The Beacon
Meeting the Sharks
I first encountered biologists Peter Pyle and Scot Anderson in my living room in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when I happened to see a BBC documentary called "The Great White Shark
Where is this? I wondered. The Galapagos? Somewhere far off the coast of Africa? Another planet?
In fact, it was the Farallon Islands, a mere 27 miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge. That a large, stable population of adult (read: huge) great white sharks resides within the 415 area code comes as a surprise to most people - it certainly did to me. The great white shark is one of the ocean's most elusive animals. So what were a pack of them doing here, not 30 miles from Macy's in Union Square?
That question, and many others about white sharks, have been pondered by Anderson and Pyle for the past 15 years. By the mid-1980s, when their research project began, the Farallon scientists had already discovered that every fall, white sharks arrived at Southeast Farallon Island to hunt the seals and sea lions that lived on its shores. The sharks were clearly visible at times, and would often come in close to shore, their black dorsal fins shearing the water like knives.
During September, October, November, and early December, large blood slicks often appeared on the water, and headless seal carcasses were a common sight.
As winter approached, the attacks would dwindle, and by January the sharks were gone.
As I came to know Pyle and Anderson, I was often startled by their incredible powers of observation and intuition. Like many talented field biologists, they shared the ability to see almost imperceptible things-subtle patterns in the environment, nuances in animal behavior, even the scar pattern on the side of a great white as it cruised under their 17-foot research boat.
It was through years of just such meticulous observation that they determined this startling fact: To a large extent, it was the same sharks that were appearing every autumn. Over time, both men began to feel as though they were part of an aquatic neighborhood. When sharks they knew showed up year after year, it began to feel like an annual reunion.
"It's unexpected to get on a personal level with the sharks," Anderson said, describing how certain sharks have exhibited specific character traits. For instance, he and Pyle know that Cuttail, a 15-foot male, is feisty, and Whiteslash, an 18-foot female, is mellow, and likes to hang around the research boat. They know that Half Fin is goofy, and Gouge is aggressive, and Cal Ripfin is sneaky, and steals seal carcasses from other sharks.
But the most remarkable shark of all was a huge female named Stumpy. Stumpy was 19 feet long and weighed 4,000 pounds and when she was in residence, she ruled the place. Her hunting ground was a swath of sea on the island's east side, near the main boat launching spot. For prey, this was not an advisable route onto shore. "No seal got by her," Pyle said. And while other sharks would take 20 minutes or more to consume their kills, Stumpy could polish off a 500-pound seal in three minutes flat.
Actually knowing the individual sharks - their behaviors, their comings and goings, even their genders - enabled the scientists to write whole new chapters in the book about great white sharks. Interestingly, they'd observed that, while the male sharks returned annually, the females came back to the Farallones only every other year. Stumpy, for example, was spotted only during odd-numbered years. When I first visited the Farallones and heard about Stumpy, it happened to be an odd-numbered year. Might a sighting be possible? Anderson shook his head slowly, and told me that Stumpy's distinctively cropped tail fin hadn't been spotted for several years. She was such an extraordinary animal though, that no one had given up hope. But in the meantime, it didn't seem likely that she was around; Stumpy had a distinctive presence. "If she was here," Anderson told me, "we'd know it."
'They Are Here, and They Are Hungry'
The world's wildest places do not ordinarily sit in the backyards of its most populous cities, but the Farallon Islands, an archipelago of rocky islets 27 miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge, are anything but ordinary. First, consider their appearance: the 10 islands in this National Wildlife Refuge jut suddenly from the Pacific; beautiful, cruel granite towers, devoid of vegetation, cloaked by fog and battered by storms. For centuries, the very sight of them inspired fear. 19th century sailors, who knew them as one of the ocean's most notorious nautical speedbumps, host to a graveyard of wrecked ships, dubbed them the "Devil's Teeth." Their jagged, barren topography does not invite a person to kick back and stay awhile: Sixty-five-acre Southeast Farallon, the largest in the group, is the only islet that's even remotely habitable, with a marine terrace providing a strip of flat area. Its sole dwellings are two 120-year-old houses; only one of them has electricity and running water. By federal law, the only inhabitants allowed to set foot on these islands are a handful of biologists who are there to monitor the wildlife, most of them affiliated with the Bay Area's PRBO Conservation Science group, who manage the Farallones in tandem with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
And then there's the islands' unique perch at the ragged edge of the continental shelf, right before it plunges more than two miles down to the abyssal plain. The upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water at this ledge makes the location a showcase for the entire food chain, from the tiniest salp to the ocean's most magnificent predator, the great white shark.
"They are here, and they are hungry," read the Farallon logbook entry for October 7, 1998. It's a typical note for this time of year: each fall, somewhere between 30 and 100 great white sharks arrive at the Farallones, attracted by the northern elephant seal colony and clusters of California sea lions, harbor seals, and even a smattering of endangered Stellar's sea lions. The great whites remain for approximately three months, disappearing in winter, and then reappearing in September. Charter fishing captain Brian Guiles, whose boat The Flying Fish makes frequent trips past the islands, spots the animals with regularity: "They're huge. I want to say like a Volkswagen."
