EMPERORS OF THE DEEP

The Mysterious and Misunderstood World of the Shark

William McKeever

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

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WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook edition published by William Collins in 2020

First published in the United States by HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers in 2019

Copyright © William McKeever 2019

Images © Individual copyright holders

Photograph here: Ocean sharks by anas sodki/Shutterstock

William McKeever asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Jacket illustration copyright Purix Verlag Volker Christen / Bridgeman Images

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780008359164

Ebook Edition © April 2020 ISBN: 9780008359188

Version: 2020-06-08

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

INTRODUCTION Man Bites Shark

CHAPTER 1 Searching for Mary Lee

CHAPTER 2 Makos, the F-35 of Sharks

CHAPTER 3 The Mysterious Case of the Hammerhead

CHAPTER 4 Sharks as Social Animals

CHAPTER 5 The Quest for the Tiger Shark

CHAPTER 6 The Shark Attack Files

CHAPTER 7 The Sex Lives of Sharks

CHAPTER 8 Bearing Witness

CHAPTER 9 Human Trafficking at Sea

CHAPTER 10 Water, Water Everywhere and Not a Tiger in Sight

CHAPTER 11 The High Seas

CHAPTER 12 Shark Warriors

CHAPTER 13 Shark Alley

CHAPTER 14 Save the Shark

Picture Section

Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Book

About the Author

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

MAN BITES SHARK

I REMEMBER MY FIRST EXPERIENCE IN THE OCEAN. ABOUT five years old, I was with my dad, anchored to his broad shoulders. He swam us out past the break, which offered me a panoramic view of the beach, the surf, the distant horizon: a new vantage point that heightened the ocean’s tremendous beauty.

My dad liked to swim when the surf was strong, with the waves pounding the shoreline, the kind of surf that the lifeguards warn against taking on. My dad always wanted to test his strength against the waves, to see if the crashing wall of water could knock him off his feet. Most of the time he was left standing. Watching him, I tried to do the same thing, just as any boy might try to emulate his father. One day, when I was ten, the waves were surging, and I summoned the courage to test them. The first wave picked me up and tossed me like a woobie in the wash. I somersaulted and rolled inside the wave, helplessly ransomed in its grasp, until it was ready to spit me out. The sensation of being roiled and tossed and turned and thrown around was totally new. Rather than being scared out of the water forever, I held on to the feeling. I could never predict which way the wave was going to send me, an arm this way, a leg that way, a disorienting feeling I continue to associate with the power of nature. Though a constant source of joy and play for millions of people around the world every day, the ocean was always in charge.

My dad and I would go fishing, and the water wasn’t always rough. Out at sea in our skiff in Nantucket Sound, south of Cape Cod, we were in prime territory to land big fish. When my father was ready to cast a line, he’d cut the engine, and we’d drift. I remember listening to the sound of the waves lapping the hull of our boat and the wind blowing through my ears as the boat rocked gently in the water. After a day of fishing, a ghostly swaying in my legs followed me to bed. Sometimes, as I looked out over the sea, I would see a dark spot just below the surface, jutting this way and that. Every now and again, I could clearly make out a shark, its beautiful dorsal fin slicing through the water. Once, my father caught a dogfish shark, a skinny bottom-dweller, about two or three feet long. I remember being struck by how vulnerable the shark looked, thrashing on the boat deck, desperate for oxygen and an escape route back into the water. Though the dogfish is edible, I pleaded with my father to let the shark go. My father gave in, and I was glad to see the fish swim away, rejoining, I hoped, its family and all the other mysterious creatures swimming deep below the surface.

Those fishing experiences with my dad deepened my appreciation of the ocean and the majestic creatures that inhabit its unseeable depths. When summer ended and the school year started, I went to the library and read every book I could find about sharks. I wanted to learn about how sharks operate, how they live their lives. I wanted to know what sharks were really like. But every book I picked up portrayed them as killers. On television and on the big screen, too, sharks were cast as man-eaters, out-of-control predators. A character would go swimming in a movie, and a shark would come along and take his leg off. Conversely, dolphins were never portrayed as anything other than pure gold, like an honor student at school, the paradigm of good behavior.

Slowly but surely, the prejudice against sharks started to seep into my consciousness. I respected sharks as much as I respected the ocean. Both were beautiful and powerful and, I understood even at a young age, in full control—I and all the other swimmers and fishermen were simply visitors to the underwater empire, vacationers, day-trippers, tourists. While my reverence for the ocean included a deep appreciation of its unpredictable power, my admiration for sharks was less sincere, tinged with suspicion and an almost irrational fear. Though I knew I was psyching myself out, every time I went into the ocean I couldn’t help but worry that a shark attack was just a few yards away.

As I quickly learned, I was not alone in this fear.

