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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
An adult great white is a big shark – really big. It has been responsible for more shark bites and human deaths than any other species, according to the International Shark Attack File. This is probably because it sees us as aberrant marine mammals flailing about in the water and certainly worth an exploratory bite – but a gentle mouthing from a two-tonne white shark, its jaws filled with row upon row of razor-sharp teeth, could result in a severe mauling for any victim unlucky enough to have attracted its attention. Though its danger was well known to ancient mariners, it was not until the mid-1970s that it came to occupy its current place in the popular imagination, when Jaws was unleashed on an unsuspecting public. The great white shark's reputation hit rock bottom in the wake of the Spielberg classic. But during the fifty years since the film's first release, public interest in the species has sparked a renaissance in research, producing remarkable new insights into the life of this extraordinary animal. Telling the story of the great white shark from the perspectives of history, psychology and biology, White Shark is nothing less than the biography of the world's most fascinating fish.
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Contents
vvi
Introduction
I magine a fish that can be the length of a large automobile and weigh almost as much, that possesses jaws which have the strongest bite force of any living animal and are lined with row upon row of teeth that are, in effect, serrated knives and pin-sharp forks, and you will start to form a picture in your mind of the world’s largest macropredatory shark – the infamous great white shark. Precise dimensions for the biggest individuals are hard to come by. There’s always something wrong with the measuring technique and estimates are often wide of the mark. Even so, reliable figures from accurate measurements indicate the largest living individuals could be close to 6.5 metres (21 feet) long, that’s four times as long as the average person is tall, and it’s quite possible there are even bigger ones.
Scientists are able to work out the size of a shark even when it’s swum away. They measure the size of the bite marks it’s left behind, and they’ve come up with some astonishing results. Off southern Australia, for instance, bite marks on whale carcasses indicate white sharks in the region of 8 metres (26 feet) long, and off New Zealand a fisherman compared the length of a white shark he encountered with that of his boat and came up with an estimated figure of close to 9 metres (30 feet) – a real giant! viii
These monster white sharks are generally mature females, males being considerably shorter, and it’s quite possible that they have lived to a ripe old age, more than seventy years old by some estimations, so they are not only the biggest predatory sharks, but possibly also among the oldest and wisest, adapted to an extraordinary degree to the watery environment in which they live.
To many people, this species is the ultimate hunter-killer. At various stages in its life, it hunts and kills quite different prey, adding more species to its diet as it gets older, including, sadly, people. It has been responsible for more shark bite incidents and human deaths than any other species, according to the International Shark Attack File of the University of Florida, probably because it sees us as aberrant marine mammals flailing about in the water and certainly worth an exploratory bite; but a gentle mouthing from a 2-tonne white shark could result in a bad mauling and severe damage to any victim who attracted its attention. Even so, if you consider how many of us pursue recreational pastimes in the sea – wading, swimming, surfing, paddleboarding, kayaking – the number of incidents is surprisingly few. If the shark actually saw us as food, there would be far more attacks and many more deaths, but the mythology associated with white sharks and humans remains, which means that people want to believe that it’s a monster and man-eater.
The problem is that, down the years, the shark has gained an unsavoury reputation. Even though this notoriety was well known to ancient mariners, to whom the shark was known quite bluntly as ‘man-eater’ and ‘white death’, it was not until the mid-1970s that the wider public became aware of this ixnow famous fish. On 20 June 1975, at 464 cinema screens across North America, the phenomenon that was Jawswas unleashed on an unsuspecting public. On 25 July, the total number increased to 675, in what was the first ‘wide release’ of a film. Usually, films are ‘slow released’, drip fed into a few cinemas in order to build up interest, but Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg, went for broke, and it paid off, breaking box office records. It was the original ‘summer blockbuster’, so called because queues of people went around the block outside cinemas; previously films had tended not to be released at this time of year, when people were on holiday.
The launch built on the ‘monster’ nature of its principal non-human co-star. Billboards on the front of cinemas read ‘The Terrifying No. 1 Bestseller – Now a Terrifying Motion Picture’. The bestseller was Peter Benchley’s book of the same name published the year before, with 5.5 million copies sold in the USA alone by the time the film was released. White sharks didn’t stand a chance.
The white shark’s reputation after the Jawsphenomenon, of course, went to rock bottom, and the species suffered as a consequence. In California, for example, the film led to vendetta killings and great white shark tournaments (see also Chapter 12), and together with a commercial fishery, these almost completely wiped out the population of white sharks along the west coast of North America. A set of mounted white shark jaws became the ultimate shark angler’s trophy, selling for up to $50,000 apiece, and hundreds of white sharks died as a consequence; but during the past fifty years, since the film’s first release, the public interest in the shark, and even the fear of it, has sparked a renaissance in great white shark research. xThe film may have terrorised people, but it also galvanised a new generation of shark researchers. In recent years, the great white is the shark species that has probably received the most scientific attention of any, leading almost to a softening of its character. Scientists even give tagged individuals affectionate names, all the result of the remarkable things that are being revealed about its life.
