The Great White

First and most notorious is the great white, the shark portrayed in Jaws. The largest carnivorous fish in the sea, great whites can grow to more than eighteen feet long and can weigh more than four thousand pounds. They can and sometimes do eat people, though it’s now accepted that nearly every attack on a person is a mistake: the shark either confuses the person with a seal or sea lion or, particularly in murky water where it must rely on senses other than its eyes, takes a test bite to determine if this living thing is edible. There have been cases of great whites targeting humans, and few though they are, each case generates justified horror.

A few years ago a woman who had been scuba diving near a seal colony was taken from the waters off Tasmania. She had almost gotten to the boat and was reaching out to grab her husband’s hand when an enormous great white attacked her from behind and below. While her shocked husband held on to his wife’s hand, the shark bit her in half, then returned and took the upper half, literally yanking her torso from her husband’s grasp.

Another notorious episode—and one for which no shark expert, scientist, or diver I’ve spoken with has ever offered a credible explanation—occurred back in 1909. A fifteen-foot-long female great white was caught off the town of Augusta, Sicily, and her belly was found to contain the remains of three human beings: two adults and a child.

More than 70 percent of great-white-shark-attack victims survive, because the shark realizes it has attacked in error and doesn’t return to finish off the prey. Granted, that figure doesn’t take into account swimmers, divers, and snorkelers who simply disappear while swimming in great-white country.

The high rate of survival may have to do with a phenomenon known as the “bite, spit, and wait” thesis of great-white behavior. First advanced by Dr. John McCosker, senior scientist at the California Academy of Sciences, the thesis explains both terminal attacks and attacks aborted after a single bite. According to McCosker, great whites have the astonishing capacity to assess, in the microsecond of a first bite, the caloric value of potential prey. If the shark determines that the prey isn’t worth the effort—that is, won’t return as much energy as the shark will expend in attacking and eating it—it breaks off the attack after a single bite. Depending on the ferocity of the bite, the prey may or may not survive.

But if the first bite tells the shark that the prey contains an energy bonanza—as would a nice fat seal, for example, or a sea lion—it will hang around after the first bite, wait for its prey to bleed to death, and then come back to finish the meal.

In general, large great whites perceive human beings as too bony to bother with, so they often depart after that first bite. Of course, when a 2,000- or 3,000-pound fish tastes a 170-pound man, withdrawal can be too little, too late. I will never forget a coroner’s postmortem photographs of a young man killed in the Neptune Islands off South Australia. The shark must barely have grazed him before recognizing its mistake, for aside from one deep cut in a thigh and a nasty wound on one hand and wrist, the victim was unharmed. In the photographs he looked as if he was asleep. Sadly, however, the big shark’s big teeth had opened two arteries, and the man had bled to death before he could reach the shore.

Some white-shark victims insist that they felt no pain at all when they were attacked, only a thud as they were struck and then a feeling of being tugged, as the shark’s scalpel-sharp teeth severed flesh and bone. A friend of ours who lost a leg to a white shark while snorkeling off Australia recalled, “I couldn’t see it, but I knew exactly what had me. It had me by the leg and was pulling me down. I thought for sure I was going to drown. I’ve never been so relieved in my life as when I felt my leg let go.” Luckily for him, a boat was nearby, someone aboard knew how to tie a tourniquet around his thigh, and he made it to a hospital.

From the swimmer’s perspective, the best thing about great whites is that although they exist worldwide, they’re extremely rare everywhere. Nature, in its infinite and eternally astonishing wisdom, determined that an apex predator (the absolute top of the food chain) as powerful and devastating as a great white should not exist in vast numbers: the marine food chain couldn’t support them. So nature decreed that great whites would breed relatively late in life—not until they’re at least twenty years old—and would bear relatively few young, only some of which would survive to adulthood.

Tiger Sharks

Tiger sharks, too, are genuinely dangerous to man. They’ve been responsible for several attacks off Hawaii in recent years, and it’s widely believed, with good reason, that they pose more of a threat to humans than do great whites. Tigers may not be as big or as robust and heavy as great whites, but a fifteen-foot, fifteen-hundred-pound tiger shark is plenty big enough; there are more of them, for they pup many more young than great whites (though some of the rapacious young quickly eat their brethren), and they’re ubiquitous. While great whites, as a rule, hang around coastal waters, tiger sharks are completely free-roaming: they’re fond of coastal waters, they like to enter lagoons at night and hunt in the shallows for prey that often includes smaller sharks, and they also roam the deep.

