The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks

by Casey, Susan

  Now more than a decade into their long-term study, the biologists did not find the prospect of collaborating with Groth very appealing. For outfitters, coupling research (real or pseudo) with commercial cage diving had become a popular way to lend gravitas to what could easily devolve into one big yee-hah. And it no doubt relaxed clients to think they were in the presence of someone who knew something about these animals. But what was best for research—or for the sharks—was not necessarily what was best for business.

  Scot was especially concerned that drifting decoys all day, every day, would desensitize the sharks. They are, after all, nature’s most exquisitely adapted predators. How long could one reasonably expect them to go on being dupes, snapping away at fiberglass? In his study Scot had always carefully varied the location, the time, and the shape of the objects he floated, and after a shark investigated a decoy, he would remove it for at least three hours. Then he’d sneak another one out there, but this time he would use an entirely different shape. To avoid influencing the sharks’ natural hunting behavior, he limited his decoy use to fewer than twenty hours per season. During the fall of 2000, the Patriot floated and towed decoys for almost one hundred hours. By mid-November, Scot could see that their effectiveness had plummeted. The boards continued to be investigated, but they were no longer attacked. It had taken less than two months for the sharks to become wise to the whole deal.

  Nonetheless, 2000 was a fantastic shark year, the best on record. On some days there had been as many as four feeding events. Groth’s success rate was high and, far from throwing in the towel, he was more encouraged than ever. Ecotourism had arrived at the Farallones, and it wasn’t going away anytime soon. People yearned to see these animals; they always had. And to that end, Groth’s endeavors actually represented progress: before cage diving was available, seeing a great white shark had usually involved killing one.

  THE WORLD’S AQUARIUMS ARE FILLED WITH SHARKS—SOUPFIN SHARKS, sevengill sharks, hammerheads, tigers, oceanic whitetips, nurse sharks, reef sharks, angel sharks, zebra sharks, sawfish sharks, horn sharks, leopard sharks, a rare albino Port Jackson shark—the list goes on. Great white sharks have been conspicuously absent. This is not for lack of trying.

  Before it was widely understood that Carcharodon carcharias is one of the few warm-blooded shark species and therefore suited to cooler water, several white sharks were parboiled in tropical fish exhibits. Most refused to eat. And then there were the transportation challenges. It wasn’t easy to cart around a live, two-thousand-pound fish with a mouthful of razors. White sharks must keep water flowing over their gills to stay alive; when forced to remain still, they eventually drown. Often, when a shark arrived at an aquarium it was already half-dead, having been tangled and asphyxiated in a fisherman’s net. And how exactly was a twelve-foot shark supposed to move through the water while it was on the back of a flatbed truck rolling down Highway One en route to Marineland of the Pacific? The whole enterprise was outlandishly complicated.

  But in the wake of Jaws, in the seventies and eighties, the cash potential of having a real live “monster” on display made marketers salivate. Aquariums kept trying in the hope that one day, one of these animals might make it. At least thirty-seven great white sharks expired in the process; SeaWorld San Diego alone went through five in a dogged series of attempts between 1976 and 1980. Most of the sharks lasted less than twenty-four hours, but in the continuum SeaWorld also managed to set a longevity record by keeping one alive for sixteen days. That record should come with an asterisk, though. In 1968, an eight-foot male white shark exhibited at the Manly Marine World in Sydney, Australia, had shown signs of thriving in captivity—and suffered a very public death because of it.

  The Manly Marine World shark defied all the odds. He’d been caught on a hook and line and had fought for hours before he was landed. When the aquarium arrived to get him, he was dragged onto a beach, dumped into an unfiltered tank on the back of a pickup truck, driven over bumpy roads for forty-five minutes, taken out of water, and hauled by stretcher up several flights of stairs, only to be deposited in a shabbily constructed exhibit crammed with turtles, nurse sharks, and assorted fish. By which time most other sharks that had endured such treatment would have already died.