Continuing my research of sharks, I came across what many consider the event that instilled in the American psyche our widespread cultural fear of sharks. It occurred in the summer of 1916. Over a horrifying ten-day period, four people were killed in the water, and one was seriously injured. The events triggered mass hysteria and, as far as I could determine, the first extensive shark hunt in history. Victim One was attacked on July 2 at Beach Haven, New Jersey. Four days later, 45 miles north, a second victim was attacked in Sea Girt, New Jersey. Immediately, hundreds of people took to their boats, armed with nets, guns, and dynamite. Many sharks were killed, each one identified as the man-eater. When the next three attacks took place on July 12—this time in Matawan Creek, 70 miles north of Beach Haven—it became clear that none of the captured sharks was responsible. A taxidermist finally claimed to identify the great white culprit after finding a child’s shinbone and what appeared to be a human rib in the shark’s stomach. Ever since, however, many have questioned the taxidermist’s theory, pointing out that because great whites cannot survive in fresh water, a single great white couldn’t have killed the three people in Matawan Creek, a freshwater tidal inlet. (A bull shark is the only shark species that can swim in both salt and fresh water.) While it’s likely a great white was responsible for the attack in the saltwater Raritan Bay, the freshwater attacks rule out a deranged, man-eating great white on the loose.

And yet, the single-shark conspiracy prevailed, a questionable-at-best theory that nevertheless served as the basis of a bestselling book, the most famous book ever written about sharks: Peter Benchley’s Jaws. Since its publication in 1974, Benchley’s novel has sold 20 million copies and has likely shaped our perception of sharks, and great whites in particular. When Steven Spielberg released his cinematic adaptation two summers later, the film locked into place the public’s intractable fear of sharks. Jaws sparked a period of great interest in great whites and established the unsubstantiated belief that sharks as a species are nothing more than bloodthirsty man-eaters, apex predators with no other purpose than to kill. The movie certainly had that effect on me. That opening scene—in which a young woman is attacked and mercilessly thrashed about—made me think twice, as the tagline promised, about ever going in the water again. From the summer of ’76 on, whenever I stepped into the ocean, the unsettling specter of sharks scuttled across the deep recesses of my mind, a twitch of fear I tried to ignore while splashing in the surf.

Little did I know that sharks have more to fear than humans. And unlike our fear of them, their fear is justified.

A FEW YEARS AGO, I WAS SPENDING THE WEEKEND IN MONTAUK, New York, a tony community in the Hamptons on the far eastern part of Long Island. Wandering around the marina, I noticed a large crowd gathered around one of the many fishing boats docked there. To my shock, everyone was gawking at a number of dead sharks strewn about the wooden boards, remnants of a recently concluded shark tournament. One shark—a blue shark about 8 feet long—caught my attention. The shark was on full display, its white underbelly exposed, bisected by the marine blue of its body’s upper half. Its mouth was gaping open, and a hook protruded from the corner of its mouth. Its internal eyelid had drooped over its eye, which reminded me of a sheet placed over a dead man in a morgue, an appropriate image because I couldn’t escape the sensation that I was visiting a murder scene. All these dead sharks had been tossed away like garbage. The sheer number of them on the dock that day rivaled the scene’s brutality.

As I slowly retreated from the marina, a knot formed in my stomach. I couldn’t help but wonder: If fishermen were killing this many sharks during one weekend on Long Island, how many sharks are dying at similar tournaments around the world? No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shake the feeling that sharks were in trouble—a feeling I confirmed once I started looking into the numbers. While sharks kill an average of four humans a year, humans kill 100 million sharks each year. That is not a typo. Humans kill 100 million sharks each year.

While recreational fishing is doing considerable harm to the shark population around the world, commercial fishing is decimating it. Sharks are harvested throughout the world for their meat, skin, fins, liver, and cartilage.[1] Specifically sharks are killed as a by-product of the $40 billion tuna industry, which provides the United States with enough tuna to feed every American 2.6 pounds per year. Seventy percent of the world’s tuna is harvested from the Pacific Ocean, where regulatory bodies are unconcerned with or overwhelmed by sustainable fishing practices. Over thousands of square miles of blue, thousands of vessels from China and other countries fish for tuna and sharks in what Greenpeace describes as an “industry out of control.” More than five thousand authorized longline vessels are currently operating in the Pacific, and many more aren’t authorized. The preferred method of catching tuna is longline fishing, a remarkable and sadistic practice. Fishing vessels set a single line from the stern of the boat. The length of this line is staggering, up to 100 miles long. Attached to this one line, at regular 10-foot intervals, are baited hooks. A relatively small vessel can set out thousands upon thousands of them. Fishermen leave the line alone overnight, reeling in their catch the next morning. Anything can get caught on that line, including the sharks that are chasing the tuna. In fact, some fisheries catch more sharks than tuna.

