Escaping the jaws of death wasn't just a figure of speech for pearl diver Iona Asai. Swimming in about 30 feet of water on the Great Barrier Reef in 1937, Asai turned just in time to see the powerful jaws of a large tiger shark closing around his head. Instinctively, he went for the shark's most vulnerable point - his eyes - and squeezed for all he was worth until his assailant gave up and released his would-be lunch.
In a sticky situation, Asai really kept his head . . . in more ways than one. But the deterred shark did manage to leave a few souvenirs of his attack. Asai needed nearly 200 stitches to suture his wound, and when an abscess had to be lanced and drained a few weeks later, a tiger shark tooth was found.
Thirteen-year-old Australian, Raymond Short, had a terrifying run-in with a far more persistent great white on a what started out as a beautiful summer afternoon in 1966. Lurking in a large clump of drifting seaweed, the attacker struck before any nearby swimmers or lifeguards knew it was there. As several rescuers, believing the shark to be gone, pulled the injured boy to shore, one of the lifesavers reached into the murky water and encountered the shark's jaws still firmly clamped onto Raymond's leg.
The determined shark hung on even as she was pulled onto the beach and battered repeatedly with a handy surfboard. When she finally let go, Raymond was rushed to the hospital, and after extensive surgery and recuperation, recovered completely. The unfortunate shark, a 300 pound female, was covered with unhealed gashes and teeth marks. Experts suggested she had resorted to attacking a human only because she was too weak to catch her usual prey.
Deadly attacks, mindless feeding frenzies, and horrifying carnage have been part of shark lore and legend since man first took to the sea. And the sight of a great white's giant gaping jaws would send shivers of terror through any hapless swimmer or sailor unlucky enough to encounter one. But out of 344 species of sharks, a mere handful have ever attacked humans, and only three - the tiger, bull, and great white shark - are responsible for nearly all known human attacks.
Ranging from the dwarf shark (Squaliolus laticaudus), which at its adult length of about 6 in. is smaller than its own egg, to the giant whale shark, which grows about 40 ft long and weighs some 88,000 pounds, sharks come in many sizes and shapes. They've been cruising the sea of some 350 million years, but in the past 70 million years they haven't changed significantly. Obviously, they know a good design when they evolve into one.
Sharks get around. They inhabit all of the world's oceans and many of the rivers that flow into them. Sharks have even been seen in at least one lake in Nicaragua. There is only one fresh water species, and several species, including the great white and some makos, are warm blooded. More powerful swimmers than cold-blooded species, a warm-blooded mako has been clocked at a speed of about 20 mph (32 km/h) for a few seconds, but sharks generally maintain a speed of about 2 meters/second. Though they seem to be tough as nails, sharks tire quickly and can be injured surprisingly easily. They may swim away from a brutal assault, apparently unscathed, but die within a few days or weeks. If all goes well, though, some shark species can live more than 30 years.
Intelligence may not be the first quality we associate with sharks, but actually they seem to be smarter than the average fish and do about as well as white rats and pigeons (yes, pigeons are smart) in learning tests. Nurse sharks have been trained to respond to signals and retrieve rings, though most people still prefer the more familiar dog for a good game of fetch.
Some sharks are downright weird. Take the submarine-stalking cookiecutter shark. This pint-sized predator is a ferocious fighter whose done some serious damage to fishing nets, not to mention the whales and dolphins they feed off. For years the odd crescent-shaped wounds found on cookiecutter victims were believed to be the result of some kind of bacteria or parasite, but the cookiecutter uses his razor-sharp teeth to gouge out a 2-inch mouthful of flesh at a time, leaving the victim scarred but still swimming.
When mysterious crescent shaped slashes were found in the rubber coating on U.S. submarines some 10 years ago, extensive testing was done to discover their source. When nothing seemed to reproduce the strange slashes, a marine biologist finally identified them as cookiecutter bite marks. Apparently, the large rubber-coated submarines looked like whales to the small assailants.