  Not only did this one survive, he swam easily around the tank showing no signs of disorientation. On day three he began to feed, with enthusiasm. Unfortunately, rather than eating the dead fish proffered by the aquarium’s divers, he chose to dine on his tank-mates. For a week, the divers watched uneasily as he worked his way through the snappers. Then he began to show interest in the divers themselves. After a particularly close call, it was decided that the shark had to go.

  But how? Manly Marine World was ill-equipped to have a great white shark in the first place, and it had no easy way to extract him. Its solution: the shark would be shot at point-blank range. And—why waste the opportunity!—tickets would be sold. This was the environmentally unaware sixties, after all. The house was packed when, ten days after the shark’s arrival, a group of divers entered the tank armed with underwater guns called “bang sticks.” It took seven bullets to kill the feisty little shark, and several minutes before he sank to the bottom of the exhibit, presumably to the cheers of the crowd. “The White Pointer was Mad…It Had to Die Before It Emptied the Aquarium,” read the headline in the Australian Post.

  Despite the barbaric finale, this incident proved that the right great white shark, held in the right conditions, could possibly make it. And if you were an aquarium director in the United States, you knew that California was the place to get your hands on one. Before gill nets were banned, fishermen regularly caught white sharks all along the shoreline in West Marin County, sometimes hauling out several in a single day. SeaWorld San Diego wasn’t the only local outfit in the hunt. San Francisco’s Steinhart Aquarium badly wanted a great white as well. Competition between the two aquariums was intense, and a bidding war began for a healthy, smallish shark. Local fishermen who called the Steinhart to report possession of a viable specimen were answered by a SWAT force—the “Steinhart White Acquisition Team.” SeaWorld, for its part, maintained cargo trucks in the Bay Area, ready at a moment’s notice to ship a shark down the coast in temperature-controlled containers replete with tranquilizing chemicals in the water and oxygenated jets that would keep the liquid gently coursing over the animal’s gills. Not to be outdone, the Steinhart created a vehicle it called the “Elasmosarcophagus,” an elaborate rolling fish tank. SeaWorld responded by upping the bounty: five thousand dollars for a healthy great white shark.

  Mike McHenry was a local fisherman who knew exactly where to find a great white shark. He also knew how to catch one. He’d fished for salmon and black cod at the Farallones since the fifties, and often, as he hauled in his lines, the sharks materialized to shear off the fish. One day, a colossal Sister approached his boat. He figured she had to weigh two and a half tons, like nothing he’d ever seen before. She was so scary, even to a man who’d been on the receiving end of just about every frightening thing the ocean could dish up, that McHenry immediately shot her in the head. As he watched the enormous fish sink, he felt regret: “Goddamn, that was a stupid thing to do!” When you considered the going price of the jaws, lucrative ticket sales from exhibiting the beast: “That thing was probably worth forty thousand dollars.” Years later, in 1982, McHenry captured four white sharks—three males, one female—in a single day while anchored off East Landing, using only baited hooks on a half-inch line. (Some people speculated that the bait had been a freshly shot sea lion, an accusation McHenry denied.) He was amazed at how easy it was to catch the sharks; only the female put up any kind of a fight. “We’d have to take a half turn on the stern cleat to slow them down,” he recounted. “But after that we could pretty well pull them alongside, where I’d kill them with a round of double-aught buckshot.”

  So when he heard about the bounty for a captive shark, McHenry turned to his deckhand and said, “Well, let�
��s go get one.”

  And he did—another female. He caught her on the lee side of Saddle Rock. This one was fifteen feet: small for a Sister, but still far too big for any aquarium tank. Steinhart’s director, John McCosker, rejected McHenry’s shark for exhibit, but after the animal died he placed it at the California Academy of Sciences so that it could be studied. “I guess this means I don’t get my money,” McHenry complained, as the shark was taken away.

  It turned out that a perfect, tank-sized shark was ultimately captured in Bodega Bay. That was Sandy, a seven-foot female, accidentally netted by a fisherman, Al Wilson, who named the shark after his girlfriend. Wilson sold Sandy to the Steinhart Aquarium for one thousand dollars. (In hopes of an even higher payout, he had first tried to contact the SeaWorld scouts who were encamped in the area, but no one answered the phone at their hotel. The entire staff had gone out to do their laundry.)