And then there are the horrors of “transshipment.” One fishing vessel transfers its catch to another vessel, which then takes the catch to market. This sounds like an efficient way of doing business, but when the transshipment happens at sea, far out of reach of inspection, fishermen can hide what’s really going on. Illegal catch is regularly smuggled with legal catch, and when the entire catch finally reaches shore, there’s no way of knowing which vessel it came from or how the fish were caught. At the same time, the crew is often made up of indentured servants, and transshipment keeps these exploited men out at sea indefinitely, often for years at a time. Forced to work for minimal pay, which is rationed out over a fishing season, the crew does what it can to survive, regularly resorting to finning captured sharks, then selling the pectoral and trademark dorsal fins on the black market or to China, where the demand for shark-fin soup is insatiable. Literally millions of tons of sharks are captured every year to keep up with this demand.

These ships are truly weapons of mass destruction on the high seas.

While it is well known that sharks are killed for their fins to make Chinese soup, they are also killed for their squalene, a key moisturizing agent in cosmetic products like lipstick. While squalene can be extracted from plants, sourcing it from sharks is easier and significantly cheaper. Squalene fisheries operate primarily in the southeastern Atlantic and western Pacific oceans, where regulations are lax.

Some people were quicker than others to recognize this peril, most notably the man most responsible for instilling a fear of sharks in the culture at large. Years after the success of Jaws, author Peter Benchley was scuba diving off Costa Rica when he had an epiphany. Submerged deep beneath the surface, he spotted the corpses of finned sharks littering the bottom of the sea. This scene, which he called one of the most horrifying sights he had ever witnessed, forever changed his life. Sharks were no longer savage leviathans and man-eating monsters; they were now the mutilated victims in this all-too-real horror story. Benchley renounced his contribution to the “momentary spasm of macho shark hunting” and abruptly changed his views on sharks. Reflecting on Jaws, Benchley later wrote that “the shark in an updated version could not be the villain.” He added that if he were to do it all over again, the shark “would have to be written as the victim, for, worldwide, sharks are much more the oppressed than the oppressors.”[2] Benchley could not escape the carnage that ensued in the wake of his book, and up until his death in 2006, he committed himself to changing the negative perception of sharks and ending their killing.

Today, sharks are under the greatest threat in their entire 450-million-year history. Despite the fact that they play an essential role in maintaining the delicate balance of the marine ecosystem and are key indicators of the overall health of our oceans, sharks are not a priority for conservation. In any healthy ecosystem, a balance of components is in place, evolved over eons. Once the sharks go, environmental repercussions will occur everywhere, from the frigid waters of the Arctic Circle to the coral reefs of the tropical Central Pacific. Taking away apex predators typically results in top-down impacts on the ecosystem. Studies have shown that coral reef ecosystems with high numbers of apex predators tend to have greater biodiversity and higher densities of individual species. A healthy coral system, for instance, requires a similarly healthy shark population, which, in turn, balances the herbivores and the fish that prey on them. Without sharks, the entire ecosystem of the coral reef collapses. Moreover, healthy shark populations may aid in the recovery of damaged coral reefs, whose futures are threatened throughout the globe.

Sharks are being decimated around the world by tuna fishing and finning and even local shark tournaments like the one I encountered in the Hamptons. From a biological viewpoint, the shark population isn’t built to withstand the onslaught. With long reproductive and gestation periods, sharks simply can’t reproduce fast enough to replace the losses. Kill the sharks, and humankind cripples the seas.

The sudden vulnerability of sharks—a species that has survived five extinction-level events, including the one that killed the dinosaurs—calls for a complete reinterpretation of our relationship with them. That’s the goal of this book. I want to shift the perception of sharks from cold-blooded underwater predators to evolutionary marvels that play an integral part in maintaining the health of the world’s oceans, because this is the only way I know how to protect the species and save the world’s oceans. This is a continuation of my work at Safeguard the Seas, the ocean conservancy I founded in 2019 to use activism, advocacy, and education to protect sharks and other fish threatened by man. Contra Jaws, I have figured out the only way to change the way we think about sharks is to cast the species in an entirely new light, in all of their underwater glory, and share with a general audience the emerging science of sharks, which is slowly pulling back the curtain on one of the ocean’s fiercest predators. Thanks to new technologies that allow scientists and marine biologists around the world to track sharks like never before, we have made great strides in recent years in understanding the species, including their mysterious underwater behavior, their supernatural migratory patterns, their remarkable social ability, and even their secret sex lives.

