Shark Trouble (14 page)

14

Even
More
Creatures to Avoid … and Respect

 

Among the immense citizenry of the sea there are innumerable other living things that appear to be immobile, inert, innocuous, inanimate, or sentient and even friendly … but that can, in fact, be dangerous to the uninitiated, the careless, or the unlucky.

Many
corals
are poisonous to the touch; they possess stinging cells that are used both for defense and to paralyze prey. The most common of the toxic corals—at least as far as swimmers, snorkelers, and divers are concerned—is fire coral, which looks like mustard that has been painted onto parts of a reef. Slick, motionless, and innocuous-looking, fire coral can deliver a thoroughly nasty sting to an inquiring hand.

Sea anemones
are poisonous, too. Their beautiful, waving tentacles present themselves as harmless because colorful little fishes swim all around them with no ill effects. In fact, each tentacle is armed with nematocysts that fire toxic harpoons into anything that touches them—except the colorful little fishes (usually clownfish), which are coated with a mucus that renders them immune to the anemone's poison. The relationship is pure symbiosis: the anemone protects the clownfish from other predators; in return, the clownfish removes food particles and other debris from the anemone, keeping it clean and healthy.

Several species of
mantis shrimp
can grow to more than a foot in length, including those that live in the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and Australia, where they're known as “killer prawns.” If that sounds melodramatic, consider: each has a pair of limbs that fold like the forearms of a praying mantis (hence the name). The limbs
un
fold like a jackknife, at the speed of light, and the blades are so strong and sharp that they can amputate a human finger with a single stroke. Mantis shrimp are fearless and aggressive, and I know several underwater photographers who are seriously afraid of them; when a photographer is concentrating on getting a macro shot of an infinitesimal creature hiding in a reef, he isn't thinking about what might be burrowed in the sand beside him, ready to pounce and slash his flesh to ribbons.

Spiny sea urchins
, black, bristly balls that live on the sea bottom, are harmless—until you happen to step on or bump into one, at which point one or more of the hundreds of spines spear you and break off in your flesh. Some species have poisonous spines and some don't, but
any
urchin spine is amazingly painful, difficult to extract (they keep breaking apart into smaller and smaller pieces), and a potential infection.

Some oceangoing critters are obviously dangerous and to be avoided at all costs:
saltwater crocodiles
leap quickly to mind. Years ago, during one of my futile attempts to translate Roger Caras's book
Dangerous to Man
to television, I worked with a researcher from the National Geographic Society to assemble a list of the ten most dangerous animals in the world. We found it impossible not to include saltwater crocodiles.

They live all over the western Pacific, in freshwater rivers and brackish swamps as well as in the sea. They eat virtually anything they can catch, and they stalk and catch almost anything: birds, monkeys, turtles, fish, crabs, buffaloes, and—documented many times—human beings. They're known to grow to at least twenty-three feet long (Ellis says they're the largest of all the living reptiles), and they regularly swim hundreds of miles out into the open ocean.

A friend of mine was once contemplating a trip around the Pacific in a collapsible kayak, and one part of his journey would take him across the Torres Strait, which separates northern Australia from New Guinea. He asked me about the chances of his encountering aggressive sharks. I told him I wouldn't be half so afraid of sharks as of the “salties,” which have been known to attack and destroy boats much more substantial than collapsible kayaks.

A version of the saltwater crocodile lives in the mangrove swamps around Cuba (and, I assume, elsewhere in the Caribbean), but it is much smaller. I believe that it's technically a caiman, which means it's a closer relative to an alligator than a crocodile. David Doubilet was introduced to one while we were doing a story on underwater Cuba, and he found it to be quite docile.

Still …

Other sea creatures have completely surprised me when, over the years, I've discovered in them a dangerous trait. But in every case I've come to realize that it's the human that has gotten in harm's way, not the animal that's suddenly turned mean.

