Moray Eels

There are a great many kinds, colors, and sizes of moray eels, most of which live in tropical and subtropical waters. Morays range in size from under a foot to nearly ten feet long, and I know from experience that a seven-footer—as big around as a football and displaying its long, white, needlelike fangs—is as scary-looking a monster as there is under water.

A significant contributor to its frightening appearance is its manner of respiring. Its mouth opens and closes constantly, which forces oxygen-rich water over its gills but which also, when accentuated by its wide, blank, maniacally staring eyes, makes the eel look as if it can’t wait to rip your head off.

Morays aren’t poisonous, but their bites can carry so much toxic bacteria that they might as well be. They’re scavengers as well as predators, and they have no aversion to rotten flesh. A moray bite is usually ragged (thus difficult to suture), exceedingly painful, and quick to become infected. It is also usually a mistake: the eel confuses a human digit for a piece of food. Usually, that is. But not always.

David Doubilet, the incomparable underwater photographer with whom I’ve worked for more than twenty years, was once severely bitten on the hand by a yellowish-colored moray off Hawaii. The eel, he says, literally charged him—zoomed out of its hole, bit him, and went home. The wound not only took forever to heal but left considerable residual damage to David’s hand.

Al Giddings, the underwater cinematographer who worked on Titanic and The Abyss, was bitten by a moray in 1976 during the filming of the movie based on my novel The Deep, of which he was codirector of underwater photography. Columbia Pictures had built a two-million-gallon tank to contain its underwater sets in Bermuda and stocked it with live animals, including a shark and some eels, one of which took a liking to one of Al’s toes. Al kept his toe, but the wound became infected immediately, and he lost some diving time.

There’s no reason for swimmers, snorkelers, or scuba divers to get into trouble with morays, and there are only a couple of circumstances in which people do get bitten.

The eels live in cavelets, crannies, and holes in reefs, and an incautious diver who goes poking around—searching for lobsters, perhaps—risks having a probing hand mistaken for a fish, seized, gnawed on, and shredded.

Another risky business involves morays that have been conditioned to accept and be fed by humans. As dive masters and other sea-savvy folks know, conditioning is not the same as taming, and eels, fish, sharks, and other marine creatures (except for some of the mammals) cannot be tamed. No one should ever try to treat a moray eel like a pet.

The danger in conditioning morays is rarely to the conditioner or the conditioner’s customers. They, after all, play by established rules: they arrive at the dive site, bringing fish scraps or other savory dead things for the eel (or eels, though to deal with more than two at once is to court serious danger); the eel emerges from its hole, expecting to be fed; it is fed; it permits itself to be touched and handled; sometimes, if the ritual has been repeated enough times that it has become imprinted as part of the eel’s repertoire, it will hunt for morsels concealed on the diver’s person, slithering in and out of his buoyancy-compensator vest, between his legs, around his neck.

For the paying customer, the performance looks truly impressive, and, in fact, it is.

The most remarkable morays I’ve ever seen lived on a reef off Grand Cayman. They had been conditioned by Wayne and Ann Hasson, who at the time ran a successful diving operation in the Cayman Islands. (You’ll have noticed by now that I persist in using the word conditioned instead of trained. It’s because I’m not certain that what the eels are taught to do constitutes training: they don’t jump through hoops or play volleyball or do anything else they’re not accustomed to doing. They eat—though, granted, in an unnatural way, that is, from the hands of humans, whom they have been taught to tolerate and, to an extent, trust. Is that training? I don’t think so; I think it’s conditioning.)

Wayne and Ann had arbitrarily anthropomorphized the two green morays into a heterosexual couple named Waldo and Waldeen. Both were enormous: six and a half or seven feet long (longer than I am tall, that much I know for sure), at least a foot high, and as thick as a large honeydew or a small watermelon.

David Doubilet and I were doing a story on the Caymans for National Geographic, and Wendy and our daughter, Tracy—both certified divers—had come along to enjoy a couple of weeks of the best diving in the Caribbean.

Tracy has always had a mystical, almost spooky, ability to communicate with animals both terrestrial and marine. I don’t mean “communicate” in the Dr. Dolittle sense; she doesn’t talk to animals. Nor do I mean it in the Shirley MacLaine sense; she doesn’t channel Amenhotep through turtles. She and animals merely appear to trust each other.

That kind of trust isn’t uncommon for humans to have with dogs, cats, horses, and other mammals. But with fish? I have seen big groupers come to Tracy—while avoiding every other human in the area—and almost snuggle up to her. I’ll forever retain a vision of her in the Caymans, walking slowly along the bottom, with two groupers swimming beside her, one under each arm.