In fact, down the centuries, the white shark has had many names. ‘Great white shark’ or ‘great white’, probably on account of its size and a pure white belly, are the most popular monikers among an English-speaking general public today, while just plain ‘white shark’ seems to be the preferred English common name used by shark scientists. In Australia, it is known as the ‘white pointer’ (see below). Elsewhere in the world people have their own names in their own languages: in Spain it is grantiburónblancoor jaquetónblancomeaning ‘white jacket’; and in the Afrikaans language of South Africa it is called witdoodhaimeaning ‘white death shark’. The shark also has its own unique scientific name, and it too has a history.
The discipline of taxonomy – the science of naming, describing and classifying living things – made a great leap forward when the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus introduced the binomial system of naming a species, for example Homosapiensfor modern humans. It was designed to enable scientists from all over the world to be able to talk about the same plant, animal or microbe and understand each other, rather than in the haphazard way it was done before using mainly common names that only locals understood.
In the tenth edition of his SystemaNaturae, published in 1758, he described and classified the white shark, but it was not xiwithout its howlers. For starters, he grouped the shark with ‘amphibians’ and assigned it the scientific name Squaluscarcharias, Squalusbeing the genus in which he placed all sharks, and carchariasused generally by the Greeks to describe either a ‘point’ or a ‘type of shark’. The word ‘point’ in translation led to the white shark’s common name in Australia being ‘white pointer’. As it happened, ‘carcharias’ became established as a favoured specific epithet, but the universally accepted binomial species name came much later.
Indeed, the white shark gained many scientific names down the years as scientists failed to agree – Squaluscaninus(1765), Carchariaslamia(1810) and Carchariasvulgaris(1836) to name just a few; in fact, it wasn’t until 1838 that Sir Andrew Smith coined the genus name Carcharodon, from the Greek karcharodōn, meaning ‘sharp and odious teeth’, a reference to the white shark’s rows of serrated, triangular teeth, and so eventually the white shark’s full species name became Carcharodoncarcharias, the scientific name it possesses to this very day.
Although it’s the sole representative of its genus, the white shark is one of the mackerel sharks in the family Lamnidae, from the Greek word lamna, meaning ‘fish of prey’. Its closest living relatives are three others in the family – the longfin and shortfin mako sharks, the latter being the fastest shark in the ocean, along with the salmon shark and the porbeagle, two sharks that closely resemble each other and are superficially white shark lookalikes. These two live in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans respectively.
All these mackerel shark characters have a fusiform shape, rounded and tapering at both ends, and are powerfully built, xiihydrodynamically very efficient and very fast, the ocean’s apex predators. The caudal (tail) fin has the upper and lower lobes almost the same size, giving these sharks a crescent-shaped tail for high-speed swimming. One diagnostic feature is the keel or keels on the caudal peduncle, the narrow bit that joins the tail to the body. There is a single keel on either side of the caudal peduncle of the white shark, a feature that it shares with mako sharks, and which distinguishes them from other mackerel sharks, which have a main keel and two shorter secondary keels. It’s an easy way to distinguish white sharks from salmon sharks and porbeagles. They all have a tall and stiff first dorsal fin and exceptionally large teeth, both iconic images that we tend to associate with the white shark.
White sharks are normally white below but dark on top, a phenomenon known as countershading, but just occasionally an oddball might appear. Leucism, in which all or part of an animal is abnormally white, is rare in white sharks, but on at least two occasions white sharks that are white all over have been reported. The first, a baby no more than 1.5 metres (5 feet) long, was caught off Boknesstrand in Eastern Cape, South Africa, in 1996; in fact, it was an albino, with characteristic pink eyes and a slightly yellow skin. The second was another young shark washed up on a sandy beach at Port Hacking, New South Wales, Australia. Unlike the South African shark, this specimen was white all over, with normal dark eyes, so it would be described as leucistic – in other words, an actual fully ‘white shark’.
A normal white shark’s eyes are often described as ‘black’, but that’s because we usually see only the pupil. The iris is a deep blue, and, in keeping with all the mackerel sharks, the xiiieyes of the white shark are much larger than those of other shark species of a comparable size, and it can see relatively well below and above the waves (see also Chapter 7).
All the sharks in the mackerel family generally prefer colder waters to warm, with occasional forays into the tropics. The white shark is found in preferred sea surface temperatures between 12 and 24°C (54 and 75°F), although tagged sharks have been known to enter waters as cold as 2.7°C (37°F) and as warm as 27°C (81°F).
So, where in the world do white sharks hang out? As it happens, they tend not to stay in one place, although they might return to a particular location time and again. They are accomplished ocean migrants, something that has only become apparent in recent years. They were always thought of as a coastal species but now we know that this is far from the truth. As adults, they spend the greater part of their life in the open ocean, returning inshore mainly to feed on high-energy foods, such as seal blubber, which is when we generally see them, hence the initial mistake (see also Chapter 6). Large numbers are found off the east coast of the USA and Canada, and the Cape Cod sharks are currently thought to be one of the largest concentrations of white sharks in the world, much to the chagrin of the region’s beachgoers and, let’s face it, the local populations of seals. They also inhabit the Gulf of Mexico and even waters around Caribbean islands, such as Cuba, where one of the world’s largest white sharks was caught (see also Chapter 10). More recently, the Bahamas, especially the western edge of the Tongue of the Ocean, a deep-water basin close to Central Andros Island, has been known to hide them. The sharks pass through the area at a depth of 25 metres (82 feet) xivbetween dusk and dawn, when few people are about, so until a recent tagging programme revealed their nocturnal migration, nobody knew they were there at all.