Once, when I was on a boat over the abyssal canyons off Bermuda, a huge tiger shark cruised leisurely around our stern, as if showing off its formidable size. The top of its head was as big around as a manhole cover, and the long, slender striped body seemed to take forever to pass by the stern. It was a chilling sight, reminiscent of the crocodile in Peter Pan that waits for Captain Hook to fall overboard. To me, the message from this giant said, Take your time, no rush, I’m in no hurry, but sometime, someday, one of you will make a mistake and enter my realm, and then you’ll be mine.

Suddenly, though, the shark must have received a signal that real potential prey was nearby, for it sped away and, a few seconds later, exploded through the surface fifteen or twenty feet behind the boat, clutching in its jaws an adult sea turtle. The turtle was too big to swallow, its shell too tough to crack; its head and legs had withdrawn into the safety of the carapace. The shark shook the turtle violently from side to side and then, mysteriously, let it go and slipped silently beneath the surface.

For several moments we watched the turtle bobbing on the surface, head and legs still invisible, and we guessed that the shark had abandoned the effort and departed in search of easier prey. The turtle must have come to the same conclusion, for slowly its legs protruded from the shell, then came the head, and then …

Bammo! Like a rocket, the shark blasted up from below, clamped its jaws on one of the turtle’s hind legs, and worried it with its teeth until, at last, the leg came off. The remaining three legs and the head snapped back inside the shell; again the shark slid away under water; again the turtle bobbed on the surface.

For the next half hour or so, we saw the assault repeated again and again, though without further success. Once wounded, the turtle appeared to be prepared to hunker down inside its shell forever, if necessary. As much as we rooted for the turtle—we knew it could live a successful life with three functioning legs—there was no way we could interfere; nor did we want to, for this was normal, natural predation in the sea.

Bull Sharks

The third shark that poses a true threat to man in the sea is the bull shark, which comes in several varieties, including the Zambezi shark, the Lake Nicaragua shark, and several of the so-called whalers of Australia. As the first two names imply, bull sharks are even more wide-ranging than tigers; they have been found in—and have killed people in—lakes and rivers. Most sharks can’t survive, not to mention hunt and feed, in even brackish water, but bull sharks are equipped with some biological quirk that permits them to function normally in salt, brackish, and fresh water.

Bull sharks also frequent shallow water and murky water, like that off the Gulf Coast of Florida. It was a bull shark that attacked young Jesse Arbogast in July 2001, triggering the media frenzy that lasted all summer, and Bahamians asserted that bull sharks were probably the culprits in the two nonfatal attacks a month later in the shallow waters off Grand Bahama Island. Bull sharks have such a bad reputation for being aggressive, fearless, and territorial that they undoubtedly are blamed for more attacks than they’re responsible for. Still, there are so many bull sharks in so many waters in which so many people choose to swim that they must be classified as extremely dangerous.

Oceanic Whitetips

Then there’s the oceanic whitetip, whose Latin name so aptly describes the creature that I’ll burden you with it: C. longimanus, or “long-hands.” This shark’s pectoral fins are extraordinarily long and graceful, resembling the wings of a modern fighter jet. Longimanus tends to stay in the deep ocean, and nobody on earth has the vaguest notion about total numbers of long-hand attacks because the people they do attack are either adrift, alone, or survivors of shipwrecks, who don’t much care what species of shark it is that’s harassing them. I’d bet that many of the crewmen of the Indianapolis, in 1945, were killed by long-hands, but no one will ever know.

I do know, however, that longimanus is unpredictable, scary, and demonstrably capable of killing a human. There’s a story about one that attacked two U.S. Navy divers in the deep waters of the Tongue of the Ocean in the Bahamas. The shark took a big bite out of one of the divers and then, as the diver’s mate fought it for possession of his friend, dragged the diver into the abyss. Finally, at a depth of about three hundred feet—far beyond safe scuba depth—the mate had to choose between letting go of his friend and dying himself, and he watched as shark and body disappeared into the gloom.

Long-hands are my personal bêtes noires—one of the few species of shark of which I am genuinely and viscerally afraid. A couple of decades ago one made an honest effort to eat me. I don’t blame the shark for trying, because my situation fell well within the bounds of Stupid Things You Should Avoid at All Costs, but the near-miss scared me—and scarred me permanently—nevertheless.

