Shark Trouble

Copyright © 2002 by Peter Benchley

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

Random House and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Random House website address:
www.atrandom.com

Title-page photograph © Jennifer Hayes

eISBN: 978-1-58836-207-0

v3.0_r2

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Preface:
Aliens in the Sea

Dedication

Other Books by This Author

About the Author

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.

Part I

1

South Australia, 1974

Swimming with Nightmares

Let's start with a story about sharks: Dangerous reef, in the Neptune Islands, 1974.

Blinded by blood, nauseated by the taste of fish guts, whale oil, and putrid horse flesh, I gripped the aluminum bars of the shark cage to steady myself against the violent, erratic jolts as the cage was tossed by the choppy sea. A couple of feet above, the surface was a prism that scattered rays of gray from the overcast sky; below, the bottom was a dim plain of sand sparsely covered with strands of waving grass.

The water was cold, a spill from the chill Southern Ocean that traversed the bottom of the world, and my core body heat was dropping; it could no longer warm the seepage penetrating my neoprene wetsuit. I shivered, and my teeth chattered against the rubber mouthpiece of my regulator.

Happy now?
I thought to myself.
Ten thousand miles you flew, for the privilege of freezing to death in a sea of stinking chum.

I envisioned the people on the boat above, warmed by sunlight and cups of steaming tea, cozy in their woolen sweaters: my wife, Wendy; the film crew from ABC-TV's
American Sportsman;
the boat crew and their leader, Rodney Fox, the world's most celebrated shark-attack survivor.

I thought of the animal I was there to see: the great white shark, largest of all the carnivorous fish in the sea. Rarely had it been seen under water; rarer still were motion pictures of great whites in the wild.

And I thought of
why
I was bobbing alone in a flimsy cage in the frigid sea: I had written a novel about that shark, and had called it
Jaws,
and when it had unexpectedly become a popular success, a television producer had challenged me to go diving with the monster of my imagination. How could I say no?

Now, though, I wondered how I could have said yes.

Visibility was poor—ten feet? Twenty? It was impossible to gauge because nothing moved against the walls of blue gloom surrounding me. I turned, slowly, trying to see in all directions at once, peering over, under, beside the clouds of blood that billowed vividly against the blue green water.

I had expected to find silence under water, but my breath roared, like wind in a tunnel, as I inhaled through my regulator, and my exhales gurgled noisily, like bubbles being blown through a straw in a drink. Waves slapped against the loose-fitting top hatch of the cage, the welded joints creaked with every torque and twist, and when the rope that tethered the cage to the boat drew taut, there was a thudding, straining noise and the clank of the steel ring scraping against its anchor plate.

Then I saw movement. Something was moving against the blue. Something dark. It was there and gone and there again, not moving laterally, as I'd thought it would, not circling, but coming straight at me, slowly, deliberately, unhurried, emerging from the mist.

I stopped breathing—not intentionally but reflexively, as if by suspending my breath I could suspend all animation—and I heard my pulse hammering in my ears. I wasn't afraid, exactly; I had been afraid, before, on the boat, but by now I had passed through fear into a realm of excitement and something like shocked disbelief.

There it is! Feel the pressure in the water as the body moves through it. The size of it! My God, the size!

The animal kept coming, and now I could see all of it: the pointed snout, the steel gray upper body in stark contrast with the ghostly white undercarriage, the symmetry of the pectoral fins, the awful knife blade of the dorsal fin, the powerful, deliberate back-and-forth of the scythelike tail fin that propelled the enormous body toward me, steadily, inexorably, as if it had no need for speed, for it knew it could not be stopped.

It did not slow, did not hesitate. Its black eyes registered neither interest nor excitement. As it drew within a few feet of me, it opened its mouth and I saw, first, the lower jaw crowded with jagged, needle-pointed teeth, and then—as the upper jaw detached from the skull and dropped downward—the huge, triangular cutting teeth, each side serrated like a saw blade.