The only person I know with a greater affinity than Tracy for marine creatures is Valerie Taylor, the legendary Australian photographer, diver, and marine conservationist, who truly is spooky—off the scale. I believe that Valerie could wordlessly convince any fish, eel, or dolphin to fetch her newspaper, pick up her laundry, and wash the car.

One day, Ann Hasson introduced Tracy to one of the giant green morays—Waldeen, I think—and when the eel had been fed and stroked by Ann, it took immediately to Tracy, snaking all around her, in and out of her buoyancy-compensator vest, seeming not to be seeking food so much as getting acquainted. Tracy never moved, except to raise her arms slowly to give Waldeen another platform around which to slither.

After a few moments, the eel calmly slid away from Tracy and returned to its home in the reef. We all puttered around for another minute or two, then prepared to move on. When I signaled to Tracy to follow us, however, she shook her head, calmly but definitely saying no.

I was bewildered: what did she mean, no? What did she plan to do, stand there all day? Then I saw her point downward with one index finger, and I looked at her feet, and there was Waldeen, halfway out of the reef, with its huge, gaping jaws around Tracy’s ankle. The eel’s head was moving gently back and forth, its jaws throbbing open and closed on my daughter’s bare flesh.

Waldeen was mouthing Tracy, the way a Labrador retriever will mouth your hand to get you to play with it. Labradors, though, are known for having a “soft mouth”; moray eels aren’t.

Tracy’s expression was serene. Clearly, she was neither hurt nor afraid. She stayed still. I stayed still, too, paralyzed with fear and wondering what I’d do if I suddenly vomited into my mask.

The eel played with Tracy’s ankle for perhaps another thirty seconds, then withdrew into the reef.

We moved on.

When we returned to the Cayman Islands a couple of years later, I learned that both Waldo and Waldeen were gone. One had been caught and killed by local fishermen—illegally, of course—and the other was said to have vanished. I’d bet that he or she, whichever it was, had been killed, too, for the most prominent danger attendant on conditioning eels to trust humans is not to the humans but to the eels. Their fate is familiar and almost inevitable; I’ve seen it happen all over the world, from the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean to the Tuamotu Islands in French Polynesia.

An eel is conditioned to associate humans with food. Sometimes the betrayal is simple. A spearfisher will descend to the reef, maybe carrying food, maybe not. The eel will emerge from its den. The fisher kills it. More often, though, the eel’s demise is more complex.

Once there lived a big moray eel in a large coral head inside the lagoon of the Rangiroa Atoll in the Tuamotus. Our son Christopher used to like to visit the eel, to watch it as it waited in ambush in the shelter of the coral. Now and then he’d see the eel dart out of its hole and, with blurring speed, snatch and kill a passing fish. Christopher kept his distance from the eel, for though local laws forbade the feeding of morays, it was common knowledge that glass-bottom-boat operators from cruise ships would send snorkelers down with food, to draw eels out of their holes for the entertainment of their passengers. Christopher didn’t carry food with him, and he didn’t want the eel to make any false assumptions about him.

News came one afternoon that a swimmer had been badly bitten by a moray eel and had had to be evacuated by air to a hospital in Tahiti. By coincidence, we were scheduled to go out into the lagoon that day. When we reached the coral head, Christopher put on mask, fins, and snorkel and dove down to see his friend, the eel.

The eel had been speared, just behind the head. It was still alive, struggling to retreat into its hole, but the steel shaft that had gone clean through its body now protruded a foot or more from either side, stopping the eel from retreating.

Christopher hung in the water, helpless, and watched the eel die.

We heard later what had happened. A snorkeler had happened by and seen the eel waiting in the opening of its hole. She had approached very close to the eel, which—thinking she was bearing food, like other humans who came so near—came out of its hole prepared to feed.

When the woman gave it nothing, the eel pursued her, conditioned to associate humans with food. The flesh the eel saw looked like food but was, in fact, the woman’s hand.

I’m sure you can finish the story yourself. The eel was deemed too dangerous to live, and a diver was dispatched to dispatch it. In truth, of course, the eel had only been obeying the conditioning imprinted upon it by humans.

The single strangest experience I’ve ever had with moray eels occurred in the Galápagos Islands, where I first went in 1987 to appear in a television show for John Wilcox. Stan Waterman was one of two underwater cameramen. The other was Howard Hall, one of the finest wildlife filmmakers working anywhere in the world today. Paul Humann, author of many fish-identification books and an expert still photographer who had spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours under water in the Galápagos, was “co-talent” with me; he would act as my guide and docent for the cameras.