North America’s west coast is another area with large numbers of white sharks, the population having bounced back from the post-1975 onslaught in Californian waters. They occur from Mexico in the south to Alaska in the north, with one individual 6 metres (20 feet) long caught in the central Bering Sea in the Arctic, so the sharks here experience a broad range of sea surface temperatures and sea conditions. Individuals from this population of white sharks also frequent the Hawaii archipelago, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where long ago various species, such as tiger and white sharks, and Galápagos and grey reef sharks, were captured for gladiatorial contests. Long before it was a US Navy base, Pearl Harbor had a 1.6-hectare (4-acre) marine enclosure into which sharks were lured with bloody meat. When the gates were closed and the enclosure was filled with sharks, the contests began, each gladiatorial slave equipped with nothing more than a stick with a shark’s tooth at the end with which to fight off their adversaries. Some won their freedom, others didn’t.
In the southern hemisphere, key white shark centres include Western Australia, New South Wales and Queensland, where the population is stable, the count aided by the study of shark DNA (see also Chapter 12). Farther to the south are the New Zealand hotspots, including its sub-Antarctic islands, like Campbell Island, just 500 kilometres (320 miles) from the Antarctic coast and site of the southernmost white shark attack ever recorded.
In the Indian Ocean, the south-east coast of South Africa xvis a known white shark centre, especially Gansbaai, meaning ‘bay of geese’, which has been home to a thriving cage diving industry. South Africa, Mozambique, Zanzibar and Kenya are on the same white shark migration route. White sharks are also present off Madagascar, along with the oceanic islands of Mauritius, the Seychelles and Réunion, the latter the site of several shark bite incidents. Bull and tiger sharks are among the perpetrators. In August 2006 a 34-year-old male had a leg severed by a white shark, but he drowned before he could be brought ashore. And, in 1975 and 1972 swimmers were killed by white sharks at beaches near the island’s capital, Saint-Denis, and a tourist beach at Saint-Philippe; in fact, of fifty-six recorded shark attacks here, seventeen have been by white sharks. Elsewhere in the Indian Ocean, such as off Pakistan, white sharks appear from time to time but they are often caught, hauled ashore and cut up ready for market. To the east, the Sunda Shelf is thought to be a migration route between the north-west Pacific and the north-east Indian Ocean, which means white sharks have appeared off Malaysian Borneo and in the Lombok Strait. Migrants also come close to South Pacific islands such as Tonga and New Caledonia at certain times of the year when large baleen whales are visiting, especially humpback whales giving birth.
Around the coasts of China, white sharks are a protected species, with miscreants fined heavily or receiving a sentence of up to ten years in prison; indeed, there was a well-publicised case of a TikTok food blogger cooking white shark on camera and posting the video in January 2023. She was fined 125,000 yuan (US$18,500) and her website was closed down. Taiwan and Japan have had some very large white sharks recorded, xvisuch as the unconfirmed 7-metre (23-foot)-long specimen caught off Taiwan’s Hualien County in May 1997; despite a ban on killing white sharks introduced by Taiwan in 2020, they are still caught illegally and sold in the region. Fins are sent to Hong Kong from Taiwan and as many as eighty other countries, it’s thought, despite a ban on trade in white sharks and their parts. Also in the Pacific, Aniva Bay in the north-west, at the southern tip of Russia’s Sakhalin Island, along with the Strait of Tartary, which joins the Sea of Okhotsk with the Sea of Japan, are the northernmost records of the species in the region. The Bohol Sea in the Philippines has been host to the southernmost.
Chile in the south-east Pacific was once a major centre, but overfishing has seen a big decline, although scientists discovered a ‘fossil’ white shark nursery here dating to Pliocene times (5.3 to 2.5 million years ago), testament to there being greater numbers in the past than today. Fossils of the ancestors of white sharks are also found here and in Peru and California, indicating that the white shark probably had its origins in the Pacific (see also Chapter 5). White sharks are still around, and one made itself unpopular when it decapitated a diver collecting shellfish near the resort town of Pichidangui, 150 kilometres (93 miles) north of Valparaiso in January 1980, while another attacked a teenage girl and a young male researcher snorkelling from a research ship about 300 kilometres (186 miles) east of Easter Island in March 1984.
On the other side of the continent, in the south-west Atlantic Ocean, large female white sharks up to 5.3 metres (17 feet) long have been caught off southern Brazil and elsewhere along the Brazilian coast, and there are records from Uruguay and xviiArgentina. It’s thought that these sharks are part of large-scale migratory movements in the South Atlantic, which include the Tristan da Cunha archipelago, the remotest inhabited islands in the world. On other oceanic islands, such as St Helena and Ascension Island, white sharks are occasional visitors; indeed, white sharks have been tagged off St Helena, and Ascension was where two white sharks recently attacked a paddleboarder – he survived.
