The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks (12 page)

Luckily, the Farallones never got leveled, paved, or armed. (They also narrowly dodged other absurd fates, such as becoming the new home of the Alcatraz prison or a gas station for passing oil tankers.) But the military continued to keep an interest in the island. More war devices were erected: transmitters and transponders and a forest of antennae and a secret radar beacon that no one was supposed to know about. By 1942, there were more than twenty buildings on this small patch of rock, and a town of nearly one hundred people, referred to by its inhabitants as Farallon City. Life was a little easier for this crew—the supply boat now arrived every week—and they actually managed to have some fun, holding movie nights and dances and cocktail parties, even publishing an island newspaper, the
Farallon Foghorn.
After the war, the population, not surprisingly, thinned; when the lighthouse was finally automated, the coast guard sent the last lighthouse keeper back to the mainland.

In 1969, nature finally had its turn. The islands were collectively designated a National Wildlife Refuge, and the Point Reyes Bird Observatory was contracted by the government to repair the damage. Where to start? There was so much to tackle. By the sixties, only six thousand murres nested on the islands (down from a half million), and other seabird populations had taken similar drubbings. Fur seals were a distant memory, the global elephant seal population had been reduced to about twenty animals, Steller’s sea lions were gone entirely, harbor seals glimpsed only rarely. No doubt the sharks were there, prowling the waters, but without seals they wouldn’t have stayed around for long. (You don’t get to be four hundred million years old by failing to adapt.)

As for the environment itself, past ignorance was augmented by present stupidity, and the place was limping. Oil tankers made a practice of pumping their ballast tanks near the islands, killing seabirds by the thousands. Four times, military planes opened fire on Middle Farallon with rockets, presumably for target practice. Gill nets killed indiscriminately, strangling seabirds and snaring every animal in their paths. Fishermen deployed explosives to catch fish, and boats journeyed out to shoot up the wildlife along the shoreline with high-powered rifles.

What little infrastructure still existed on Southeast Farallon was outmoded, corroded, and neglected. Garbage lay everywhere; cats and rabbits terrorized the birds; heaps of rusty refrigerators and washing machines and assorted pipes blocked the East Landing. The place, to put it plainly, was a wreck. But if any group was up to the task, it was PRBO. Undaunted, they sent out waves of all-star biologists, led by David Ainley. Slowly, the island was reclaimed by the wild. Buildings were dismantled, concrete areas were torn up and replaced by nesting terrain for auklets and petrels. Whole stretches of land became completely off limits to burrow-crushing, flock-spooking humans. Eventually, the only remaining signs of civilization were the two houses, the crane at East Landing, some water tanks, a couple of small buildings used for storage, and a crumbling stone foundation near the North Landing, known as the old eggers’ house. And, of course, the lighthouse tower itself.

Elephant seals, fur seals, harbor seals, and Steller’s sea lions began to reappear on the shores, first as individuals and then, over the years, in colonies. Murres, cormorants, guillemots, petrels, auklets, puffins, shearwaters, fulmars, grebes, scoters, pelicans, terns, loons, and even the odd albatross—they all trickled back. As the twenty-first century began, there were one hundred thousand murres in residence. The gulls, to no one’s surprise, made a particularly strong comeback.

THE STATION HOUSE WAS A FRIENDLY LOOKING RESTAURANT WITH A
western feel, painted dusty red, with a funky, hand-lettered sign. I pulled into a parking spot out front, alongside two silky hunting dogs in the back of a pickup truck. It was 6:00 p.m. and already dark. As I stepped out of the rental car, I took a deep breath—the air had that cool, tangy ocean smell. The street was deserted. Toby’s Feed Barn was shut down tight next door, as was the Point Reyes Whale of a Deli on the corner, and there wasn’t a soul walking around. Glancing in the windows of the Station House, I discovered why: What appeared to be the entire town was crowded into the dining room. As I opened the door a wall of noise hit me, and a waitress swept by with a dozen Anchor Steam beers balanced precariously on a tray. A single table was available in the corner of the bar, and I grabbed it.