I'm speaking here specifically of
groupers
,
bluefish
, and, believe it or not, certain species of
dolphins
.

The one dicey moment I've witnessed with a grouper happened in the Turks and Caicos Islands, a small archipelago south of the Bahamas. A woman in our crew had decided to go for a swim during the heat of the day, and she dove off the boat without giving a thought to the fact that she was in a very active phase of her menstrual cycle. She was wearing a two-piece bathing suit, the bottom half of which was brief but not scandalously so.

She had been in the water for perhaps twenty or thirty seconds—she had surfaced from her dive and wiped her hair back from her face—when she felt something bump her, very hard, in the thigh, and then bite her.

She shouted and lashed out with her feet, trying to back away. She wore neither mask nor fins, so she couldn't see what had bitten her, nor could she escape with any speed. It pursued her, bit her again, and kept coming. Again she shouted.

Those of us on board heard her shout, ran to the side, and looked overboard. Through the gin-clear water we could see everything: a small (eight- or ten-pound) Nassau grouper had, we assumed, scented blood in the water and, following its instinct, attacked the source. Never mind that the animal it was attacking was more than ten times its size: that animal was bleeding, and blood meant injury, weakness, and vulnerability.

It took us a few seconds to realize that what we were watching was not funny. Then two of us jumped overboard, one right behind the swimmer, one right on top of the grouper, which—startled to find that the sky had fallen on its head—shot away to the safety of the reef below.

We escorted the woman to the back of the boat, helped her up onto the dive step at the stern, and were astonished at the damage wrought by the small, young, normally placid fish: the inside of one of her thighs had been torn, and blood was flowing from ruptured veins. Fortunately, the fish had not bitten deep enough to slash through the femoral artery, which could have caused serious, even mortal, damage.

In January 2002 a report came in from Australia about two divers being harassed by a
six-foot-long,
several-hundred-pound grouper that seemed intent on trying, at least, to eat them. It sneaked up on one diver and took his entire head in its mouth. Only quick, aggressive action by his buddy saved the diver from serious injury, or worse.

I grew up knowing how violent and voracious bluefish could be during a feeding frenzy. Every summer I fished for them off Nantucket, and when birds were working on a school of baitfish and bluefish were attacking from below, the carnage was mesmerizing. The blues would roll and leap and dive, snapping at everything with their scalpel-sharp, triangular teeth, and often we'd decide not to bother throwing a lure into the mèlée because there'd be no sport to it: a bite was all but guaranteed in writing.

From the safety of the boat, I never gave a thought to what would happen to a person who found himself in the water amid an orgy of feeding bluefish.

A lifeguard in Florida found out. He was sitting on a surfboard in calm water less than a hundred yards offshore when, first, flocks of gulls and terns drove a huge mass of baitfish toward him, and then he saw—he could tell from the sudden, roiling chop in the glass-calm sea and the glint of sunlight off the scales of rolling fish—that a school of blues was assaulting the baitfish.

He watched, spellbound, as the feeding frenzy came closer. He didn't move, didn't paddle away, just sat there with his feet dangling over the sides of the surfboard.

So fast did the bluefish strike and so sharp were their teeth that two of the lifeguard's toes were gone before he could yank his feet out of the water.

In the newspaper account I read, the lifeguard didn't talk about the pain he felt, or what he had done to stem the flow of blood from his mangled foot while he paddled ashore. All he would discuss, all that seemed to be on his mind, was the terror he felt at the prospect of a dozen frenzied bluefish flinging themselves onto his surfboard and continuing to chomp on him, and the ultimate horror of what would happen if, through panic or clumsiness, he capsized his surfboard, fell into the water, and was eaten to death by a thousand ravenous fish.

Nature has spent millennia creating balanced ecosystems all over the world: on one island, just the right kind and number of snakes to keep the bird and rodent populations in check; on another, the proper plants to nourish the resident animals, and the appropriate insects to pollinate the plants.