At the Cape Verde Islands in the North Atlantic, fishermen have landed exceptionally large specimens, the white sharks thought at one time to be attracted there by an open boat sperm whaling industry. They also occasionally visit the Canary Islands, turning up off Tenerife and La Gomera, but with only six shark bite incidents since the sixteenth century, the chances of being caught out are very low. Madeira also has the occasional visitor, but these visits are few and far between.
The Mediterranean Sea has been another hotspot, albeit nowadays with seriously declining numbers due to illegal fishing and bycatch. White sharks feature frequently in the writings of the ancient Greek and Roman naturalists and philosophers so, at one time in the distant past, there must have been a sizeable population (see Chapter 2). Elsewhere in the north-west sector of the North Atlantic, there have been a few sightings off western Europe, such as Portugal and the Bay of Biscay, but, alas, no confirmed sighting off the coasts of the British Isles (see also Chapter 6).
All this means, in fact, that white sharks can occur just about anywhere in the Earth’s oceans, from subpolar waters to the tropics. They’re absent from the most northerly parts of the Arctic Ocean, the most southerly parts of the Southern xviiiOcean and, curiously, the Arabian Gulf, where conditions are clearly not comfortable for white sharks. It makes the white shark the most widely distributed species of shark on earth.
It’s also a remarkable but greatly misunderstood animal, something that maybe our biography can try to put right. Generally speaking, a biography is a detailed description of an individual’s life, but, in this case, it’s a comprehensive look into the lives of many individuals that lived from millions of years ago until the present day, giving rise to an ocean predator that evolution has honed almost to perfection, but also one that, down the years, has had its unfair share of bad press and could even be threatened with extinction in the not too distant future. For this reason, it would be good if we could have some kind of empathy with the main character, so somehow, we must tap into that delicate interface between humans and wild nature and show just how amazing is this animal – a fish, yes, but one with extraordinary qualities, a lord among sharks.
PART I
2OF SHARKS AND PEOPLE
Chapter 1
Ancient People of the Sea
In 1996, the bones of a young man were found in the On Your Knees cave, also known to First Nations as ShukáKáa, meaning ‘Man Ahead of Us’. It lies at the northern tip of Alaska’s Prince of Wales Island, where the man lived at the time folk were migrating from Asia to North America at the end of the last Ice Age. The exodus is thought to have started about 30,000 years ago, just prior to the Last Glacial Maximum, when a single population of people began to move eastwards through Siberia from what is now north-eastern China. By about 20,000 years ago, when climate change brought in milder and wetter weather, they were able to cross into the Americas because North America and Asia were joined by a land bridge, the result of sea levels being about 50 metres (165 feet) lower than they are today. This pioneering group was thought to have found an ice-free corridor along the continental divide between two adjacent ice sheets – the Cordilleran ice sheet next to the coast and the Laurentide ice sheet farther inland – and were able to travel into the heart of North America to the south of the Canadian ice sheets. Here, they had the entire land and all the game – woolly mammoth, steppe buffalo and 4other large mammals – to themselves. There was nobody else about. However, others soon followed.
Some arrived via the ‘Kelp Highway’ coastal route, and they probably came by sea rather than overland. The Laurentide ice sheet came right down to the edge of the ocean where the towering ice fronts of mighty glaciers collapsed into the sea, forming gigantic icebergs. The only way to follow the coast to the south, therefore, was by boat, probably in craft similar to the seal-skin umiak used by the Inuit to hunt bowhead whales. The young man in the cave was more than likely a descendant of those early maritime travellers.
Many of the coastal settlements in the Pacific Northwest, some close to 15,000 years old, were inundated when the ice sheets of the last Ice Age melted and sea levels rose, so only underwater archaeologists with scuba gear can explore them now, but the On Your Knees cave was on higher ground, which became an island, and so it is readily accessible; at least it became so when all the debris which had fallen down and blocked the entrance had been removed. Today, the cave is about a kilometre (0.6 miles) from the sea and 125 metres (410 feet) above sea level. It had been a refuge for a succession of bears, but the most interesting discovery was the human remains and the young man who once lived there, albeit for a relatively short time: he died when just twenty years old. The date was roughly 10,300 years before the present.
Tests on materials excavated from the cave indicated that the young man’s diet was mainly marine mammals, in particular seals, and wherever there are seals there is sure to be a formidable competitor and serious danger – the white shark. You can imagine the scenario: young hunter sneaks up on a 5seal or sea lion rookery but inadvertently spooks the animals and they, almost as one, head for the sea. He takes to his canoe, a rather flimsy craft covered with animal skins or birch bark, and he manages to harpoon one in the water. After a struggle, there’s blood everywhere. Cue white shark. It grabs the seal, and a tug of war is won by the shark. It must have been tough being a hunter here in those days, but he had to provide for his family. Ironically, his harpoon was probably tipped with a shark’s tooth… but did white sharks really come this far north?
