ANY SHARK CAN RUIN YOUR DAY

Don't take as gospel my (or anybody's) list of bad actors in the company of sharks. All such lists are subjective. Mine includes only sharks that either I or my colleagues have had trouble with. Some folks, for instance, have reason to be scared of hammerheads. Others have had unhappy run-ins with gray reef sharks.

What you should take as gospel is that any shark can be dangerous. Still, most injuries inflicted by reputedly inoffensive sharks are caused by human error or ignorance.

Nurse sharks, for example, are among the gentlest of all shark species. The common peril people face from them is being bumped by them as they flee. I know of one diver, however, who entered a cave and saw a nurse shark sleeping in the sand. He pulled the shark's tail to get it to move. The shark moved, all right. Startled awake, it spun around in a frantic blur and bit the man in the throat (missing an artery by a couple of millimeters). It tore a gold chain from his neck, and as it fled the cave, it knocked the man spinning against the rock wall.

Over a single August weekend in 2001, in the single Florida county of Volusia, six people were bitten by sharks that they had seen before they entered the water. The sharks (most were blacktips) had gathered to feed on schools of baitfish. The people had gathered for a surfing contest. Too impatient to wait for the sharks to finish feeding and leave the area, the surfers chose instead to wade among and step over the feeding sharks.

That only six were bitten seems to me a miracle.

Other attacks have happened to people who ignored, or were ignorant of, the basic rules that help keep the chances of an attack to a minimum. They swam at dawn or at dusk; they swam alone; they swam far from shore or where fish were feeding or birds were working.

On August 19, 2003, Debra Franzman, age fifty, was swimming with seals at Avila Beach, California, when she was fatally bitten by a great white shark. She was wearing a black wet suit with a black hood, booties, and gloves. To the shark she undoubtedly looked like a wounded (or extremely clumsy) seal floundering around on the surface. As risky as such behavior sounds—and is—she had apparently been swimming with those same seals and wearing that same costume nearly every day for ten years—completely without incident.

Elsewhere in the world, a man was almost killed when he tried to hitch a ride on the back of a whale shark, as harmless a giant as ever roamed the sea. When he grabbed the enormous dorsal fin, his hand slipped; then he slipped. He hung in the water, watching, as the great speckled body moved beneath him like a ship. He forgot that this ship was driven not by a propeller but by a tail as tall as he was and as hard as iron. The sweeping tail clubbed him from behind, leaving him breathless and senseless. He survived only because an alert buddy located his regulator mouthpiece, rammed it into his mouth, and purged it—forcing air into him. Then the buddy inflated his vest, which lifted him to the surface.

There is one circumstance under which any shark of any size will eat a human being without hesitation. That is if the person is dead.

Sharks are scavengers. Scouring and clearing the ocean of animals that are weak, weary, or dead is one of a shark's most valuable functions.