Before the simple two-week shoot was over, all three of them were to escape death and serious injury by the narrowest of margins: Stan and Paul by being lost in the open ocean at twilight and, another day, by being set upon suddenly by a large school of very aggressive small sharks; Howard and Paul, after Stan and I had departed, when the boat we had chartered crashed into an island and sank in the middle of the night. (The boat had been running on automatic pilot, and the crewman on duty had only to watch the radar screen. He had been taught everything about the radar—except what it was for—and had gazed serenely as the blip indicating the island drew ever closer to the center of the screen, until finally the boat slammed head-on into the rocky shore.)

We had filmed sharks of several kinds, in situations both controlled and hairy: tiny Galápagos penguins (the northernmost penguins in the world), which swam like miniature rockets in pursuit of their prey; exotic critters like red-lipped batfish, which looked like a medical experiment gone awry, as if the body of a frog had been grafted onto the mouth of Carol Channing; seals and iguanas; Sally Lightfoot crabs and blue-footed boobies.

What we hadn’t yet filmed were moray eels, which in the Galápagos (for reasons I know not) tend to congregate in large numbers in tight quarters. We had been told to expect to see four or five, or maybe more, eels poking out of a single hole, their heads jammed together, their jaws opening and closing as they respired in ragged synchrony. We hadn’t seen it yet, but we kept looking, for we all knew it would make a wonderful image.

One day we found it—not once but several times—and it was wonderful and we filmed it till we ran out of film. Then, as we turned away, we noticed something curious: the eels were following us. We were on a rough, open lava plain, and from hidden holes all over the bottom, moray eels large and small, green and spotted, had come all the way out into the open and were chasing us.

Impossible. Morays never left the safety of their holes.

Oh, really?

We knew there was no point trying to flee; the morays could catch us up in a wink. And they did. And once they had us at their mercy, they … did nothing. They chased us, caught up with us, and passed us by.

It was frightening and—once we knew they didn’t intend to bite us—fascinating and utterly inexplicable. None of us had ever seen anything like it before, and I haven’t since.

Killer Whales (Orcas)

If there’s an animal in the sea of which great white sharks have good reason to be afraid, it’s the killer whale. Among meat eaters, it is the apex predator in the ocean. (Sperm whales, which are much bigger, are—technically—meat eaters, too, but their diet consists mostly of squid.) Though killer whales are officially members of the dolphin family, they make most dolphins seem like church mice. Males can grow to thirty feet long and weigh several tons.

Killer whales do eat mammals, and they have attacked and sunk boats—one celebrated incident was recounted in the book Survive the Savage Sea—but there is not one recorded instance of an orca in the wild attacking a human being. There are, though, a couple of instances of captive killer whales turning on and wounding their trainers.

I was aware of all the facts and statistics when, in the 1980s, I was asked to go scuba diving in the wild with killer whales, but the knowledge was cold comfort: I didn’t know anybody who had ever gone into the water with wild killer whales on purpose, so there was no one to call for advice. I thought that perhaps the reason nobody had ever been attacked was that nobody had ever been in the water with one. Maybe I’d be the index case, the first and foremost, the late, lucky loser.

The first protective measure I took was to have a wetsuit made, puke green with yellow piping on the arms and legs and a broad yellow stripe across the chest, designed to broadcast to any and all killer whales, I am not a seal! I considered having the actual words stenciled within the yellow stripe, but even I knew that, smart as they were, killer whales couldn’t read English.

Killer whales exist in all the oceans of the world, in warm water and cold. According to Richard Ellis, they’re the most widely distributed of all cetaceans (dolphins and whales). Their common name comes from the documented fact that they kill other whales. Pods of killer whales will gang up on one of the great whales—a blue whale, say—and kill it and eat it.

I was to dive with them in the cold Canadian waters of the Johnstone Strait, off Vancouver Island, where several pods were resident and being studied by scientists. Specifically, there was a particular stony beach where killer whales were known to come to rub themselves on the round rocks—called “rubbing rocks,” in fact—either to rid themselves of minute parasites or, more likely, just for the fun of it. The plan was for Stan Waterman and me to lie on the rocky bottom, using oxygen rebreathers so as not to generate bubbles (whales hear them, know that they mean people, and stay away), and wait for the whales to arrive, at which point, with ABC’s primitive video camera hard-wired to a monitor on the beach, we would capture images of them in an orgy of rubbing. (This has been done a thousand times since, but up till then it had never been done.)

I met my first killer whale before I even got wet. A local scientist and I were traveling across the Johnstone Strait in a rubber boat when we came upon a pod of orcas cruising easily in open water. We stopped the engine and drifted, and within five minutes the whales surrounded us, clicking and tweeping and chattering among themselves. There was a big male—easily identifiable by his five- or six-foot-high dorsal fin—along with a couple of females and a few youngsters.