Given their ability to withstand cold temperatures, it may be no surprise to learn that in the Pacific Ocean, white sharks are often seen as far north as the Gulf of Alaska, and there is one record from the Bering Sea. It can live in such chilly waters because it has a special heat exchange system in its body, which you’ll read about in Chapter 6. This enables the shark to maintain a body temperature slightly higher than the temperature of its surroundings, so it can function fairly normally in frigid waters. It has led scientists to realise that the white shark is present at higher latitudes more often than was previously thought.
A white shark, for example, lashed out at commercial fishing gear off the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in the summer of 1961, and another individual was captured off south-east Alaska in 1981. All in all, twenty-nine reliable sightings or strandings were recorded in Alaskan and British Columbian waters between 1961 and 2004 in a survey by the late R. Aidan Martin, published in 2004. About 95 per cent of them were large fish, one giant with an estimated length of 6.2 metres (20 feet), which means that, while out hunting and fishing along the Pacific coast, those first Native Americans 6probably encountered white sharks, and big ones too; and there and then was started that uneasy relationship between sharks and people which Jawsencapsulated so graphically nearly ten thousand years later.
In Martin’s survey, a good few great white sharks – twelve to be precise – were recorded around the islands of Haida Gwaii, just 75 kilometres (47 miles) to the south of Prince of Wales Island and part of British Columbia. This is home to the Haida people, and it has been so for at least 12,500 years, when the ice sheets were still in place and long before the Europeans came in 1774. They, like other tribes along the Pacific coast, are people of the sea, probably also descendants of the migrant pioneers, and the white shark is a creature they were in awe of, which they show in an interesting way.
Sharks, the white shark and dogfish in particular, often feature on the tall and spectacular crest and story poles carved by the Haida people (also known popularly but inaccurately as totem poles, the word ‘totem’ having been borrowed from doodem, meaning ‘clan’, as used by the Ojibwe people of the Great Lakes). At the Haida Heritage Centre, for example, there is a crest pole featuring four blue eyes and a mouth with red lips and triangular teeth that looks distinctly like a white shark with its jaws extended at the moment of an attack. Maybe one is reading too much into this carving, but it’s there for all to see, as was a large white shark that was washed up on a beach on Graham Island, the largest island in Haida Gwaii group, just as they must have been 12,000 years ago. The stranding occurred in December 1977, and the shark was 5.5 metres (18 feet) long. The species is not common here but, from time to time, it does make its presence felt. Photographs exist of 7a dead porpoise with white shark bites and a Steller sea lion with horrible injuries, but still alive, that were taken on Haida Gwaii beaches. They represent a fish that was sure to impress.
In fact, sharks must have played an important role in Haida life to feature so strongly on crest and story poles, along with bears, eagles and the other animals they would have encountered and borrowed to represent their particular clan. The traditional shark motif – triangular teeth and thick red lips – is picked up again in a modern rendering on a crest pole erected in the summer of 2022 in front of their longhouse in Old Masset by renowned Haida artist Kihlyaahda Christian White and his wife Candace Weir-White. The totem of red cedar is 16 metres (53 feet) tall and 1.5 metres (5 feet) wide at the base and each of the figures, carved into the wood one above the other, is based on a traditional story. The shark, for example, is a white shark mother who captured a woman, and that woman became a shark woman. Similarly, there is the story of the dogfish mother, in which the shark represented is the smaller dogfish, the spur dogfish by all accounts, as the prominent spine at the front of its dorsal fins is found in ancient middens. A woman, so the story goes, was on a rock on the shore of Haida Gwaii, and the dogfish that lived there led her down to the seabed, where it removed its dogfish blanket to reveal that it was actually human. The woman grew fins on her arms, legs and head and she never went back to the human world on the shore ever again, but her clan’s descendants have used the dogfish image on its crest pole ever since. Stories like these, in which people and animals are transformed, have been handed down from one generation to the next for millennia, and the Haida keep them alive to this day. 8
Vancouver Island, especially the west coast, is another known white shark location. Positioned about 250 kilometres (155 miles) to the south-east of Haida Gwaii, it is home to the Nuu-chah-nulth people. They were humpback whale hunters for more than 4,000 years, and wherever there are dead whales, there are sure to be white sharks. The large, mature sharks are attracted to floating carcasses, so the hunters must have encountered and had great respect for them, especially the monstrous ones that they say ‘liked to eat canoes’. They were named ‘dogfish mothers’, the name borrowed from the spur dogfish, and during a ceremonial feast, a dancer would appear, wearing the mamachaktlhinkiitsimor shark rider headdress, and then sway this way and that as if swimming underwater on the back of a gigantic shark. The Nuu-chah-nulth people were also among the first conservationists; in fact, they have a word for it – uhmuuwashit, which means ‘keep some and not take all’, an enlightened attitude to their fishery. As Chief Earl Maquinna George of the Ahousaht First Nation once said, ‘these people knew how much they could use, and they didn’t ever use it all.’
On the other side of the country, on the Atlantic coast of Canada, the Mi’kmaq are a First Nation people that live in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, and they have been there for at least 4,000 years. They have a deep relationship with nature and throughout their history, they have been confronted with the great white shark; they have a specific name for it, mukumu’k, and another for sharks in general, wipitamekw, meaning ‘many-toothed one’.