  On August 12, 1980, Sandy made her public debut in the Roundabout, Steinhart’s brand-new, hundred-thousand-gallon, donut-shaped tank. Forty thousand people lined up to see her over four days, with thousands more turned away. Walter Cronkite proclaimed Sandy “the Darling of San Francisco” on national news. Life magazine devoted a spread to her. John McCosker was pictured in the tank with the shark, accompanied by a caption that read, “His swimming companion is a four-month-old, seven-foot, 300-pound great white shark, a species better known…for dismembering women and gulping down small children.”

  Scot, who was twenty-four years old at that time, rushed to the aquarium. A queue of people snaked out the front door, spilling onto the street. He stood in the line for an hour, slowly making his way into the Roundabout where Sandy swam against the current, surrounded by yellowfin tuna, barracuda, and rays. Viewers were allotted ten minutes to watch her before they were shuttled out and the next group ushered in. It was Scot’s first encounter with a live great white, and he was struck by how substantial she was compared with the other sharks he’d seen. Sandy was disoriented in the tank, but there was nothing tentative about her movements. She was just a baby, but you could already discern her power.

  Still, this was hardly the invincible killer that people expected. She avoided food, even delicacies like skinned sturgeon. She seemed afraid of the dark, so lights were left on around the clock. And, most troubling, a minute electrical current from the tank’s power system drove her to bang her body repeatedly against the wall. Even as the stunned animal thrilled the shark-crazy public, McCosker felt heartsick about the consequences. “We were at a loss about what to do,” he wrote later. “But if we did nothing at all, she would probably be dead in a week.”

  The decision was made quickly. On August 17, five days after her arrival, Sandy was removed from the Steinhart and once again loaded into the tricked-out Elasmosarcophagus. She crossed the Golden Gate Bridge with a full police escort. When the entourage arrived at the Sausalito Harbor, Sandy was carefully placed in a sling that hung alongside the boat that was to lead her out to the Farallones. The trip was an especially drawn out ordeal as the boat churned through heavy seas at the glacial pace necessary to keep the shark alive and in the sling. Members of the press, who’d clamored to document the release, suffered through hours of ferocious seasickness. But it was the right thing to do. When Sandy was released, she bolted away with a vitality she’d never shown in the tank.

  MEANWHILE, AN URCHIN DIVER BY THE NAME OF JOE BURKE HAD HIS own solution to the problem of keeping a great white alive in captivity: He’d exhibit a dead one. Burke had been diving at the Farallones since the eighties and had seen sharks with regularity. Mostly they just cruised him, swimming by slowly and taking a good long look. Being sized up by great white sharks is never a calming experience, and Burke (unlike Ron Elliott) was always rattled by the encounters. But the red-hot Japanese market made harvesting urchins akin to, as Burke described it, “swimming around picking up hundred-dollar bills.” The untouched reefs and ledges of the Farallones’ seafloor were covered with money, and the only thing standing between a diver and his urchin bonanza was a fleet of Brinks trucks with teeth.

  One day while he was harvesting his cash, Burke met a shark, a huge female, who was different from the others. Her size alone made him gasp into his mouthpiece, but this one had a chip on her shoulder, to boot. She kept circling him, coming closer and sharply flicking her tail. At that point, Burke thought it might be a good idea to tuck himself underneath some rocks. The shark vanished for a moment and Burke took the opportunity to flee. But the second he moved away from his shelter, the shark reappeared, and he had to retreat. This went on and on—Burke trying alternately to hide and escape, the shark harassing him like a cat toying with a mouse. Finally, in desperation, Burke climbed inside his urchin basket and signaled for his deckhand, Donald, to winch him up. As he rose to the surface, curled in the wire netting like the catch of the day, the shark continued to circle menacingly, as though trying to figure out the best angle of attack. Getting out of the water in one piece seemed like a miracle.

  Burke could not forget the encounter. He was stunned by the shark’s distinctive personality and her relentless aggression. There was more to these animals than anybody realized, he thought. And he set out to do something about it.