Peter showed up in his Toyota truck minutes later, followed almost immediately by Scot in his VW van. Fourteen months had passed since we’d seen each other, but little had changed in their appearances: Peter had a few new flecks of gray in his hair, and Scot had shaved his beard, but the net effect was still of two outdoorsmen, inadvertently hip in their perfectly distressed clothing, with a laid-back confidence that turned people’s heads.

As the waitress handed us our menus, I asked them about a story I’d just read in the local paper but hadn’t quite believed. This past October, apparently, a well-meaning boatload of people who’d nursed a pair of injured sea lions back to health, naming them Swissy and eDog in the process, had decided that the Farallones would be the perfect place to release them. They’d motored out from San Francisco and pulled up to the East Landing buoy. After weeks of rehabilitation and care, the sea lions were petted one last time and lovingly decanted into their new home. They swam around playfully while their rescuers snapped pictures for, oh, thirty seconds.

Swissy was on his second circumnavigation of the boat when a shark seized him, literally biting him in half. Everyone on board screamed; one woman burst into tears. There was some splashing, and the shark dove, taking Swissy’s hindquarters with it. The tiny head had bobbed for an instant and then disappeared. I needed confirmation: Was this really true? Peter nodded slowly. Scot winced. “It was
awful
.”

“What were they thinking?” I asked. It was like taking someone with a broken leg, carefully nursing the leg back to health, and then pushing the patient off the side of a cliff. A week afterward, back on the mainland, one of the would-be samaritans sent Peter some pictures of the sea lion’s demise. By blind luck the shutter had gone off at the exact moment of the hit, and as far as attack photos went they were the best he’d ever seen.

(Later I saw the pictures myself and it’s true, they are spectacular. A two-ton, sixteen-foot male shark named Gouge is heaving himself out of the water only a few feet away from the camera. Gouge got his name because when he first showed up at the Farallones he had three propeller wounds on his head, deep, and so pulpy they looked like raw hamburger meat. In one image, a tiny flipper can be seen hanging out of the left side of Gouge’s mouth.)

Over the roar of the restaurant, they recapped the past year for me. Scot was back at his park ranger job, tending hiking trails at the national seashore, and Peter was consumed with a new bird book he was writing, a detailed treatise on the subject of plumages and molt. The sharks were never truly out of mind, though: Seventeen scientific papers were currently on the drawing board.

The 2002 shark season had been mediocre; fifty-six attacks were observed between September and November, approximately the same number as the previous year, but down from the season high of seventy-seven in 2000. Things on the surface were buzzing, however. The
Patriot
had been a constant presence, with cage-diving tours all but sold out. Over the course of three months, their decoy use had topped two hundred hours. Six other boats had shown up, attempting to lure the sharks with surfboards and, in two cases, chum. The shark-tourism situation only promised to get worse, so the push was on to enforce new, more muscular restrictions including a ban on towing decoys and a 150-foot no-approach zone around feeding great whites. Predictably, the cage divers were opposed to this, and an ugly battle loomed this winter. The intensity of the conflict made everybody nervous. Peter had been spending much of his time dealing with the fallout, attending committee meetings, smoothing ruffled bureaucratic feathers, doing his best to ensure that the Shark Project didn’t become a political casualty. As he and Scot described the tense atmosphere, I noted a weariness in their voices. They were tired of this, I could see, and longed to return to the days when the island and its sharks were their only focus.

Well, what about the sharks?

“Okay, let’s see,” Scot said. “So Betty was back, and Emma. Cal Ripfin was back. Our old buddy Bitehead was back; he’s got some new bites on his head. Spotty was back, he showed up with Cuttail, late again.” He turned to Peter. “That’s something we need to look at. As they get older do they arrive later? Could be.”

Peter nodded. “Or they learn to come in during the elephant seal peak.”

“Or maybe they’re spending more time breeding.”

I was beginning to realize that studying great white sharks was not really about the rush of seeing them. Instant gratification was beside the point. Decades passed before patterns became visible, before hunches could be proven, before the jigsaw puzzle came together, if it ever did. Science, by definition, was altruistic. You might be the one who benefited from the information you’d collected over the years, you might not. You might be dead, even. And someone else using your data might go on to win the Nobel Prize.