Today, large white sharks are present as far north as the 9Gulf of St Lawrence and Newfoundland, arriving mainly in summer and autumn, and there is no reason to believe there were fewer of them thousands of years ago. Archaeologists have found sharks’ teeth in shell middens dated 4,000 years before the present. The teeth had holes drilled in them, so they were likely worn as pendants, which means these ancient people must have had a significant relationship with the white shark: probably a sense of awe mixed with fear. However, the relationship stopped abruptly when Europeans arrived: no more shark tooth pendants. What happened there, nobody knows.
Whether any of these First Nation peoples were the victims of shark bite incidents is rarely recorded, but a letter from Father Pierre Maillard, dated about 1755 and collected by Earle Lockerby, recalls a conversation with Arguimaut, a Mi’kmaq shaman on Prince Edward Island (or Ile Saint-Jean as it was known at that time). It tells of life before colonisation, in particular, the relationship with white sharks. It recounts how Mi’kmaq fishermen in their moose-skin-covered canoes were faced with attacks from a ‘bad fish’. ‘All too often,’ the shaman recalled, ‘these malicious beings attacked the sterns of our canoes, so suddenly and without warning they sink the boat and all who are in it. Some of the crew escape by swimming, but there are always some who fall prey to these voracious flesh-eating fish.’
The description of canoe attacks was similar to those of the Nuu-chah-nulth people on the west coast, except that the Mi’kmaq apparently fought back. By way of defending themselves, the fishermen tried to harpoon the shark and fend it off until they could reach land, but there was also a more 10ingenious defence. They tried to trick the shark into thinking it was closer to land than it really was and so there was the real risk of it beaching. They fastened foliage to the stern of the canoe, split spruce roots and tied them to the bottom of the canoe with eel grass, and decorated it with any other plants that were available. To the shark, it looked like it was too close to shore.
Whether these ‘bad fish’ are great white sharks is called into doubt by some commentators. They believe the miscreants were orcas or killer whales, common enough on both the east and west coasts of North America. However, there are no records in historical times of orcas killing people, although a recent spate of attacks on yachts, especially their rudders, in the Strait of Gibraltar gives credibility to these creatures attacking the stern of canoes. There is, though, another reference from another priest writing in 1824.
Father Vincent de Paul was travelling by canoe from Tracadie, Nova Scotia, to Cape Breton Island, which would have taken him past Prince Edward Island, when his paddlers, probably from another clan, ‘perceived three monstrous fish called maraches’. ‘They were frightened,’ recalled the priest, ‘as these fish are very dangerous. Their teeth are like gardeners’ knives for cutting and boring, or like razors slightly bent. They are extremely voracious, and often follow boats, attacking them with violence.’
The description given is certainly not of three orcas, as they have fairly blunt, conical teeth. The ‘razors slightly bent’ could only refer to one thing – our old friend the white shark, and recent behavioural research in the eastern Pacific has revealed that it often hunts with a friend, not cooperating, but 11one following the other and taking advantage of any successes (see also Chapter 8). The three marachescould well have been white sharks, the word marachethought to be from the Basque name for ‘shark’. They were considered so dangerous because their teeth munched through the flimsy, bark-covered canoes like a knife through butter. The craft became waterlogged, and their crews left floundering in the water – easy pickings.
More recently, in 2021 to be precise, a 21-year-old woman was swimming in the same area, off the coast at Cape Breton, when she was attacked by a white shark. According to the Canadian Shark Attack registry it was the first shark bite incident since the 1800s, although scientists predict there are likely to be more in the future. The reason is that the white shark population is recovering from the seal-hunting days, when the population of their primary prey – mainly harbour and grey seals – was decimated. With the seals gone, the sharks didn’t bother to visit, and so were rarely seen. When the seals were protected, however, their population increased significantly, and the sharks returned. It’s possible we could be seeing in the not-too-distant future what it was like all those years ago, when there were many more white sharks in the area than there are now.
Although there are few reports of shark bite incidents back then, for obvious reasons, it seems to be beyond doubt that First Nation peoples were harassed and even lost their lives to white sharks, but there is one record from Japan that’s unequivocal – there’s a body! One of the oldest shark bite victims has been uncovered in an ancient Jōmon culture site – the Tsukumo Shell Mound – in the southern part of the island of Honshu. Alongside the shell middens in the village cemetery 12were the gruesome remains of an adult male, estimated to be close to 3,000 years old. The body, or what was left of it, had 790 perimortem traumatic lesions characteristic of a serious shark attack. Researchers at Oxford University found that the bite marks were mainly on the arms, legs, pelvis and ribs and they were able to build a three-dimensional model of the victim’s bones and injuries. It revealed that he had probably tried to fend off the shark with his left hand, but the shark took it. A later bite severed arteries in the leg and the man succumbed through loss of blood. The shark made off with his right leg. The left leg became detached and was found in the grave resting on his chest. The culprit was more than likely a white shark, the species responsible for modern shark bite incidents in the same area, although tiger sharks are present too.