The great white's mouth opened wider and wider, until it seemed it would engulf the entire cage, and me within it. Transfixed, I stared into the huge pink-and-white cavern that narrowed into a black hole, the gullet. I could see rows and rows of spare teeth buried in the gum tissue, each tooth a holstered weapon waiting to be summoned forward to replace a tooth lost in battle. Far back on each side of the massive head, gill flaps fluttered open and shut, admitting flickering rays of light.

A millisecond before the mouth would have collided with the cage, the great white bit down, rammed forward by a sudden thrust of its powerful tail. The upper teeth struck first, four inches from my face, scraping noisily—horribly—against the aluminum bars. Then the lower teeth gnashed quickly, as if seeking something solid in which to sink.

I shrank back, stumbling, as if through molasses, until I could cringe in relative safety in a far corner of the cage.

My brain shouted,
You … you of all people, ought to know: HUMAN BEINGS DO NOT BELONG IN THE WATER WITH GREAT WHITE SHARKS!

The shark withdrew, then quickly bit the cage again, and again, and not till the third or fourth bite did I realize that there was something desultory about the attack. It seemed less an assault than an exploration, a testing. A tasting.

Then the shark turned, showing its flank, and by instinct I crept forward and extended my hand between the bars to feel its skin. Hard, it felt, and solid, a torpedo of muscle, sleek and polished like steel. I let my fingers trail along with the movement of the animal. But when I rubbed the other way, against the grain, I felt the legendary sandpaper texture, the harsh abrasiveness of the skin's construction: millions upon millions of minuscule toothlike particles, the dermal denticles.

The shark was moving away, upward; it had found a hunk of quartered horse, probably ten pounds, possibly twenty, dangling in the chum. The shark's mouth opened and—in a split-second mechanical replay of the bite on the cage—it swallowed the chunk of horse whole. Its gullet bulged once as the meat and bone passed through on its way to the gut.

Tantalized now, the shark turned again in search of something more to eat. It bit randomly, gaping and snapping as if hoping that the next bite, or the next, would prove fruitful.

I saw a length of rope drift into its gaping mouth: the lifeline, I realized, the only connection between the cage and the boat.

Drift out again. Don't get caught. Not in the mouth. Please.

The great white's mouth closed and opened, closed and opened; the shark shook its head, trying to rid itself of the rope. But the rope was stuck.

In a fraction of a second, I saw that the rope had snagged between two—perhaps three or four—of the shark's teeth.

At that instant, neurons and synapses in the shark's small, primitive brain must have connected and sent a message of alarm, of entrapment, for suddenly the shark seemed to panic. Instinct commandeered its tremendous strength and great weight—at least a ton, I knew, spread over the animal's fourteen-foot length—and detonated an explosion of frenzied thrashing.

The shark's tail whipped one way and its head the other; its body slammed against the cage, against the boat, between the cage and the boat. I was upside down, then on my side, then bashed against the side of the boat. There was no up and no down for me, only a burst of bubbles amid a cloud of blood and shreds of flesh from the chum and the butchered horse.

What are they
doing
up there? Don't they see what's going on down here? Why doesn't somebody
do
something?

For a second I saw the shark's head and the rope that had disappeared into its mouth—and that's the last thing I remember seeing for a long, long time. For when the shark's tail bashed the cage again, the cage slid down four or five feet and swung into the darkness beneath the boat.

I knew what would happen next; I had heard of it happening once before: the shark's teeth would sever the rope. My survival would depend on precisely where the rope was severed. If the shark found itself free of the cage, it would flee, leaving the cage to drift away and, perhaps, sink. Someone from the boat would get a line to me. Eventually.

But if the rope stayed caught in the shark's mouth, the animal might drag the cage to the bottom, fifty feet away, and beat it to pieces. If I were to have a chance of surviving, I would have to find the rope, grab it, and cut it, all while being tumbled about like dice in a cup.

I reached for the knife in the rubber sheath strapped to my leg.

This isn't really happening. It can't be! I'm just a writer! I write fiction!

It
was
happening, though, and somewhere in the chaos of my beleaguered brain I appreciated the irony.

How many other writers, I wondered, have had the privilege of writing the story that foretells their own grisly demise?