Without warning, one of the youngsters—twelve or thirteen feet long and as big around as a barrel—surged out of the water and plopped its head on the side of the rubber boat. It opened its mouth, displaying its pink tongue and its huge conical teeth.

Shocked, I flinched and backed away.

“He wants you to scratch his tongue,” the scientist said.

“Right,” I replied, thinking that at this moment jokes were in rather bad taste.

“I’m serious. Go ahead.”

I stared at him and at the whale, which was waiting patiently, mouth agape, emitting an occasional click or cheep. Then, having concluded that a one-armed writer could still be a writer, very gingerly I touched the whale’s tongue and gave it a scratch.

“All the way back,” the scientist said. “Right at the base. And really scratch it.”

I took a deep breath and plunged my arm into the whale’s mouth up to my shoulder. With my hand out of sight in the back of the dark cavern, I scratched for all I was worth.

The whale purred. I’m not kidding—it purred, just like a contented cat. And I—from the pit of my stomach to the back of my neck, where the hairs stood on end and tingled—felt overwhelmed by an almost celestial sense of awe, a conviction of communication not only with this young whale but with … I don’t know … nature itself. I’d never experienced anything like it.

I looked at the scientist and grinned, and he grinned back. I scratched some more, the whale purred some more. I would’ve kept scratching all day, but after a while the scientist said, “That’ll do,” and I withdrew my arm. The whale closed its mouth and slid gently back into the sea.

The rest of our experiment with the killer whales of the Johnstone Strait was relatively uneventful. The water was wickedly cold, so we began by using dry suits, which, as the name implies, are intended to keep the diver dry and warm instead of, as in the case of a wetsuit, wet and clammy, but I have never gotten the hang of maneuvering inside what amounts to a gigantic space suit. I didn’t know how to adjust my buoyancy; air pockets formed and shifted, so I hung askew, then shot to the surface upside down and backward. Forsaking warmth in favor of equilibrium, I switched back to my wetsuit, which allowed me ten or fifteen minutes of feeling in my hands and feet and approximately half an hour of consciousness.

The water over the rubbing rocks was only five or six feet deep but very murky (visibility between five and ten feet), and Stan and I lay on the bottom and waited for a pod of whales to come along for a rub.

We heard them long before we saw them; the clicks, whistles, and cheeps, I learned later, were the whales discussing us. Their supersensitive sonar picked us up from half a mile away, but they couldn’t decide what we were. They knew we were alive and not fish, warm-blooded but not seals or sea lions. We exuded no bubbles. Evidently, we were worth investigating, for the whales continued toward us. Their conversation grew louder and more excited. (Stan and I later confessed that each of us had been convinced that the whales’ discussion had been about which of them would have the privilege of deciding which of us to consume first.)

Louder and louder grew the whale sounds as closer and closer they came, and still we could see nothing but thick gray murk.

Suddenly, like a flash cut in a movie, the frame of our vision was filled with an enormous black-and-white head rushing at us. The jaws were agape; each cone of sharp white ivory shone like a blade.

And then the whale actually saw us, recognized us for what we were, and immediately—impossibly quickly—veered away, emitting a loud, long blaaat, the cetacean equivalent of a Bronx cheer, whose meaning (to me, at least) was vividly clear: disgust and dismay at being gulled by two dumb, clumsy, and decidedly inferior beings.

The immense body vanished; no other appeared, and as the pod pulled away from us, the tone of their discourse returned to a level of calm, desultory conversation.

Poisonous Animals

The oceans are full of creatures that depend on poison as a weapon of defense or offense. They range from anemones to corals to jellyfish, cone shells, bony fish, and air-breathing snakes.

Swimmers, in general, don’t have to worry about any but the jellyfish, but there are so many kinds of jellyfish, with toxins of such a great variety of virulence, that it behooves a swimmer to seek the advice of locals before galloping willy-nilly into the water.

In Australia, for example, there are box jellyfish, called sea wasps, whose poison can, and occasionally does, kill a human being. At certain times of the year some beaches along Australia’s northeast coast are closed to swimmers and surfers because of the seasonal invasion of sea wasps.

One of the most common dangerous jellyfish in the Atlantic is the Portuguese man-of-war, whose tentacles deliver a toxin that, while not usually fatal, causes excruciating pain and can be debilitating. The best thing that can be said about men-of-war is that you can see them coming: they are wind-and-current-driven jellies with “sails” like purple balloons that extend several inches above the surface. Visible though they may be, however, it’s best to give them a wide berth; their stinging tentacles can extend as much as a hundred feet below and, depending on the current, to the side.