On huge, isolated landmasses such as Australia, which contain several disparate kinds of environments—jungles, deserts, mountains, forests, and coastlines that vary from straight and sandy to cold and rocky to warm and swampy—disparate natural balances have evolved. Animals, plants, and insects live well together, feed and sustain one another, and maintain viable populations with one another.

The sudden introduction of
new species
—almost always by humans, intentionally or not—can, and usually does, disrupt those natural balances. Sometimes the disruptions are catastrophic to local populations. In the Galápagos Islands, for example, the introduction long ago of pigs and goats (from passing ships) destroyed populations of birds and reptiles that laid their eggs in the ground. And nowadays, tourist cruise boats inadvertently transport colonies of insects from one island to another, creating chaos among resident plant and insect populations that have no defenses against the newcomers.

Some of the Hawaiian Islands have lost almost all their native birds to an invasion of voracious snakes from Guam that, scientists believe, have hitchhiked their way across the Pacific in ships' cargoes and sometimes in the wheel wells of passenger jetliners.

The so-called “killer bees” from Africa were brought over to South America by scientists trying to create a productive new strain of bees. Inevitably, some of the bees escaped, and over the past several years they have gradually made their way north up the American continent, overpowering and crossbreeding with native species and creating ferociously aggressive new strains of ill-tempered bees.

Kudzu was imported into the American South, where, because it has no natural predators, it has overrun enormous areas of several states. Gypsy moths were imported into the American North by a well-meaning but wrongheaded scientist, and they've become a plague upon our trees.

Another instance of man attempting to manipulate nature put me and my family into one of the weirdest encounters of my life.

Wendy, Christopher, and I were in Moorea, the island forty minutes by fast boat across the Sea of the Moon from Tahiti. Christopher was ten, and this was the second year we had taken him with us to explore the waters of Polynesia while I did a story for a magazine. He was already an accomplished diver, and over the next couple of years he would become more so as he accompanied us on two voyages to explore the underwater world of the Galápagos.

Our hotel in Moorea featured a swim-with-the-dolphins attraction. I'm aware of the controversy surrounding human contact with captive marine animals, especially captive cetacea (dolphins and whales), and, with a few specific exceptions, I'm against holding large cetacea in captivity.

Still, we decided to try this program. Christopher had never been in the water with a dolphin, and besides, the facility in Moorea was not a normal captive-interaction program. It seemed to me to be particularly enlightened: for one thing, the two trained dolphins were not captives—they had access to the open ocean, were free to come and go as they pleased, and had been conditioned only to return to the tank at the hotel twice each day, when they would be fed and permitted—the trainer swore that they didn't have to be coaxed—to interact with a few humans.

Before we entered the tank, the trainer explained to us that the two dolphins were of an especially intelligent branch of the family
Delphinidae:
rough-toothed dolphins, a male and a female, approximately eight feet long. They were not trained to do tricks; they would simply come to us when and as they chose and swim among us, and though we could extend our hands and feel the hard, slick skin as the dolphins passed, we were not to grab a dorsal fin and hitch a ride or to try to hold or impede the dolphins in any way.

The tank was approximately four feet deep and a hundred feet in diameter, and when we were all in the water, the trainer signaled to his assistant, who opened the gate between the tank and an exterior holding pen.

Immediately the two dolphins swam into the tank. For a moment they paused together on the far side, like (I imagined) two vaudeville performers facing a small audience and discussing how best to wow them. And then … well, first I'd better explain something:

At the moment when what happened was happening, I hadn't a clue as to what was really going on, or why. Not until several days later, after conversations with people who knew a great deal more about dolphins than I do, did I understand how and why a macho-mad dolphin had threatened my life.

When the trainer told us that rough-toothed dolphins were smarter than most, he neglected to add that they're also temperamental and difficult. Other dolphin experts used words such as “cranky,” “aggressive,” and “darn well dangerous.”