Since 1987, PRBO biologists (and other noteworthy shark scientists) have been conducting cutting-edge research on the species. Among their discoveries is this startling fact: year after year, it's the same sharks who are returning. To date, more than 100 individuals have been identified, and in some cases satellite-tagged, their appearances and behaviors meticulously documented. This virtual neighborhood of great whites within a protected area offers something found nowhere else on Earth: the chance to study them in their natural environment, unaffected by chumming or baiting. As a result, the researchers have gotten to know the predators one-on-one.
Tomorrow, I'll introduce you to a pair of biologists who were the human members of this aquatic neighborhood, and to the most legendary great white shark to have ever hunted at the Farallones: Stumpy, herself.
Meet the Great White Shark
It's strange to watch the current fascination with space travel -- money's being thrown at everything from tourist shuttles to a manned Mars landing. Meanwhile, 71 percent of our own planet -- the oceans -- contains more mysteries and questions and problems than we can ever hope to solve. Earlier this year I saw the ocean explorer Graham Hawkes speak at the TED Conference in Monterey, California (an ocean town if there ever was one); he chastised the many space-heads in the audience by saying "Your rockets are pointed in the wrong direction." I couldn't have agreed more: I'd just spent several years reporting on the work of biologists who are studying one of the ocean's most misunderstood creatures, the great white shark.
For all its media exposure and front row seat in our collective nightmares, the great white shark -- or white shark, as scientists prefer to call them -- is an animal we barely know. Even some basic information is missing. How long do white sharks live? Unknown, but the best guess is somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 years. How many of them are there? Again, no answers. Like all apex predators, nature only doles out relatively few to begin with, and evidence points to declining populations from there. Virtually nothing is known about their mating process; their breeding grounds remain a mystery (although the Southern California bight appears to be a kind of nursery area); their gestation period is also unknown, although it's likely to be long, perhaps as long as 18 months.
The white shark is obviously a difficult animal to study. They're masters of ambush hunting, so hiding is a big part of their survival strategy. And they've had plenty of time to get it right: the white shark in its current form has been roaming the seas for 11 million years; its ancestry reaches back some 60 million years, and sharks as a class of animals have been on the planet for 400 million years, predating dinosaurs by 200 million years. As predators, they're very, very good at what they do. One of the big challenges for white shark scientists is finding their study subjects! There are a handful of places around the world where the odds of encountering these animals get higher, including False Bay, South Africa; Guadalupe Island off the coast of Baja; and spots along the California coast.
Tomorrow, I'm going to talk about a specific shark hotspot in Northern California: the Farallon Islands. At this spooky outpost 27 miles off the coast of San Francisco, scientists have had enormous success studying a very special group of great white sharks. Their discoveries have gone a long way toward changing people's perceptions of the white shark as a diabolical killing machine. Which is great news, because if ever an animal needed some better PR, it's this one.
Why Sharks Matter
When people think of summer, certain things come to mind: warm weather, beaches, watersports and-sharks. Chalk it up to the enduring cultural imprint of Jaws (last June marked the movie's 30th anniversary) or the fact that, some years, it has seemed as though sharks were running amok, and the papers were filled with stories of people who'd been bitten, losing limbs and in a few tragic cases, lives. And it's true that the bull shark, the species often responsible for close-to-shore encounters in Florida and the Gulf Coast regions, is one aggressive fish.
However, the scenario of marauding sharks descending on the beaches come July 1 is wrong on several levels. For instance, it's now known that sharks don't actively hunt humans (with the possible exception of bull sharks, who seem to hunt anything that moves). And it's clear, especially to Oceana's audience, that sharks have far more to fear from us than we have to fear from them. I can't vouch for this figure, though I've heard it many times: For every human that is bitten by a shark, humans manage to kill 10 million sharks. Bad enough. But in 2003, Dr. Ransom Myers and the marine scientists at Dalhousie University released a stunning report showing that fully 90 percent of the global seas' large predatory fish were gone, and that this had happened in a breathtakingly short time.
In the press release accompanying the publication of the study, Meyers said: "Since 1950, with the onset of industrialized fisheries, we have rapidly reduced the resource base to less than 10% - not just in some areas, not just for some stocks, but for entire communities of these large fish species from the tropics to the poles."
Clearly, things have to change if the ocean's alpha species are to survive. When you consider that sharks are among the oldest animals on earth, having survived at least four global mass extinctions, it's astonishing to think that they might not survive a single generation's worth of industrialized fishing. Throughout this week, I'd like to talk about why sharks matter - even the most feared among them - introduce you to a group of adult great whites that I was fortunate enough to spend time with, and discuss the latest marine biology aimed at making sure that in the future, humans aren't the wildest things out there. Because, actually, summer is not shark season, at least not on the West Coast. Autumn is.