There are dozens of other stinging jellyfish that are more nuisance than menace, and almost all of them (including the sea wasps and the men-of-war) share a fascinating technology of attack. Their tentacles shoot microscopic harpoons, called nematocysts, into their victims, and the harpoons inject potent neurotoxins, or 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—actually what Ellis calls “a colony of differentiated cells associated to form a functioning ‘animal’”—and eaten with “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—and many of them work, more or less, depending on the kind of jellyfish that has stung you, the amount of tentacle matter that has made contact with your skin, and the degree to which you are or aren’t sensitive 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, and 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, and all she felt was an annoying tingling sensation—which may say as much about the highly subjective nature of pain as it does about jellyfish toxins.

Poisonous fish, many of which are of the family Scorpaenidae and include the scorpion fish, the lionfish, and the stonefish, are found in tropical waters and normally live near, on, or in the bottom, which is 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, and one that makes wading around reefs a perilous pastime.

Scuba divers worry about the Scorpaenidae for yet another reason: under water and within the kaleidoscopic 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 as they lie, half-hidden in the sand, and wait for potential prey to amble 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 Christmas-tree ornaments designed by Hieronymus Bosch—gaudy, brazen, 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, and 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, and almost all of which want nothing whatever to do with human beings. There are several species; 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, and 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 wetsuits prevented the snakes’ fangs from reaching their skin—or at least slowed the bite enough to give them 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. Up to six feet long, slender, tough, fast as lightning, and armed with a prognathous lower jaw (it extends forward beyond the upper one) studded with dozens of jagged, needle-sharp teeth designed specifically to tear prey to shreds, a barracuda looks to me like the Jack Palance of the sea: 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. While the great barracuda is capable, no question, of causing grievous bodily harm to any and all of us, 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, and 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 accustomed to seeing barracudas appear from nowhere, as if by teleportation, hang around and gaze with fixed eye at whatever’s going on, and 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 appraising 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, and it is done in circumstances where swimming against the current is difficult, dangerous, or downright impossible. Divers leave the boat in one location, drift along with the current—holding a line tethered to an inflated ball that bobs on the surface so the captain of the boat can keep track of them—and are retrieved by the boat 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, effectively touches the shore right there as it 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, where instantly they’re 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—and 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. Not content with the speed with which we were roaring along, he increased his velocity 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, against the current, kicking as fast as his fins would flutter, breast-stroking with his arms, staring at us through the faceplate of his mask, his eyes wide with fear. Implausibly, he was making headway, and when he reached us he kept swimming until he was behind me, and then he stopped struggling, grabbed me, and climbed aboard my back.

I looked at Wendy, who was looking at Clayton, who was pointing somewhere ahead as, in exhaustion, 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 inadvertently come up behind, and perhaps startled, a shark that had turned toward him, scaring him out of his wits, when I saw Wendy pointing and then the dive master pointing, and there, a few yards ahead and below, was what looked like a big school of big sharks, 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, and 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 barracudas, barracudas on steroids.

I couldn’t believe it. Even allowing for the fact that, under water, everything looks a third again as big as it really is, these monsters couldn’t be real. They were 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.

It took me several minutes to rein in my mental hyperbole. As we continued to drift together, and these great creatures paid us no attention whatever—they moved aside, in fact, to avoid contact with us—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—and 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; their bodies are structured not with bones but with cartilage. They include everything from sawfishes to guitarfishes to manta rays, eagle rays, and stingrays, and—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 general benevolence of stingrays need travel no farther than the Cayman Islands, where local dive groups 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, 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, because 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. Ellis points out that long, long ago, stingrays dead, dried, and doctored were known as “Jenny Hanivers” and were displayed as proof of the existence of mermaids.

Twenty years ago I had an experience with a ray that changed my life. Literally. Not only did I hurry home and write a book about it—The Girl of the Sea of Cortez—but 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, which for reasons no one has ever been able to ascertain 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 in the dual capacities of nurse and still photographer.

One afternoon, when we returned to our chartered boat, the Don Jose, full of macho tales of death-defying diving among the anthropophagi, 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 wing tip to wing tip; for the moment, all we knew was that it looked as big as an F-16.) Its unique cephalic fins, which would unfurl during feeding and become supple sweeps to gather food into the immense maw, were rolled up tightly now, 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: huge, horned, winged, with a mouth big enough to swallow a person whole and a proclivity for leaping clear out of the water, turning somersaults, and slamming down upon the surface of the sea, obviously daring any foolish sailor to fall overboard into its ghastly grasp. Equally obviously, such hideous monsters deserved no fate better than death, and 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, probably to rid themselves of parasites but possibly, as I prefer to believe, just for the hell 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; witness 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, and 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 virtually 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 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, and very slowly the great body began to move forward, not with enough velocity 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, and off they went, with Michele’s heart pounding in her chest, elation 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, and 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 stopped. Michele let go and came to the surface: incredulous, thrilled beyond words, and knowing full well that we would never believe her because surely, by the time we returned, 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.

