15

Okay, So What Can We Do?

On a beautiful autumn day in late March 1999, I knelt inside the belly cavity of a gargantuan great white shark and helped a scientist hunt for its heart.

In life, she had been nearly eighteen feet long—longer than all but the biggest sport-utility vehicles—and had weighed nearly two tons. By now, after a year of being frozen, she had shrunk by a foot and had lost a few hundred pounds of water weight.

Still, the two of us fit easily within her, and when the National Geographic cameraman approached for a close-up, there was ample room for him as well.

This leviathan had died, or been killed, or had killed herself—the difference between interpretations was not insignificant and depended on your attitude toward animals and nature and mankind’s relationship to both—by rolling up in a coastal longline set to catch big Australian snappers, becoming ensnared, and finally asphyxiating. Like all sharks of her kind, she stayed alive only by constantly moving forward and flushing oxygen-rich water over her gills. Once immobilized, she died of anoxia—lack of oxygen.

The fisherman who found her had towed her to shore and notified the authorities. Though it was illegal to kill a great white shark in the state of South Australia, this death had obviously been accidental, and no charges were lodged. In fact, the police expressed their gratitude to the fisherman; he could easily have cut the shark away from his line and let it sink to the bottom. When he asked for permission to keep the jaw, however, his request was denied: a great-white-shark jaw this huge might fetch ten thousand Australian dollars from a collector, and news of such a sale might encourage other fishermen to discover other “accidental” catches.

The scientific community expressed its collective regret that the enormous predator had died, but individual scientists were delighted to have the opportunity—very rare, indeed—to study a fully mature, intact, and undamaged female great white shark.

First, though, they had to find a freezer large enough to hold her until they could decide exactly what to do with her and how and where to do it. They located a gigantic cold box a few miles outside Adelaide, and there they stowed this special specimen—until now.

I had been working for months on a story for National Geographic magazine and a television special for NGTV about great white sharks, to be published (and broadcast) in the spring of 2000, as close as possible to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the release of the movie version of Jaws. David Doubilet and I had proposed the story as a vehicle through which to gather photographs the likes of which had never before been taken (his responsibility) and to assemble all the new information about great whites that had accumulated in the quarter-century since the film had burst upon the public consciousness (mine).

When John Bredar, the gentle, genteel, and gifted producer/director of the television film, told me that the gigantic shark was about to be brought in from the cold, thawed, and studied, I quickly volunteered to return to the other side of the planet, where we had been diving with great whites only a couple of months earlier.

Thawing the shark took several days—well, hey, do you have a microwave capable of defrosting a thirty-five-hundred-pound fish?—and on the first day she was displayed, on a trailer bed at the South Australia Research and Development Institute (SARDI) outside the town of Glenelg, twelve thousand people waited in line for hours, in a driving rain, for the chance to see, touch, feel, and smell the most formidable predator any of them had ever seen—or, probably, ever imagined.

She was magnificent even in death. Her length, her breadth, her sheer bulk struck spectators dumb. Her inch-and-a-half-long upper teeth were irresistible to wide-eyed children, who ran their fingers over the serrated sides of each white triangle and thought thoughts that would surely return to them in the dark of night. Nobody said much, and those who did speak kept their voices low. I heard not one smart-mouth crack, not one lame joke, and I knew that if someone had uttered even a mild expression of cynicism, the crowd would have turned on him and shamed him into silence.

The folks were fascinated, yes, and awed, but as the hours passed and the crowd kept shuffling through, the sentiment I felt permeating the atmosphere most thoroughly was reverence. What they were seeing was not merely a legend come true, but tangible evidence of the power of elemental nature. For several people this was, I was certain, a moment of epiphany.

The next day the shark was moved farther out of town, to the Bolivar Maceration Facility, a big, hangarlike building on open land beside a sewage-treatment plant, where whales and other large marine animals that washed up onshore were cut to pieces and rendered into disposable constituent parts.

Bolivar was where Dr. Barry Bruce, an eminent SARDI biologist from Tasmania, and I would be filmed dissecting the great white shark. (Actually, of course, he would dissect and comment while I watched and asked questions.)

Bolivar stank. Oh, my, did it stink! Every square inch of every surface, every atom of air that flowed from and around the great gleaming tanks full of putrefying flesh reeked with a nauseating pungency that brought tears to our eyes. (Though I was given a chic yellow rubber apron to wear, along with striking black rubber boots and lovely pink rubber gloves, the stink invaded and so completely inhabited every fiber of my cotton clothes that eventually, after a few futile launderings, I would be forced to wrap them in plastic and put them out with the garbage.)

The shark lay on her back, tilted slightly to port by the protrusion of her rigid dorsal fin, which shifted her massive insides leftward in a bulge that threatened to roll her off the dissecting table. Barry and his team of assistants and students had placed buckets and plastic vats all around the table, to catch whatever fell out when the shark was opened up. While Barry honed the twelve-inch blade of a carving knife, John Bredar placed me, his cameraman, his lights, and his sound equipment in positions perfect to announce and record any and all discoveries.

Nobody knew what we would find inside the shark, and nobody speculated aloud about the possibilities, though we all silently shared the same thoughts. A keg of nails? Half a horse? A whole swordfish? A sea lion? A human leg? An entire person? All of these and a thousand other implausible objects had been found before inside great white sharks.

Barry placed the point of his knife against the belly of the beast; I cleared my throat; the cameraman said the magic word, speed, telling John that the camera was rolling at the proper rate; John gave Barry a quiet “Action!” and the dissection began.