Our relationship with sharks has been a bumpy one, to say the least. In fact, after all these centuries, we still know relatively little about the shark, and much of what we do know is tainted by our primordial dread of the unknown monsters lurking beneath the placid ocean surface. Ancient Fijians, dependent on the sea for their livelihood, considered the shark god, Dekuwaqa, the god of fishing and seafaring. Trapping or eating sharks was taboo. Savo Islanders once worshipped a benevolent shark god who was believed to rescue the islanders from shipwrecks but destroy their enemies. But other Pacific Islanders have showed their respect for the shark by hunting and killing them virtually bare-handed to prove themselves.
The shark's strange diet is renowned and has even played a role in at least one sensational murder case in Sydney known as the Shark Arm Mystery. In this 1935 case, detailed in Ron and Valerie Taylor's Sharks: Silent hunters of the deep, a captured shark in the Coogee Aquarium, showing signs of illness for several days, suddenly vomited up a tatooed human arm, among other things, to the amazement of aquarium visitors. The regurgitated dinner led to the discovery of the murder of a local small-time criminal, James Smith, who had been missing for several days. Though the events leading to Smith's demise and the likely murderer were uncovered, with no complete corpse, the suspect was never brought to justice. Authorities believed the murderer had stuffed the body into a tin trunk, cutting off the "shark arm" to make the body fit, then dumped it into the sea.
Other items recovered from shark stomachs include everything but the kitchen sink (and maybe that, too). The Natural History of Sharks, by Thomas Lineaweaver and Richard Backus, lists the following: 6 hens and a rooster, 25 quart bottles of Vichy Water, a reindeer, six horseshoe crabs, three bottles of beer, a blue penguin, a piece of bark from an oak tree, porpoise parts, a 100-pound loggerhead turtle, a handbag, sting rays, a spaniel, and a 25-pound lump of whale blubber and whalebone strands. Jerome Smith's 1833 Natural History of the Fishes of Massachusetts notes a record of French fishermen hauling in a 22-foot shark whose stomach included "among other undigested remains, . . . the headless body of a man, encased in complete armor."
Despite these gruesome discoveries and chilling tales of shark attacks, humans are by no means the shark's food of choice. With our ever-expanding human population and the growing popularity of tourism in exotic island locales and beach resorts, encounters with sharks are becoming more common despite the dwindling shark population.
A recent article in the Philadelphia Inquirer cited 79 shark attacks, including 10 fatalities, worldwide in the year 2000 - the highest number of attacks since we started keeping records in 1958. Florida, with its long coastline, tropical waters and huge resident and tourist populations, accounted for 34 attacks but only one fatality. Australia had 7 attacks with 3 fatalities. In all of 1999, only 58 shark attacks were reported.
As we encroach more and more on the shark's territory, it would benefit both species to understand them better. In fact, a well-fed shark generally prefers to avoid humans in the water, and most are not particularly aggressive, as Valerie Taylor's description of her attempt to test her shark-proof chain mail suit show:
"To coax the shark to bite I had to stuff fresh tuna pieces under the mesh, and then had to attract its attention by waving a whole fish in front of it. After one good bite, usually with a lot of shaking, each shark we experimented with was generally reluctant to try again. Instead it would nuzzle me, trying to find a gap in the mail.
"Far from being aggressive, the whitetips, once fed, would hang around like friendly puppies, begging for more food. After a while they became a positive nuisance, eating all the bait we put out and swimming around in front of the camera lens.
"However, it was always easy to chase persistent whitetips away. A few smacks on the nose solved the problem. They are quick to recognise aggressive behaviour, and once they had learnt to associate humans with physical pain they would never come within arm's length again. . . ."
A good lesson for scuba divers, but possibly an even better one for sharks. Humans kill far more sharks than sharks kill people - for food, the possible medical benefits of their cartilage, just for sport, and increasingly, simply by polluting or encroaching on their habitats. Whether little sharks shudder in horror at stories of unprovoked and deadly human attacks, we are their worst nightmare. Learning to avoid us is clearly in their best interest. If only we would do the same!
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