I was with an ABC-TV crew, also in the Tongue of the Ocean, in open water more than a mile deep. We had tied our boat to a Navy buoy that had become a popular spot to film because it had been in the water for so long that the sea had claimed it, transforming it into an artificial reef. Microscopic animals had taken shelter in the buoy and the chain and had been followed by tiny crustacea and other small critters. Then the larger ones had come to feed, and those larger still, until—in the magical way the sea has of generating life on all levels—the entire food chain had come to use buoy and chain as a feeding ground.

A school of yellowfin tuna was swarming around the buoy, attracted by something, and in the brilliant sunlight of the summer day the colors were so gorgeous that we decided to take some footage for the film segment about the Bahamas that we were working on for The American Sportsman.

I, as the so-called talent, was dispatched into the water. Stan Waterman followed to film whatever happened—presumably nothing more than the contrasting colors of the beautiful fish against the cobalt sea, interrupted now and then by a black-rubber-suited human wearing a yellow “horse-collar” buoyancy-compensator vest around his neck.

Back then I was still a pretty green blue-water diver. Blue-water diving is diving in water with no bottom visible or reachable; it can spark fears and phobias, for to look down into the darkling blue nothingness is to harken back to childhood nightmares about monsters and infinity. I wasn’t accustomed to diving in water I knew to be more than five thousand feet deep, and once in a while I was haunted by a vision of my body drifting down, down, down, from light blue to darker blue, to purple and violet and the unknown black.

So, naturally, whenever I had to dive in blue water, I carried a security blanket: a sawed-off broomstick about three feet long, attached to my wrist by a rawhide thong. Exactly what it was supposed to protect me from I never determined, but my logic was unassailable: if cameramen could carry cameras with which to ward off attackers, and assistants could carry cameras and lights, why shouldn’t I be allowed to carry a broomstick?

Thus armed, I jumped overboard and swam among the yellowfin tuna—or, rather, they swam around me. I held on to the barnacle-covered buoy chain to keep from being swept away by the current, and the school of tuna, which had scattered when I splashed into the water, re-formed and circled me. The shafts of sunlight piercing the surface glittered on their silver scales and yellow fins, and it seemed to me that Stan must be gathering an entire library of beauty shots.

The water was very clear, visibility more than a hundred feet, I was sure, though it’s hard to tell in blue water, for there’s nothing visible against which to gauge distances.

At the very edge of my vision I saw a shark swimming by. I couldn’t discern what kind it was, and I didn’t much care, for it was ambling, really, and showing no interest in me or the tuna.

Meanwhile, far up on the bow of the fifty-five-foot boat, one of the crew—bored and tantalized by the sight of so many delicious meals swimming so close to the boat—rigged a fishing rod, dropped a baited hook into the water, and let it drift back into the school of tuna. He had not asked permission, nor had he told anyone what he was doing, for—hey, who cares?—he was staying out of the way and minding his own business. When he hooked a fish, he would simply drag it up to the bow and haul it aboard, and no one need be the wiser.

Stan gestured for me to move away from the buoy, so that he could frame me and the fish cleanly against the blue background. I let go of the chain and kicked my way out into open water. Obligingly, the tuna followed.

Suddenly I was gone, jerked downward by an irresistible force, with a searing pain in my lower leg, arms flung over my head, broomstick aiming at the surface. I could see Stan and the tuna receding above me. I looked around, panicked and confused, to see what had grabbed me. The shark? Had I been taken by the shark? I saw nothing.

I looked down. I was already in the dark blue; all that lay below were the violet and the black and … wait … there, against the darkness … what could it possibly—

A tuna, fleeing for the bottom, struggling, fighting … fighting? Against WHAT?

Then I saw the line, and the silvery leader. The fish was hooked, for God’s sake. Somehow it had gotten … no, impossible, no way it could have—

A cloud billowed around my face, black as ink, thick as … blood. My blood.

I leaned backward and kicked forward, wanting to see my feet.

The steel leader was wrapped around my ankle. The wire had bitten deep, and a plume of black was rising from the wound, a sign that I was already down very, very deep, for blood doesn’t become black till the twilight depths. (The sea consumes the visible spectrum of light, one color at a time, beginning a few feet under water. Red disappears first, then orange, yellow, green, and so on, until, when you reach 150 or 200 feet, blood looks black.)

All I could guess was that, in some implausible fluke, as the fish had fled the surface it must have passed between my legs, or circled around my feet, or somehow wrapped the leader around my leg. And all I knew was that, somehow, I’d better find a way to free my leg before I was taken to depths from which no traveler returns.

I reached for my knife, to cut the line, but—encumbered by gear and disoriented by fear—first I couldn’t find the knife, and then I couldn’t release it.

