Shark Trouble Read Online Free Page A

available in the sea are incalculably valuable, for the past half century we have devoted much of our national treasure to reaching and studying a moon that we know to be barren, while spending, relatively, pennies on exploring the rich body of our own earth. Forty years ago John F. Kennedy was already lamenting that we knew more, even then, about the far side of the moon than we did about the bottom of the sea.
    We know, really, almost nothing about the ocean, so it’s not surprising that we know so little about sharks.
    Until recently, there’s been no pressure to learn about sharks, for sharks have never had a constituency among the public. Whales, on the other hand, have an enormous constituency. The save-the-whales movement is more than thirty years old, and dolphins, of course, have long had their own legions of devoted humans. (Remember
Flipper
?)
    It’s true that whales and dolphins are easy to study and easier still to love. They’re mammals. They breathe air. They nurse their young and guard them ferociously. They click and talk to one another. They do tricks. They’re smart. We can anthropomorphize them, projecting human characteristics onto them. We give them names, and convince ourselves that they respond to—and even love—people they come to know.
    Not sharks. Sharks are hard to study and harder still to love. Because they’re fish, not mammals, they don’t have to come up for air, so they’re difficult to keep track of and impossible to count.
    And they do have the unfortunate reputation of occasionally—very, very occasionally—attacking a human being and—even more occasionally—eating one.
    It’s hard to care deeply for something that might turn on you and eat you.
    Traditionally, shark scientists, like scientists in many other disciplines, have been highly educated in the library and the laboratory and under-experienced in the field. But there have been—and are still—a handful of outstanding, dedicated shark scientists who are rich in talent, widely experienced in the field, and who have the admirable capacity to, when faced with a particularly perplexing problem, utter the words: “I don’t know.”
    In the United States, Eugenie Clark, John McCosker, Samuel Gruber, and Peter Klimley are heroes to us shark fanatics. Up-and-coming youngsters like Rocky Strong, with whom I worked in South Africa, are devoting their professional lives to the study of great white sharks. And Barry Bruce, with whom I once spent several hours wallowing around inside the corpse of a gigantic great white, is one of the leading shark experts in South Australia.
    Of all the benefits that
Jaws
—as both book and movie—has brought me, none do I value more than the opportunity to do television shows and magazine stories with, and learn from, the scientists, sailors, fishermen, and divers who make the sea their home. The new knowledge we’ve gained since the mid-1970s has convinced me that while almost all of the great-white-shark behaviors I described in
Jaws
do, in fact, happen in real life, almost none of them happen for the reasons I described.
    For example, what I and many others at the time perceived as attacks by great whites on boats were, in fact, explorations and samplings. In 1999, in the waters off Gansbaai, South Africa, I witnessed great-white behavior that would have been unimaginable even a few years ago. Large adult great whites approached our tiny outboard-motorboats and permitted a “shark wrangler” named Andre Hartman to cup his hand over their snouts—a risky business he had first attempted in order to guide a shark away from biting a motor and breaking its teeth—at which they rose out of the water, gaped for several seconds as if hypnotized, then slipped backward, down and away, in what I can only describe as a swoon.
    Furthermore, the numerous reports I interpreted as intentional, targeted attacks on