When Howard and Stan had filmed the ray itself from every possible angle, 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, and 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, and it accelerated to a speed at which 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, and 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; rather, like 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.

The world grew dark, and for a moment I was afraid—I knew we had gone very deep, but I had no way of knowing exactly how deep because I couldn’t let go with one hand to retrieve my depth gauge. If we’re too deep, I worried, I’ll run out of air, or get the bends on surfacing, or—

Just then, as if to reassure me, the manta returned to the world of light. It rushed for the surface, gaining speed with every thrust of its mighty wings, and I had the sudden, terrifying conviction that it was going to burst through the surface and take to the air—and me with it—and when we slammed down again on the water I would be reduced to pudding. But long before it reached the surface, the manta swerved away and began to cruise twenty or thirty feet below the boat.

Finally, it slowed, then silently stopped directly in the shadow of the boat. I let go and made my way to the surface.

Like Michele, I didn’t know how long my journey had lasted, and there was no way to find out. My air tank was almost empty, and Stan and Howard had each run through a full load of film, which meant that I had been under water on that magical ride for at least twenty minutes. But how deep, and for how long, at what depth? The only way I would know how much residual nitrogen remained in my system—the villain that brings on bends—was to wait. If I came down with the agony of the bends, in my joints or my guts, I’d know I had gone too deep for too long. If I didn’t, I’d know I hadn’t. Simple as that.

The manta, meanwhile, remained beneath the boat. Over the next three days, every member of the crew had a chance to swim with or ride on the manta, and always, without exception, the wonderful ray returned its passengers to the same exact spot beneath the boat.

As soon as I returned home, I began to write, for a story had been born, entire, in my head. I wrote it at record speed (for me) and with thoughts, feelings, and perceptions I didn’t know I had.

It was published as the novel The Girl of the Sea of Cortez, and though it’s now out of print, I’m delighted that readers (especially young ones) are still discovering it, for it is my favorite of all my books about the sea.

Though the book still clings to life, I’m sorry to report that the magical manta rays of the Sea of Cortez do not. Too many fishermen lost too many nets to the mantas, and so they hunted them down and killed them.

Squid—Giant and Otherwise

Of all the creatures that have ever lived in the sea, none, I warrant, has generated more groundless fears and fabulous fantasies than the giant squid. Jules Verne had a giant squid attack the submarine Nautilus in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I wrote a novel about a giant squid, titled Beast, which NBC made into a miniseries. And Richard Ellis, who knows more than I ever will about giant squid, published a fine, comprehensive, and accessible nonfiction book called The Search for the Giant Squid.

Ellis’s title is particularly appropriate, for almost the entire history of man’s relationship with this most formidable of all invertebrates has been a search, and a fruitless one at that. One of the main reasons—if not the main reason—for our endless fascination with this monster of monsters is that so very, very little is known about it. And the reason for that is that despite twenty-first-century technology and vast expenditures of money and time by battalions of intrepid scientists and adventurers, no one has ever seen a giant squid alive in its habitat—that is, the ocean. What fragments are known have been gathered from studies of specimens either dead or dying in the nets that have ensnared them.

Here, in a combination of facts from Ellis’s encyclopedia and my own experiences, conversations, and reading, is a distillation of what’s known about giant squid.

Their scientific name is Architeuthis, which translates from the Greek (roughly) as “first among squids,” not first in line but first in importance, as in “squid of all squids” or, in today’s parlance, “Man, you de squiiiid.” There are more than a dozen different species of Architeuthis, most named for the place their corpses were found, but amateurs like me bundle them all together with the single name Architeuthis dux: king of kings of squids. Sort of.

They are the largest of the more than seven hundred kinds of squid that live in the world’s oceans. The biggest one accepted by science—the dead animal, found decades ago washed up on a New Zealand shore, was complete—was definitively measured at fifty-seven feet long, from its tail to the tip of its two “whips,” or feeding tentacles. (Unlike octopuses, squid have ten arms, eight short ones plus the two whips.)

The biggest one accepted by me was seventy-three feet long; by the time it washed up on a beach in eastern Canada, some of its arms had been eaten away, so it could not be accurately measured, but reputable scientists extrapolated from the substantial remains that the animal would have been seventy-three feet long.

I’m prepared to believe, furthermore, that somewhere in the deep ocean there lives a giant squid more than a hundred feet long. While I was doing research for Beast more than a decade ago, I spoke by phone with one of the world’s two great teuthologists (squid scientists). He was ill then and would die soon thereafter, and though he was helpful and forthcoming, he insisted that I not attribute anything he said directly to him, for he didn’t want to risk his reputation or his place in the pantheon of teuthology. He told me that his lifetime of study had convinced him that the existence of a 150-foot giant squid was not only possible but probable.

