The good news is, the sharks are coming back

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, oceanography, fish, sharks, memoirs

This mug shot of a white shark was recorded with a pole camera. It is used to identify the shark when it is seen again. Look carefully at the boundary between the white underside and the gray back of the shark, particularly the wiggly part just forward of the pectoral fin. Also, the head has numerous scars, many of them from the claws of seals the shark has eaten. All these markings are distinctive, and the older a shark is, the more unique features it accumulates.

Oceanographer Greg Skomal and his colleagues have compiled "ID pictures" for a few hundred sharks in their efforts to produce a census of sorts of the occurrence of white sharks in the waters off Massachusetts and New England. They have also tagged a couple of hundred of them with acoustic tags, which regularly "ping" a series of buoys off Cape Cod and the Massachusetts when the animals enter the area, or with recording tags that track their movements. The work is described in Dr. Skomal's memoir/documentary book Chasing Shadows: My Life Tracking the Great White Shark.

Here we see him on the "pulpit" of a shark-tagging boat, getting a pole camera ready, as the boat approaches a few sharks that were spotted from an airplane, including the one above. I clipped these two images from one of the many videos of Dr. Skomal's work as a shark researcher.

He gained his passion for studying sharks when he saw Jaws as a youngster. During his college years he expected one day to move to California, where a white shark "hot spot" is found near the Farallon Islands. Once he completed undergraduate studies in Massachusetts in 1983, however, white sharks were occasionally being seen in the area, and his relationship with the oceanographers was such that he was reluctant to leave. He eventually stayed, first spending a few years on Martha's Vineyard and later landside, and now heads shark research in the whole area.

He came along just in time. White sharks had been almost absent for many years, mostly because their preferred prey, seals, had been hunted nearly to extinction because of state bounties. Saltwater fishing tournaments, which formerly treated all sharks as "trash fish" and "vermin", began expanding their purview, and then specialized "monster tournaments" began, targeting sharks, and the great white shark in particular. But for years, white sharks were quite rare compared to blue sharks and mako sharks and a few others.

With the end of the bounty, the seals began to return. The rocky areas around Cape Cod are prime seal nursery habitat and haulout areas. White sharks followed. Now there are hundreds, although other shark species number in the thousands. Tagging that targeted white sharks in particular began as a definitely side endeavor. The book details the growth of this "tail" until it began to "wag the dog". The changeover occupied the late 1980's and 1990's. 

Here we see Dr. Skomal on the pulpit, from a better vantage point (the airplane), just after he has placed a recording tag behind the dorsal fin of a shark that appears to be nine feet long, so its age may be twelve years.

White sharks live about seventy years, similar to our longevity, and they begin to procreate by age twenty, also like us. However, they do not care for the young after they are born. Instead, a female shark has a double uterus, into which several eggs are placed. The first baby shark to hatch in each side gradually eats the other eggs, so the total gestation time is about twice as long as humans', while the babies grow to a size of 4-5 feet. Once the babies are born they are on their own.

As you may imagine, the greatly increasing presence of these large predators—as large as twenty feet—in coastal waters near extremely popular swimming beaches has many people upset. However, the efforts of Dr. Skomal and many other oceanographers to educate the public, and to try to allay the unrealistic fears engendered by the Jaws films, brought many people to realize that these animals are necessary for a healthy ecosystem. White sharks in the Atlantic were listed as Vulnerable in 1997 and have been federally protected since then; Pacific white sharks were listed a few years earlier.

Several encounters people have had with white sharks in waters off Massachusetts and New England are detailed. A few of them were fatal. A few others were severe, and the victims spent months or years recovering. Some were bad scares that left tooth marks on boogie boards or kayaks, for example. Understandably, fatal shark attacks cause great consternation in coastal towns and their residents. Dr. Skomal has had to walk a fine line between defending the sharks and educating the people among whom he lives, to avoid charges of "caring more about science than people's lives".

In spite of much greater numbers of these sharks in New England's waters since 1990 or so, these animals are elusive and their behavior is not as well known as we would like. People who like to kayak out to be among the seals are basically walking in front of a loaded shotgun with a hair trigger. To my way of thinking, that's a way to earn a Darwin Award. Quite a number of "shark mitigation" methods have been discussed over the years. Based on experiences in Australia and South Africa, it is known that none of them is 100% effective. We in the West have gotten used to being the apex predator for a few generations, while in other parts of the world, there are still tigers or hippos, etc., that take a few lives yearly (many more than sharks, actually). 

Now America's well-heeled "elites" find themselves sharing the water with a real apex predator, one we cannot drive out or completely destroy. Knowing their habits is the best way to avoid getting in their crosshairs. Humans aren't their preferred prey, seals are. But a human swimming or paddling looks enough like an injured or naïve seal that a shark might take an exploratory bite to see "what is that thing?". Such a bite, from a mouth two feet wide full of 3-inch, serrated teeth, can well be fatal. And the shark was "just checking". The more research, the more learning, the better!

This informative and engaging book can educate us all. I hope it gets very wide circulation.

Out of the sidewalk jungle, into the maw of the behemoth

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, sharks, islands, natural history

What do you get when you keep a true-born thrill seeker cooped up in an Editor's job too long? You get a woman who gives a few years of her life, and a small fortune, to obtain short-term residence and proximity for a few months at the South Farallon Island.

Just twenty-seven miles west of the Golden Gate bridge, the Farallon Islands are uninhabited at present, except by a literal handful of researchers. A couple of these study the population of great white sharks that spend about half of their year in the surrounding waters, feeding mainly on the elephant seals, and other seals, that breed there. The islands are called the Devil's Teeth, for good reason, once you see the photos.

Were you ever told that a human in a wet suit looks a lot like a seal, and moves like one that is sick? That probably explains why very few knowledgeable SCUBA divers are willing to dive anywhere west of San Francisco. Even in the off season, there are great whites that pass by.

Susan Casey spent a couple of very short visits (a day trip and a few day-long "internship") on South Farallon. She managed to wangle the loan of a yacht to live on, anchored nearby, for a few months in 2003...until the ship broke its anchor chain and drifted off during a storm. She'd snuck onto the island to have one night in a stable bed, or she'd not be around to write the story. That story, Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks, is exactly as the title bills it.

The researchers she relied on, Scot and Peter, studied the white sharks for nearly twenty years. A few appeared every year of two throughout those years (Great whites seem to live upwards of thirty years). One group of males, called the Rat Pack, stay mostly to the south of the island. A group of females, called the Sisters, stay mostly to the northeast. I found the natural history fascinating. Mature females are bigger, mostly about 18 feet, up to 21 feet long. White sharks are bulky, and the larger ones are over eight feet wide and six feet deep. Mature males are in the 14-16 foot range. In either case, they are big, powerful predators. However, when a pod of Orcas show up—up to 30 feet long and 12 feet wide—the sharks vanish.

I am a quiet sort. I don't live for excitement and risk like Ms Casey does. In her narrative she pulls no punches about the privations she and others experienced. I am indebted to her for opening a window for me, onto a place, and a life, that I would certainly not experience voluntarily.