But there had been one major breakthrough this season: The satellite tags had begun to pay off with reams of new information. The Farallon sharks, it seemed, spent most of their lives roving the open ocean rather than sticking close to the coast, as had been supposed. And when they moved away from the islands and over the lip of the continental shelf, they began diving to depths greater than seven hundred meters. That, too, was unheard-of behavior from an animal that hunted its prey on the surface. And the sharks were
booking
, logging as many as sixty miles per day with purposeful efficiency. It was as though they were late for an appointment somewhere and hustling to keep it. A Rat Packer named Tipfin, tagged by Peter in October 2000 (and again in October 2001), was discovered to have cruised 2,300 miles to Hawaii in thirty-seven days. He remained near Maui for at least four months, and then turned around and returned to the Farallones in October. No one had any inkling that great white sharks were such globe-trotters. “It was like seeing owls leave the forests and head out over the open plains,” Scot said.

Tipfin was the only tagged shark, however, who went that far west. When the other satellite-tagged sharks left the Farallones, they all swam southwest, to a patch of ocean located approximately 1,500 miles off the coast of Ensenada, Mexico. They remained there for as long as eight months, indicating that this remote place is where they spend much of their lives. Though the gathering spot lacks seamounts or islands or any other notable features, its significance is surely anything but random, and not just among the Farallon set. White sharks tagged at Guadalupe Island and elsewhere in California headed straight to the same area. Scot had long suspected that something unusual was going on when they weren’t at the Farallones; he’d noticed that by the time the sharks disappeared in December they had managed to fatten themselves up, but when they returned the following autumn they were much thinner, sometimes unrecognizably so. Often they were trailing remoras, small pilot fish that are found in more southerly waters. The epic trip described by the tags explained the
where,
but not the big mystery:
why?
“So the question is,” Scot said, leaning in and raising his eyebrows dramatically. “What the hell are they doing out there?”

Clearly the sharks weren’t wasting energy heading out into the wild blue yonder for no good reason. Feeding? Pupping? Perhaps, but neither of those theories quite fit. Chasing down seals in the open ocean didn’t make sense in terms of energy expenditure; and the likelihood that the region served as a kind of nursery for baby white sharks was diminished by the presence of so many males. Scot and Peter had the beginnings of an idea, one that couldn’t be proved yet but was captivating nonetheless: that this gathering spot might be the great white’s ancestral mating ground, a destination with ancient significance that is roadmapped into the sharks’ DNA.

Whatever the reason for this hot spot, the tags had done their work. Identifying the region was the first step to protecting it. Findings from the tagged sharks had recently been published in the prestigious journal
Nature,
with Peter and Scot among the authors. Central to the discoveries was a marine scientist named Barbara Block. Block, a MacArthur fellow and by reputation a force of nature herself, had helped pioneer the pop-off satellite tags and planned to affix four thousand of these and other devices not only to sharks but also to sea turtles, squid, albatross, elephant seals, and whales, as well as tuna and other predatory fish. She was one of the leaders on a project known as TOPP (Tagging of Pacific Pelagics), a twenty-million-dollar study aimed at discovering how marine animals journeyed through the Pacific, where they traveled to eat and mate and breed. These creatures spent their lives jetting through the sea, across routes and byways and submarine plains that only they knew about, and for the most part, the only time they were glimpsed was when they ventured close to shore.

TOPP, in turn, was part of a billion-dollar study known as the Census of Marine Life that aimed to spend the next decade determining what actually lived in the world’s seas, and what kinds of animals were likely to live there in the future, given the way things were going. The census was massively ambitious, breathtakingly difficult—and long overdue. “We haven’t spent enough time exploring our own planet,” Block pointed out on her website.

High-powered, well-funded, politically connected, and world-renowned, Block and her team were dream collaborators for the Shark Project. She was encouraged by the fact that twenty-two great whites had been tagged in only four seasons at the Farallones and that, in most cases, the animal’s history (and gender) was known. Next September, she intended to send out at least two dozen tags. A major goal for the 2003 season was to tag some Sisters; to date all but two of the jewelry-wearing sharks were Rat Packers.