Imagine a squid half the length of a football field … a squid that, standing on end, would reach fifteen stories into the air … a squid longer than three locomotives … a squid … well, you get the idea.

Giant squid seem to inhabit the oceans’ midwater range, between 1,800 and 3,500 feet; that, at least, is where most of the specimens caught recently in fishing nets have been found. There is practically no light at those depths except for what is generated by creatures that are themselves bioluminescent (like many squid), and giant squid have enormous eyes (the largest in the animal kingdom) that can attain a diameter of fifteen inches and, presumably, can gather in every available atom of light.

Throughout history (all the way back to Homer) there have been stories of giant squid attacking and sinking ships. Many of these tales have been supported by witnesses and newspaper accounts, but none have been completely authenticated. Countless stories exist of monster squid assaulting fishermen and plucking hapless shipwreck survivors from lifeboats. None of those would stand up in court, either, though I’m convinced that several, though perhaps wildly exaggerated, spring from seeds of truth. There are, simply, too many accounts by too many rational people with too little to gain by fashioning silly fictions for them all to be fantasies or hallucinations.

Certainly, giant squid have the equipment with which to wreak havoc on small boats and all humans. Although Architeuthis does not have (as I posited in Beast) claws within each sucker on its tentacles—claws that are present in many smaller, more aggressive species of squid—its suckers do possess rings of hard, sharp “teeth” made of chitin (the same stuff some mollusk shells are made of), which gnaw into prey and drag it toward the animal’s big, sharp beak. The beak, in turn, slashes the prey to pieces and feeds it to the squid’s studded tongue, which forces the flesh down into the gut.

A lovely way to go, no?

Among the many things not known about giant squid are how big they can grow, how fast they grow, how long they live, exactly what they feed on (it is known that sperm whales feed on them), where they hang out, whether or not they are aggressive, whether or not they are as immensely powerful as legend insists, and why they die. Every year, all over the world, a great many giant squid just seem to die. Because their flesh is loaded with ammonium ions, which are lighter than water, their bodies float rather than sink. Some are consumed by sharks and other fish, but some float all the way to shore more or less intact.

My fascination with giant squid began in the late 1970s, when Teddy Tucker and I decided to try to catch one off Bermuda, where giant-squid bodies—and pieces of bodies—were found floating on the surface quite often. We went out at night and from the stern of his boat lowered two 3,000-foot lengths of cable woven of forty-eight strands of stainless steel. Each cable carried clusters of baited hooks of varying sizes, plus Cyalume chemical lights, which, we hoped, would attract the squids’ attention.

We had visions of grotesque monsters in the Stygian deep, throbbing with the colors of excitement (all squid have in their flesh chromatophores that allow them to change color with the speed of a strobe) as they attacked our baits; of titanic struggles as the cables thrummed with strain and spat droplets of water from each stressed strand; of the stern of the boat being pulled down, down, until—perhaps—Teddy would decide that the only way to save our lives would be to sever the cables with the axe he had stowed by the transom.

We waited all night, bouncing around in rough seas, and got nary a nibble on either cable. At dawn, morose with disappointment, we began to haul in the cables on giant spools.

They came in easily. Too easily, in fact. Strange.

The five-hundred-foot marker passed, then the thousand-foot, and with every turn of the spool the cable seemed lighter, much lighter, weirdly light. The fifteen-hundred-foot marker passed, and now the cables felt too light. Definitely.

Over the stern the cables popped. The lights were gone, the baits were gone, the hooks were gone. The final thousand feet of cable were gone.

The cables had been severed. They hadn’t popped from weight or stress; the strands were all still tightly wrapped. They had been cut. Bitten off.

Gloom gave way to excitement. What could have done this? Not a shark; no gigantic fish had swallowed the baited hooks and tried to run with them. We would have felt it; the boat would have moved. And no shark tooth was hard enough to cut through an eighth of an inch of stainless steel.

We couldn’t have foul-hooked a whale. Sure, the weight of a whale would have been enough to break the cable, but the cable ends would be splayed, the strands all askew.

Whatever had bitten through our cables, we decided, had a beak as hard as Kevlar. (How, you ask, could we make that leap of logic? Easy: we wanted to.) And what had such a beak?

Why, nothing—nothing, that is, except a giant squid.

Clearly, this was an animal worth pursuing.

We tried the next year, and the next. We’ve tried, in fact, every year since then. Always we’ve been teased; never have we been successful.

We’ve hung cameras down to two and three thousand feet and focused them on baited hooks. We’ve seen creatures bizarre and wonderful—vicious little squid that savaged our bait till all that was left were scales; curious, unknown sharks that live only in that particular part of the deep—but never a sign of Architeuthis.