  He hatched a plan to tow a dead great white shark around in a tank and charge people to take a look. But unlike the aquariums, Burke wasn’t after a manageable-sized white shark—he wanted a full-on Sister, a spectacle of nature, a leviathan. To be specific, he wanted the mad shark that had chased him out of the water. He wanted everyone to understand the true measure of her length, and her impossible girth. He wanted them to be able to look into her black, all-seeing eyes.

  The troubles with Burke’s scheme began immediately. If the shark was not preserved in liquid, it would quickly rot. But a portable glass tank big enough to hold an eighteen-foot Sister would collapse under the weight of the liquid required to encase the animal. His fallback plan, to build a metal tank with portholes, didn’t work, either. Such a tank would cost an ungodly sum and require an 18-wheeler for transport.

  And then there was the shark. Quietly plucking urchins off the bottom and fishing topside for a two-ton specimen were pursuits with about as much in common as tai chi and football. Burke and Donald fumbled around at East Landing with only the vaguest ideas about how to catch a Sister. They made attempt after attempt, littering the Farallon waters with everything from sheep carcasses to several hundred frozen chickens. On one hot October day, Scot and Peter watched from the island as the duo hauled two large cardboard canisters onto the deck of their boat, which was called Under Pressure. The canisters held a new, particularly rich type of chum: sheep entrails and sludgy cow viscera, slopped up from the slaughterhouse floor. And it had been simmering, fermenting, festering below deck in the afternoon heat. When Donald stabbed a knife into one of the canisters to open it, there was a large explosion and, for a full second or two, a bloody shower of cow. The two men, covered in the stuff, both began to scream at once. Within seconds the air was saturated with a stench so putrid it made the twenty-five thousand western gulls smell like perfume.

  Burke never managed to catch a shark at the Farallones. After advertising widely to fishermen along the California coast, he paid ten thousand dollars for a seventeen-foot female that had been killed in a swordfish net. But when the shark arrived, Burke was dismayed to see that she had an aesthetically unpleasing smirk on her face and the appearance of buckteeth. And once the jaw sets after death, it can’t be realigned. He began to hate his shark. Loathed the way she looked. In the end, Burke took a chain saw to the carcass, gave up on his exhibition plans, and moved his family to New Zealand.

  But the boats kept coming. Through the seventies and eighties, even the early nineties, regulations protecting the Farallon sharks were weak. Safely protected as a wildlife refuge, the islands themselves were untouchable by law, but right offshore, anything went. Fishermen shot at seals with high-powered rifles. Boats set longlines all over Mirounga
Bay, each hoping to land a great white. Some sportfishing outfitters offered one-thousand-dollar rewards to any client who managed it.

  The biologists could do nothing but watch. The island logs express their frustration, and their painful compromise: “October 7, 1988: Quarterflash out all day baiting in Mirounga Bay without apparent action. They are now being buffeted by 25+ knot winds. Ahh, gee.” Later the same week: “Los Hermanos y Hermanas is anchored at East Landing again, slowly pumping 50 gallons of horse blood over the side to attract sharks.” And on September 7, 1990, the log read: “The two sharker boats of yesterday were at it again today without success…. We went out and talked with the captain of the Mayflower who was bitten by a shark last year. We traded stories and we convinced/asked them to just take one shark, if any. They said they would, and would allow us to examine and photograph any sharks they caught. They seemed very interested in our work.”

  By this point, the biologists had begun to know these animals, which made the hunting that much harder to watch. They were particularly concerned about one shark, a Rat Packer named Half Fin. Half Fin was happy-go-lucky, somewhat goofy, perhaps not the smartest shark out there. He was easily recognizable because his dorsal fin was half gone, lopped horizontally through the middle. And he was always around. Anytime a surfboard was dropped into the water, Half Fin would be right on it, like a retriever bounding after a stick. Scot and Peter were amazed that he never caught on that the decoy wasn’t food, the way the others did. It seemed likely that the long-liners were going to catch him, that if any shark was going to end up stuffed into someone’s glass case, it would be Half Fin.