Have you ever daydreamed about plunging your knife into the belly of a marauding shark? Perhaps you’re diving down to open the treasure chest or rescue the fair maiden when suddenly a dark shadow falls over you and the giant shark attacks. You duck below the monster, reach up with your knife hand, and slide the blade into the soft white flesh of the underbelly, splitting it open like a ripe melon and sending the mortally wounded shark off to die in the deep.

Well, forget it. Your knife would either bounce off or break off, and you’d face a future as lunch.

While Barry labored to slice through skin—no, meat!—more than an inch thick, he explained that female great whites are armored by nature to protect them during mating, which is a violent affair punctuated by repeated bites from the male desperate to maintain his grip on the female. “Remember,” Barry said, “they don’t have hands, and they have to hold on somehow.”

As the slit in the shark’s belly grew longer, pressure increased from within, and cutting became quicker.

Someone said, Watch out.

For what? I asked.

The liver. It’s a third of the body weight. Here it comes!

And here, forcing its way out through the hole in the shark, came a thousand-pound liver, the immense organ of energy storage that permitted the shark to go without eating for a month or more after one substantial meal.

For a couple of hours the dissection proceeded methodically. Barry described each of his findings, first in layman’s terms for the camera, then in scientific jargon for the tape recorder monitored by one of his aides.

The shark’s fins were sliced off, and as each was tossed into a bin, we spoke of the sorry fact that there were people all over the world who would gladly have butchered this shark for her fins alone.

Though she bore old mating scars on her flanks, and though her uterus was stretched (indicating that she had borne young), she was not pregnant when she died.

We took breaks—to change tapes and batteries and to rinse our lungs with fresh air—and during one I was taken on a hunt for specimens of Australia’s notorious endemic funnel web spider. Small (about the size of your thumbnail) and inoffensive-looking, Australian funnel webs are among the most poisonous spiders on the planet and, unfortunately, are common in populated areas like suburbs. It took us less than five minutes to find several—in a woodpile, under discarded equipment, beside a corner of the building—which reinforced my conviction that Australians are some of humanity’s hardiest and most sensible people.

Wherever they live, travel, hike, swim, fish, dive, kayak, or trek, they risk being confronted by something capable of doing them in with tooth, fang, claw, jaw, or stinger, and yet there is no public clamor to eradicate any animal because of the peril it poses to the human population. Australians have learned to coexist in relative peace with nearly everything, and when occasionally a human life is lost to an animal, the public usually reacts philosophically.

It was after noon when Barry determined that the time had come to open the shark’s stomach and examine its contents. What would be in there? We all watched with childlike anticipation.

Barry slit the stomach sac, and following an initial deluge of liquid, there came …

… not much, really, except confirmation of how the shark had died. The stomach contained three intact fifteen- or twenty-pound snappers, swallowed whole and complete with hooks, leaders, and lengths of line, and a few bits and pieces of other prey: beaks from small squids and octopuses, otoliths (bony pieces from the inner ear) from different fish, which would be studied later, and a four-inch-long stingray barb whose owner must have been consumed a long time ago, for it had already migrated through several inches of dense flesh on its way to rejection by the shark’s amazingly rugged defense mechanisms.

We shared a feeling of anticlimax: inside the shark there were no billfish, seals, or walruses, whole or in part, no priests, scientists, or politicians—not even a license plate or two.

By now, our excitement had been replaced by subdued silence, for as Barry reached up behind the jaw and felt around for the shark’s heart, we could see that the once magnificent creature had been reduced to little more than a memory. Only the head remained intact, and even that now radiated not power but pathos.

What I felt most, I think, was sorrow at the waste. The death of this giant had benefitted no one. Maybe Barry and his team would come up with discoveries or conclusions that might help protect other sharks; maybe the children in the crowds that had stood in line to see the great white would grow up with respect and affection for the animals. I hoped so, because otherwise the net result of this accidental catch and all the attention and effort attending it would be merely one less apex predator in the critical food chain at the bottom of the world.

Nature is very careful with her apex predators. They were not made with man in mind—remember, they’ve been present on earth, more or less exactly as they are today, for scores of millions of years—and they cannot survive interference, accidental or intentional, from humans.

At the rate at which great whites are being killed all over the world, the existence of certain populations is already threatened, and the survival of the entire species may soon be in doubt.

Our grandchildren may be able to know great white sharks only from film and videotape.

The same is true, to a greater or lesser degree, of other sharks and other fish.

Ideologues of every stripe, as well as folks with interests economic, political, or personal, can interpret data and statistics to suit their own purposes, but a few unalterable facts resist interpretation: every major fishery in the world is being overexploited, pushed beyond its capacities. At a time when a swelling human population needs more animal protein than ever, catches of almost every important food fish are in decline.

Everywhere, too many fishermen with too much sophisticated gear are chasing too few fish.

In retrospect, the shark-attack hysteria of the summer of 2001 seems to have been a diversion. Yes, an unfortunate youngster whose case lit the fuse was attacked by a shark. Yes, others, too, were attacked, and four died. Those were tragic accidents that can’t be denied, mustn’t be diminished, and won’t be forgotten. But they were neither unprecedented nor inexplicable.

The sensational “summer of the shark” was a creation of the media, and only in that regard was it extraordinary. Seldom in recent centuries have so many spent so much energy, print, and airtime trying to discover and deftly explain the cause of something that hadn’t happened, wasn’t happening, and didn’t exist.

We mustn’t let ourselves be distracted from the genuine problems that do exist in the sea, problems that can be solved only by us and only if we will reexamine our place in nature and rethink our conduct as members of the natural order.

My personal guide are some words written by the naturalist Henry Beston in his 1928 classic, The Outermost House, and I end with them because additional words would be superfluous:

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.