If the man was buried close to where he was killed, the incident must have taken place in the vicinity of the Seto Inland Sea, where there have been several attacks by particularly large white sharks in modern times, including a professional shell diver who was killed by what was identified as a white shark as recently as March 1992. The general belief was that these were isolated events, with few white sharks visiting Japanese waters, but a survey by Kazuhiro Nakaya published in 1994 found that they are much more common than was first thought. During the eighteen months from March 1992 to August 1993, he discovered there were at least nineteen white shark captures or observations reported in Japanese waters with the likelihood that many more captures during the same period have gone unrecorded. Four were in the Seto Inland Sea, one specimen over 5 metres (16 feet) long, a large shark. However, it’s possible that they could have been even bigger all those years ago, 13before the animal was hunted intensely; as sharks can grow old, so they could grow verybig.
However, what is probably the oldest known shark attack victim was discovered near the Peruvian town of Paloma, where the bones of a seventeen-year-old boy were estimated to be 6,000 years old. Like the Japanese skeleton, it showed signs of a shark attack. Hip and arm bones had deep bite marks, and the left leg was missing. The boy’s grave, however, was unusual. According to researchers from Harvard University and the University of Missouri, who excavated the site, most graves were covered with soil or located below a house floor and would have been close to or under the village’s reed huts, but this grave was a basic open pit covered by a grid of canes overlaid with woven mats to form a roof. A seashell, a large flat rock and several pieces of rope, some tied with elaborate knots and one with a tassel, had been placed alongside the body.
The site is about 3.5 kilometres (2 miles) from Peru’s Pacific coast, where the Humboldt Current, flowing northwards from the Antarctic, is very rich in wildlife. When the wind blows parallel to the shore, upwellings drag up nutrients from the deep-sea floor which feed first phytoplankton, then zooplankton, followed by huge shoals of small fish, then large fish, fur seals and South American sea lions, until the energy stream reaches the apex predators, including white sharks.
In ancient times, the sharks certainly impressed the locals. They were revered, possibly even worshipped. One archaeological site where this is thought to have occurred is Huaca Pucllana, an ancient settlement on the central coast of Peru. It was occupied by people of the Lima culture and dated between 1,824 and 1,325 years old. The inhabitants were farmers 14and fishermen who built truncated pyramids made of clay bricks to worship deities symbolised by figures associated with the sea, such as waves, sea lions and, of course, sharks. Their mortal remains have been found in buildings where ritual banquets were held, with the teeth of white sharks common around the site, often in small piles where jars had once stood, so they must have had some significance in proceedings, including gruesome human sacrifices. There are many ceramic jars at the site, the artwork depicting many aspects of life at Huaca Pucllana. Some show the advanced reed boats they used for fishing, which could be up to 3 metres (10 feet) long, and one ceramic has a fisherman in a boat being attacked by a shark, no doubt a white shark.
About 100 kilometres (60 miles) to the south of Huaca Pucllana is another archaeological site at the town of Asia, on the coast. It too has white shark teeth alongside the remains of other marine life. And at Potrero Tenorio in central Peru, fragments of pottery show the distinctive shapes of white sharks.
It all means that in the distant past, white sharks must have been numerous along this stretch of coast in order that there can be so many teeth at the various archaeological sites; but, like the situation in eastern Canada, the hunting of sea lions and fur seals to the edge of extinction caused Peru’s white sharks to disappear too. The seals have bounced back, but the sharks are still relatively rare. Only two reports exist in the scientific record, and they are both old, from the 1940s. In 1944, pictures of a 5-metre (16-foot)-long white shark, which was caught in a net outside Ancon Bay, to the north of Lima, appeared on the front page of the AndeanAirMailandPeruvianTimesand in 1949, another shark, just under 5 metres, was 15reported at Miraflores, a district in Lima province. There is a record of a fatal shark attack in Peru in 1849 and fatal white shark attacks are known from Totoralillo in 1963 and El Panul in 1980, both in neighbouring Chile, and that’s about it.
However, on the other side of the continent, on the Atlantic coast of Argentina, two teeth from a great white shark turned up in an unexpected place. This time the archaeological site – the Nutria Mansa locality in the province of Buenos Aires – was that of land-based hunters, the hunter-gatherers of the Pampas. They lived in the early-middle Holocene, about 8,000 years ago, and more usually hunted terrestrial mammals, especially guanacos, rather than sharks, so what were sharks’ teeth doing among their possessions?
The teeth had an artificial transverse groove at the root tip, maybe for a thread to be tied. It’s an indication, perhaps, that they were adornments, possibly pendants, although blunted serrations suggest they were also used as tools, probably for cutting. They could have been worn around the neck a bit like somebody today with a penknife in their pocket. How these people obtained the teeth, however, is unknown. They could have chanced upon a beached shark or come across a dead seal which had been attacked by a shark, escaped, but had the teeth embedded in its fatally injured body. The teeth could have been traded, or they simply found the teeth washed up on the shore. Whatever the reason, it was not a lone case. White shark teeth have also been found associated with terrestrial hunters in Uruguay and Brazil.