One day we set a baited line half a mile down and buoyed it with three rubber balls, each designed to float five hundred pounds. We left the line for a couple of hours while we went to set others, and when we returned, the balls were gone.

For fifteen or twenty minutes we searched back and forth. There was no question that we were in the right place; Teddy has an uncanny ability to locate himself in the open ocean, especially off Bermuda, where he can pinpoint his position by triangulating landmarks.

The balls were gone. Simple as that.

Just as we were about to abandon them—yet another mystery never to be solved—there was a roaring, whooshing sound off the port side of Teddy’s boat, and one by one—Pow! Pow! Pow!—the three balls burst through the surface, still connected together, and bobbed placidly on the calm sea, as if they’d never been gone at all.

When we pulled in the half mile of line—heavy-duty polypropylene rope, to be precise—all the hooks were gone, as were all the baits, and, once again, the strands of the rope were still tightly bound. Something had pulled and pulled and pulled, with a force great enough to sink three quarters of a ton, and then bitten through the rope.

In the early 1990s, when I was host of an ESPN series of shows called Expedition Earth, produced by the enterprising and indefatigable John Wilcox, we spent nearly three years putting together an hour on giant squid. Because we knew that the chances of our being able to film one in the wild were close to nil, we filmed some of the animals closely associated with Architeuthis.

We traveled again to Canada, this time to dive—in January, no less, and in falling snow—with the squid’s fabulous cousin, the giant octopus. Documented as large as sixteen feet in diameter, but averred in legend to grow to greater than twenty feet from tentacle tip to tentacle tip, giant octopuses are shy, reclusive, and, when they can be coaxed out of their dens, fascinating to watch as they scurry across the sea floor, changing color and pattern to camouflage themselves to match the bottom they’re on or over.

We swam with Caribbean sperm whales in the deep waters around Dominica and Martinique, hoping—against all odds—to catch some interaction between whale and squid. The only squid I saw, however, were ex-squid, former squid, squid that (like the famous Monty Python parrot) were no more; as I snorkeled beside a fifty-foot-long adult sperm whale, she sounded, and left me, as a parting gift, enveloped in a thick red cloud of eaten, digested, and excreted giant squid.

We acquired old woodcut prints of beached giant squid, amateur video footage of giant squid killed in fishing nets, and some extraordinary footage shot by Howard Hall of a hundred-pound Humboldt squid—considered by Mexican fishermen to be more dangerous to man than any sharks—ripping apart a big tuna being hand-fed to it by Bob Cranston. (One of Howard’s other colleagues was later attacked by three Humboldt squid and was lucky to escape with his life.)

In the end we put together a good hourlong show that was, I believe, informative and entertaining—all, of course, without once succeeding in finding a single giant squid.

Over the past decade, more and more dead and dying giant squid have been caught by net fishermen, particularly in the waters off New Zealand. The reason is not a sudden population increase in giant squid but relatively recent technological advances that have given deep-sea trawlers access to fish in water two thousand to five thousand feet deep. There, evidently, the squid spend a good deal of their time feeding on, among other things, a species of midwater fish called orange roughy.

Orange roughies are amazing fish, only about a foot long, that can live for more than a century. Ellis says that “there are documented records of individuals that have reached 150.” They don’t mature until they’re about thirty years old, and because they tend to gather in tight schools, they’re easy prey for deep trawlers. A five-minute trawl, according to Ellis, “can fill a trawl net with 10 to 50 tons of fish.”

Consequently, orange roughies are being wiped out at an alarming rate. The fishery is only twenty-three years old, and already catches have declined drastically. Some scientists believe that orange roughies may eventually set a record for the speed with which any species (of anything) has gone from initial discovery to commercial extinction.

Meanwhile, though, the presence of giant squid among the orange-roughy populations has lured legions of passionate teuthophiles (squid lovers)—scientists, writers, divers, and filmmakers—to embark upon multimillion-dollar expeditions to find giant squid by using submersibles, fifty-thousand-dollar-a-day ships, and the highest of high-tech locating gear.

None has ever seen a giant squid—let alone caught one or filmed a live one swimming in the sea—and, I confess, I’m glad.

Architeuthis is one of the few true mysteries left on earth, an animal of mythic stature that we know exists but we cannot find, a real creature that is at the same time an ancient, enduring legend, a spur to scientific quest and an inspiration to mankind’s imagination.

It is the last dragon. We need our dragons, for they help our fancies soar beyond the boundaries of grim reality.

I hope that the giant squid successfully eludes us for years to come, for to find the dragon will be to kill it, and to make it disappear forever.