The tuna stopped diving and turned, and the change in pressure against its mouth, the release of resistance, must have convinced it that it was free, for it swam upward, toward me.

The line slackened, the leader eased and spread, and I slid my foot and fin out through the widening coil.

Giddy with relief, I checked my air and depth gauges: 185 feet deep, 500 pounds of air, more than enough for a controlled ascent but nowhere near enough for a decompression stop, if one was necessary, a contingency about which I knew nothing. Diving computers were still years in the future (as were any computers for the common man). Because I hadn’t intended to leave the surface, certainly not to venture deeper than, say, ten feet, I hadn’t consulted the standard of the day: the U.S. Navy’s decompression tables, a reliable guide—though calibrated for a twenty-five-year-old male in peak physical condition—to safe diving at various depths.

How long have I been at this depth? At any depth? How long have I been in the water? No idea.

I started up, slowly, and now the black blood no longer billowed around me but trailed behind. The pain in my leg had waned, and my foot seemed to be working, which meant that no major tendon had been cut.

I passed a hundred feet, then ninety, eighty … things were lighter now, visibility had returned, and I could see the rays of the sun angling down from the shimmering surface. Everything would be okay, after all. There was noth—

The shark came straight for me, emerging quickly from the blue haze, its fins forming a triangle of lopsided symmetry because of the slight downward curve of the extraordinary pectorals.

Ten, maybe fifteen feet from me it veered away, banked downward, and passed through the trail of blood leaking from my ankle. Convinced now of the source of the savory scent it had picked up from far away, it rose again, leveled off before me, and began the final, almost ritual, stage of the hunt.

Because seawater acts as a refractive lens, sizes are difficult to ascertain under water. The generally accepted rule is that animals appear to be roughly a third again as large as they actually are. This shark looked ten or twelve feet long, which meant that, in fact, it was probably seven to nine feet long. But “in fact” didn’t matter to me; all I cared about was that the closer this shark came, the bigger it looked, and near to me or far, it was very big.

It circled me twice, perhaps twenty feet away, establishing for itself a pattern and perimeter of comfort, and then began gradually to close the distance between us. With each circle, it shrank the perimeter by six inches, then by twelve, then fifteen.

I raised my broomstick and held it out like a sword, waving its blunt tip back and forth to impress upon the shark that I was a living being armed with the weapons and determination to defend myself.

Longimanus was not impressed. It circled closer, staying just beyond the reach of the broomstick. I could count the tiny black dots on its snout, the celebrated ampullae of Lorenzini, which carry untold megabytes of information, chemical and electromagnetic, to the shark’s control center.

The mouth hung open about an inch, enough to give me a glimpse of the teeth in the lower jaw.

As I turned with the shark, trying to maintain some upward movement, I watched the eye—always the eye—for movement of the nictitating membrane, the signal that the threat display was ending and the attack itself beginning.

It quickened its pace, circling me faster than I could turn, so I began to kick backward as well as upward, to increase the distance between us.

I jabbed randomly with the broomstick, never touching flesh, never causing longimanus even to flinch.

I glanced upward and saw the bottom of the boat, a squat, gray black shape perhaps fifty feet away, forty-five, forty …

The shark appeared from behind me, a pectoral fin nearly touching my shoulder. The mouth opened, the membrane flickered upward, covering most of the eye, the upper jaw dropped down and forward, and the head turned toward me.

I remember seeing the tail sweep once, propelling longimanus forward.

I remember bending backward to avoid the gaping mouth.

I remember the ghostly, yellowish white eyeball, and I remember stabbing at it with the broomstick.

I don’t remember hitting, instead, the roof of the shark’s mouth, but that’s what must have happened, for the next thing I knew, the shark bit down on the broomstick, shook its head back and forth to tear it loose, and, when that failed, lunged with its powerful tail, intent on fleeing with its prize.

The broomstick, of course, was attached to my wrist, and I was suddenly dragged through the water like a rag doll, flopping helplessly behind the (by now) frightened shark, which had taken a test bite from a strange, bleeding prey and now found itself dragging a great rubber thing through the water.

Breathing became difficult; I was running out of air.

I tried to peel the rawhide thong off my wrist, but the tension on it was too great and I couldn’t budge it.

I was on my back now, upside down, my right arm over my head as longimanus towed me away from the safety of the boat. I could once again see blood trailing from my leg; at this depth it was dark blue, and it streamed behind me like a wake.