In Uruguay, shark teeth, along with seal teeth, were found at an archaeological site on San Miguel Hill, about 30 kilometres (19 miles) from the coast. They were in a ritualistic setting 16associated with the mound builders of the Cerritos and dated to between 2,500 years ago and historical times when written records began. Another site at the coast, Punta de la Coronilla, dated 2,700 years before the present, has white shark teeth, along with seal and fish bones. It’s thought the two sites might be linked and that the people had a somewhat complex lifestyle, spending some of their time inland and the rest at the coast.
In Brazil, the focus of attention has been the sambaquis or shell mounds that are found along the Atlantic coast from the border with Uruguay to just north of Rio de Janeiro, the mounds decreasing in size and frequency the farther north you go. They are basically ancient waste tips of people who hunted and fished and lived between 6,000 and 2,000 years ago. The middens contain sharks’ teeth and the remains of both marine and terrestrial animals. While many of the teeth have simply been discarded, some have perforations and were probably worn as pendants, while others made up necklaces. However, there was more to it than that.
Researchers at the Rio do Meio archaeological site in Florianópolis, a so-called ‘shallow site’ rather than a mound, took a close look at tooth microwear and so were able to work out the function of sharks’ teeth in this precolonial society. While many were ornaments, as we have seen, this research indicates that the teeth were also most definitely used as tools. The work was so detailed that it could reveal whether the tooth was used primarily to cut soft materials, such as leather and meat, or hard stuff, such as bone and wood, and whether it was used for piercing, cutting or scraping. One great white shark tooth even showed that it was employed to cut away bark from green 17wood. Hafted sharks’ teeth also made effective arrowheads. They helped the arrow to penetrate the prey’s body, the only drawback being that they shattered if they hit bone. On the plus side, they floated in water, while arrows tipped with stone sank, so the shark-tooth-tipped arrows could be recovered and used again. All in all, it is a remarkable piece of work, literally at the cutting edge of archaeological research, and it highlights the special relationship that must have existed between humans and sharks along the Brazilian coast in precolonial times.
In fact, sharks’ teeth are so numerous at the many archaeological sites on the Atlantic coast of South America that there must have been a healthy population of white sharks here too, but today it’s a shadow of its former self. A survey of the scientific literature published in 2001 came up with just nineteen records of white sharks in Brazilian waters, along with one offshore sighting, and another paper quoted ‘about 24’, so these days the fish is not common. However, a historical record from 1992 revealed one of these rare giants, which was caught accidentally in a fisherman’s gillnet off Bom Abrigo Island, about 55 kilometres (34 miles) off the coast of southern Brazil, and it was quite an animal; in fact, it was so big that two fishing boats were needed to tow it back to port. It was a large female, 5.3 metres (17 feet) long, with an estimated body weight of 2.5 tonnes (5,500 pounds), or about one-and-a-half times the weight of a family car. When her stomach was opened up several shark heads spilled out – two sandbars, two scalloped hammerheads and a blue shark, most likely discarded from fishing boats – and the remains of one bony fish and two dolphins, one of which was a mature Atlantic spotted 18dolphin. The remarkable thing about her, though, was the size of her liver. The hepatic somatic index, the ratio of liver weight to body weight, was 27 per cent, which makes it one of the largest white shark livers in the scientific record.
The female was living where seasonal upwellings bring cold deep-sea waters into the coastal environment, at a point where the continental shelf is narrow, an area of coast that encompasses the shoreline between the states of Espírito Santo and Rio de Janeiro. Three other large and mature white sharks – 5.0 metres (16 feet), 5.3 metres (17 feet) and 5.5 metres (18 feet) long – were caught in the Ceará region, which experiences similar conditions to those where the large female had been caught. So, even though white sharks are few and far between in these waters today, those that have been observed have made a big impression on the scientific community. If sharks of such size had been around when ancient tribes had been diving, say, for shellfish and other foods from the sea – and the evidence seems to suggest that they were – then those folk must have been firmly in the danger zone, so it’s little wonder that they revered such a large and powerful fish.
Chapter 2
The Selachia
Fragments of a ceramic vase, the Cretere del Naufragio, dated 725 BCE, were excavated at Lacco Ameno on the Italian island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. On its sides are depicted shipwrecked sailors fighting to stay alive, and they’re surrounded by myriad sea creatures. One person has his head in the mouth of a huge fish, probably a white shark. It is Italy’s oldest example of figurative vase painting and the world’s first report of a shark attack.
This association between sharks and people in the Mediterranean has a history that started way before the eighth century BCE. It was probably gustatory at first, as the remains of sharks have been found in late Stone Age caves in southern Italy and Spain; but wherever sharks, especially white sharks, and people come into contact there is always the prospect of the prey turning into the predator.
Centuries later that love–hate relationship, which underlines the story of Jaws, engaged ancient Greek and Roman poets, philosophers and naturalists. Take Herodotus (c.484–c.425 BCE), for example, the ‘father of history’, at least according to Cicero. In his extensive tome Histories, he tells of a time, in 492 BCE, when the Persian fleet were getting the upper hand over the Greeks. However, their luck suddenly changed when they 20
