Preface

Aliens in the Sea

Shark attacks are natural news leaders. They meet all the criteria for show-stopping spectacle: blood and guts, horror (ANIMAL SAVAGES HUMAN!), and mystery (INVISIBLE TERROR FROM THE DEEP!), and they are highly videogenic. Even if the camera can’t get a shot of shark or victim, it can pan the empty beach and the forbidding ocean, focus on the BEACH CLOSED or DANGER: SHARKS signs, and capture the comments of panicky witnesses.

Shark attacks often dominate the news in the summer, as they did in 2001. Newspapers, magazines, radio and television news, and talk shows kept count of the supposed carnage taking place on the East Coast of the United States. Experts were empaneled to speculate on causes and meanings of this sudden, unprecedented assault on humanity.

Never before, to my knowledge, has so much ink and so much airtime been devoted to so few events of little national and international consequence. Dr. Samuel Gruber of the University of Miami, one of the world’s most respected shark scientists, sent the following statement by e-mail to dozens of his colleagues: “I have never seen anything like it in 35 years in the business of shark biology—the media are completely mesmerized by sharks and unlike most sharks the media seem to be feeding on themselves!”

For, the truth was, the hysteria was not justified by statistics or facts. There were not significantly more shark attacks than usual during the summer of 2001, either in the United States or around the world. Though numbers of reported attacks had increased incrementally all during the twentieth century, thanks to increases in the numbers of people living by the shore and swimming in the water and to vastly improved communications, they had leveled off during the 1990s and stayed relatively constant at around sixty to eighty attacks, worldwide, each year. Those are reported attacks, granted, but they’re the only measure we have.

Shark attacks continued to occur in the United States, with far less than a tenth the frequency of homicides and fatal accidents in the workplace and less than a thousandth that of motor-vehicle deaths. As for shark-attack fatalities, well, they’re so rare that they’re not even on the scale.

I have a “lunchpail degree” in sharks: knowledge acquired not from books so much as on the job—or, in my case, in the water. I have been fascinated by sharks all my life, and have spent more than three decades studying, diving with, and writing about sharks, making documentary films about them, and being involved in the feature films and television movies made from the novels that grew out of my fascination, including Jaws, The Deep, and Beast.

All my life I’ve been intrigued by sharks of all species, sizes, and temperaments, and I’ve swum with sharks all over the world, from Australia to Bermuda, South Africa to San Diego, almost always on purpose but occasionally by accident. I’ve been threatened but never attacked, bumped and shoved but never bitten, and—many times—frightened out of my flippers.

Over the years, I’ve learned how to swim, snorkel, and dive safely in the ocean, how to exist—co-exist, really—with sharks and the hundreds of other marine animals I’ve been lucky enough to encounter. Hence this book about sharks and other sea creatures, and understanding how to be in the ocean.

In these pages, I pass along what I’ve learned not only about sharks and how to minimize the chances of getting in trouble with sharks, but also how to maximize the chances of seeing sharks, a privilege that is becoming increasingly infrequent.

Shark attacks on human beings generate a tremendous amount of media coverage, partly because they occur so rarely, but mostly, I think, because people are, and always have been, simultaneously intrigued and terrified by sharks. Sharks come from a wing of the dark castle where our nightmares live—deep water beyond our sight and understanding—and so they stimulate our fears and fantasies and imaginations.

For some of us, the fear is a safe fear, what The New York Times, in an editorial, called “pleasurable cultural hysteria.” It is a fear of something that is unlikely ever to happen to us.

For others, though, for those of us who spend much of our lives in, on, or under the sea, it is a genuine fear, and one to be dealt with through knowledge, experience, and judgment.

Of all the oft-cited shark statistics, one that generates very little media coverage and almost no public interest is the most horrible of all: for every human being killed by a shark, roughly ten million sharks are killed by humans, sometimes for their skins and their meat but mostly for their fins, which are rendered into soup that is sold (for as much as a hundred dollars a bowl) all over the world and is regarded as a status symbol by the burgeoning middle class in China and other Asian nations.

Sharks are critical to the maintenance of the balance of nature in the ocean (in ways we know, and also in ways we are still discovering) and for us to wipe them out, either through greed, need, recklessness, or simple ignorance, would be a tragedy—not just a moral or aesthetic one, but an environmental one as well—in dimensions we’re just beginning to comprehend.

For all we read and hear about “unprovoked” shark attacks, I’ve come to believe that there’s no such thing. We provoke a shark every time we enter the water where sharks happen to be, for we forget: the ocean is not our territory, it’s theirs.

None of us would stroll casually into the Amazon jungle, wearing nothing but a bathing suit and carrying for protection a tube of sun cream and a can of bug spray. We know that the jungle is not our natural habitat; we realize we’re intruders in the jungle, and that in the jungle there are creatures that regard us as a threat or as prey, and will use every mechanism nature has given them—sting, bite, poison, whatever—to ward us off or attack us. We know that large predators live in the jungle and that, through ignorance or intent, they might regard us as food.

In short, we accord the jungle the respect it deserves.

Yet many people regard the ocean with nonchalance, innocence grounded in ignorance. We need to recognize that, as terrestrials and mammals, we represent a tiny minority on our planet. Seventy percent of the earth is covered by water, leaving to humans a mere three square miles out of every ten.

Of our planet’s biomass (the grand total of all living things), more than 80 percent inhabit the seas and oceans. All of those creatures have to eat, from the tiniest copepod up to the largest carnivorous fish in the world: the great white shark.

And so, when we plunge into the water, we must be aware that we are the aliens in the sea; we must heed the signs that a shark could be patrolling nearby—signs such as birds working a school of baitfish just offshore, fishermen in small boats with rods bent double and the surface of the water oily with a slick of chum, and other warning signs I’ll describe in these pages.

We need to realize that when we go into the sea, we are entering hostile territory, and we should arm ourselves with basic precautions, recognizing that, in the sea, we are fair game to the predators that live there.

I don’t mean for a moment that we should stay out of the sea; rather, we need to prepare ourselves, and our children, to swim safely in it. We have, in fact, no choice, for we cannot survive without healthy seas, and I mean that quite literally: the sea sustains all life on earth, controlling our climate and atmosphere, generating the air we breathe and the water we drink.

Only now are we beginning to realize that we have the power to destroy it. And that, too, I mean quite literally. For centuries, human beings have treated the sea as an infinite resource and a bottomless dump. Now we are learning that the sea, like everything else on the earth, is finite and fragile.

This book is about understanding the sea in all its beauty, mystery, and power. It’s about respecting the sea and its creatures, many of which are exotic, complex, and more intriguing than anything ever imagined by the mind of man.

But mostly it’s about sharks and my experiences with them. Sharks are perfect predators whose form and function have not changed significantly in more than thirty million years. I’ll try to pass on what I’ve learned about sharks and about keeping safe in the sea, to show you what sharks are like and why they don’t want to hurt you or eat you, why they would like nothing better than to be left alone to do what nature has programmed them to do: swim, eat, and make little sharks.