Everything stopped. At once. My arm was free, and I was floating, neutrally buoyant, about thirty feet beneath the surface. I looked at the broomstick—or at what remained of it: longimanus had bitten through it, and the strands of mashed wood fiber looked splayed, like a flowering weed.

Far away, at the outer limits of my sight, I saw the black scythe of a tail fin vanish into the blue.

I sucked one final breath from my tank, opened my mouth, tipped my head back, and propelled by a couple of kicks, ascended to the kingdom of light and air.

Not until I reached the swim step at the stern of the boat did the weakness of fear overcome me, and the shock.

I spat out my mouthpiece, took off my mask, and gurgled something like, “Goddamn … son of a bitch!… mother—”

“No!” said the director. “No, no, no. You can’t use that language on network television. Go back down and surface again and tell us what you saw.”

Makos and Blue Sharks

The final two sharks on my personal list of species to be wary of could not be more different from each other. One, the mako, is a loner that reminds me of Jack Palance in Shane: sleek, silent, and vicious. The other, the blue shark, is a pack animal that rarely bothers anyone but has, on occasion, killed human beings floating in the ocean. Because it is a pelagic (open-water) shark like longimanus, the blue shark is vulnerable to large commercial fishing operations, and over the last ten years populations of blues all over the world have been devastated.

The mako is one of the fastest fish in the sea—far and away the fastest shark—and is the only shark listed by the International Game Fishing Association as a true “sport fish.” The feel of most sharks on a fishing line has been likened to hauling on wet laundry or trying to lift a cow; fighting a mako has been compared to riding a bull or wrestling a pissed-off crocodile.

Makos leap completely out of the water, turn somersaults, and “run” in any and all directions in their frenzy to escape. Hooked makos have been known to charge boats and jump into open cockpits, where they’ve gone berserk and destroyed the boat that has hooked them. (A mako, remember, can weigh upward of a thousand pounds.) Some fishermen have jumped overboard rather than risk being beaten to death by the flailing fish, and a few have tried to subdue maddened makos by shooting at them with high-powered rifles—a technique not recommended, because of possible unintended consequences.

While the body of a mako is one of the most beautiful in the sea, its face is positively ugly. A mako looks mean. Its teeth, upper and lower, are long, pointed, sharp as needles, and snaggly. Unlike a great white’s teeth, which speak to me of quick, efficient death, a mako’s teeth warn of a nasty end, of flesh ripped into ragged chunks. A mako’s eye, too, is distinct from every other shark’s. To me, at least, it looks crazed and threatening, like a coiled snake, ready at any second to explode into unstoppable violence.

A mako’s speed, however, is its most dazzling weapon. Especially over short distances—like the range of visibility in most water conditions—it is capable of appearing and disappearing as if by magic: a gray ghost in the distance one second, right in front of you the next, gone the next, back again the next.

A friend of mine was snorkeling in shallow water in the Bahamas a few years ago, poking the sand bottom with a long metal rod in search of buried cannons or shipwreck wood, when he glanced up and noticed a shark cruising at the far limit of his vision. Here’s what he recalls:

“I didn’t give it a thought, didn’t pay any mind to what kind it was. Before my eyes had refocused on the bottom, it hit me. Out of nowhere. I never saw it coming. All I knew was, I felt like I’d been hit by a freight train. My mask was knocked off, both flippers came off, I dropped the spear, and suddenly the water was full of blood. Mine. The mako had hit me just once, a glancing blow, tore up my thigh pretty badly. I could see him off a ways, hanging there, like he was deciding whether or not I was worth eating. Then—poof!—he was gone. I guess he figured I was too bony.”

Bony, perhaps; lucky, definitely.

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—and what subjective lists ignore—is the most important fundamental precept of dealing with sharks, that is, 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 most docile of all species. The common peril people face from them is being bumped by them as they flee. I know of at least one diver, however, who, when he entered a cave and saw a nurse shark sleeping in the sand, pulled the shark’s tail to get it to move. The shark moved, all right; startled awake, it spun around in a frantic blur, bit the man in the throat (missing an artery by a couple of millimeters), tore a gold chain from his neck, and, as it fled the cave, 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 saw before they entered the water. The sharks (most were blacktips) had gathered to feed on schools of baitfish; the people had gathered to participate in 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 last year happened to people who ignored, or were ignorant of, one or more 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.

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, and hung in the water, watching, as the great speckled body moved beneath him like a ship. Mesmerized, 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, and the sweeping tail clubbed him from behind, rendering 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—and inflated his vest, which lifted him to the surface.

There is one circumstance under which all sharks of all sizes and (nearly) all dietary predilections 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.