Shark Trouble (13 page)

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.