was, however, out of breath. She decided to return to the boat and put on scuba gear.

  The manta was still there when she returned. This time she was emitting noisy streams of bubbles, and she knew that the manta would probably flee from them.

  It didn't.

  Slowly, she let herself fall gently down until she was sitting on the manta's back.

  Still it didn't move.

  Michele reached forward and, very gingerly, pulled strand after strand of thick rope netting out of the ragged wound. She had no idea how— or even if—rays experience pain. But if they did, she thought, this had to hurt.

  The manta lay perfectly still.

  When all the rope was gone, Michele carefully packed the shreds of torn flesh together and pressed them into the cavity in the wing. She covered the wound with her hands. Now the manta came to life. Very slowly it raised its wings and brought them down again. Very slowly the great body began to move forward, not with enough speed to throw Michele off its back but with an easy, casual pace that let her ride comfortably along. To steady herself Michele put one hand on the manta's six-foot-wide upper lip. Off they went, with Michele's heart pounding in her chest, happiness filling her heart, amazement and delight flooding her mind.

  The boat was anchored on a sea mount, an underwater mountain whose peak extended to within a hundred feet of the surface. With unimaginable grace the manta took Michele on a flying tour of the entire mountaintop. Down it flew to the edge of darkness, then up again to the surface light.

  Michele didn't know how long the ride lasted—fifteen minutes, maybe half an hour. But eventually the manta returned to its station in the shadow of the boat and s
topped. Michele let go and came to the surface. She was thrilled beyond words, but she thought we would never believe her. Surely by the time we came back, the manta would have long since returned to its home range, wherever that might be.

  But it hadn't. It was still there, still resting in the cool, still apparently—impossibly!—willing to have more contact with humans.

  We decided to try to capture the manta on film. We knew we couldn't duplicate Michele's experience. But even if we could get some shots of the great ray flying away with a human being in the same frame to give a sense of its size, we'd have some very special film.

  Howard and Stan filmed the ray itself from every possible angle. Then they signaled for me to descend, as Michele had, and attempt to land gently on the manta's back. I had done my best to neutralize my buoyancy so that, once submerged, my 180 pounds would weigh nothing. Now I used my hands like little fins to guide me down upon the animal as lightly as a butterfly.

  As soon as the manta felt my presence on its back, it started forward. It flew very slowly at first, but soon its wings fell into a long, graceful sweep. It was flying so fast that I—in order to stay aboard—had to grip its upper lip with one hand and a wing with the other and lie flat against its back. My mask was mashed against my face, we were going so fast. My hair was plastered back so hard that on film I look bald.

  I felt like a fighter pilot—no, not a pilot, for I had no control over this craft. It was more like being a passenger in a fighter plane. Down we flew, and banked around the sea mount, and soared again. We passed turtles that didn't give us a passing glance and hammerheads that (I swear) did a double take as they saw us go by.