To understand these new discoveries, I visited the top oceanographic research institutions in the world, interviewing today’s leading scientists and conservationists, from Cape Cod to Cape Town, from the Florida Keys to Australia’s Shark Bay, with stops in between. These pioneers broke down for me this emerging science of sharks and shared many of the species’ most closely guarded secrets. At the same time, I tagged along with Greenpeace activists in Busan, South Korea, to learn about the organization’s most recent “bearing witness” campaign and to tour the Rainbow Warrior, the organization’s iconic ship. I also met with courageous artists and relentless activists around the world who, like me, are trying to change the public’s perception of sharks through creative marketing campaigns and daring exhibitions in Miami and Mossel Bay, South Africa. To get a better sense of how the international fishing industry traffic operates, I interviewed six former slaves-at-sea in Cambodia. Closer to home, I spent a day with the self-professed “last great shark hunter” and went to a mako-only shark tournament in Montauk, the Super Bowl of shark contests, to understand why recreational fishermen continue to hunt sharks for sport, despite their declining numbers. And finally, to get a close-up view of the world’s most feared and most misunderstood predator, I stepped freely into their environment, emboldened this time to share the water with the species that has fascinated me since I was a child.

While much has been uncovered about sharks in recent years, there is still much to learn about them—or unlearn in the case of our popular misconceptions about them. Though hardly comprehensive, this book is a culmination of my two-year journey, at once a deep dive into the misunderstood world of sharks and an urgent call to protect them, a celebration of sharks as remarkable apex predators, supersensory navigators, and humankind’s greatest ally in nature, and—as scientists begin to learn more about them and their behavior—quite possibly the key to unlocking the mysteries of the ocean. That is, if we don’t kill them off first.

Though I focus primarily on the Big Four—great white, mako, hammerhead, and tiger—the ocean is home to approximately five hundred species of sharks, from the epaulette shark, which crawls across the surface of reefs, to the 34-ton whale shark, the ocean’s gentle giant, which motors along at its own pace, consuming 50 pounds of plankton a day. The diversity of the species comes across in its behavior and appearance, its form and function. The bioluminescent catshark, for instance, which glows green in the darkness off the continental shelf, is a stunning specimen. Greenland sharks, which measure 13 to 16 feet in length and weigh 3,000 pounds, may live more than four hundred years,[3] making them the longest-living vertebrate in the world by at least one hundred years. They are also the slowest-moving shark, traveling at 1.6 miles per hour. And while the bull shark lacks the natural good looks of the sleek thresher, a ballerina of a shark, the bull’s internal machinery, which allows it to survive in fresh and salt water, is undoubtedly a thing of beauty. This evolutionary marvel rivals the great white’s deep diving and long-distance traveling abilities, the mako’s perfectly proportioned cylindrical body, the hammerhead’s trademark T-shaped head, and the tensile strength of a tiger’s jaw, which can generate a force of 3 tons per square centimeter, equivalent to the weight of two cars.

Sharks have never been considered beautiful creatures. Yet what all the sharks discussed in this book illustrate is that they are indeed beautiful and majestic, emperors and empresses of the deep, every last one. “If everyone were cast in the same mold,” Darwin famously wrote, “there would be no such thing as beauty.” Because beauty takes shape when one recognizes the diversity of life and comprehends nature’s magnificent design, the experience of it touches the soul. Draped in various shapes and sizes lies a beauty to behold like pearls scattered throughout the world’s oceans. We just have to open our eyes to see the sharks as if for the first time.

CHAPTER 1

SEARCHING FOR MARY LEE

SHORTLY AFTER DAWN ON JUNE 17, 2017, MARY LEE DISAPPEARED off the coast of Beach Haven, New Jersey, a sleepy beach community 20 miles northeast of Atlantic City.

Concern quickly spread among Mary Lee’s 130,000 Twitter followers, a modest but loyal fan base most likely amassed during her numerous high-profile travels around the world: winters in Palm Beach, summers in the Hamptons, and, in between, the occasional jaunt to Bermuda, where she splashed around in the island’s cerulean surf. Wherever Mary Lee went, people followed her every move. Curious beachcombers and paparazzi checked their iPhones for news of her whereabouts and speculated about Mary Lee’s real age, her sudden fluctuations in weight, and even the rumored father of her reported pregnancy.

So when Mary Lee suddenly vanished, people naturally feared the worst. Dropping off the map wasn’t like her. It certainly wasn’t the kind of behavior expected by her growing legion of fans or her handlers. Either she had decided to go offline for a few weeks or—as seemed more likely as June turned to July—Mary Lee wasn’t ever coming back.

I first heard about Mary Lee, and the growing frenzy surrounding her, from Greg Skomal, a senior fisheries biologist at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and head of the Massachusetts Shark Research Program. Skomal, who’s been studying great white sharks in Cape Cod since the Reagan administration, couldn’t stop talking about her. I can’t say I blamed him. As he made abundantly clear over the course of our conversations, it isn’t every day you get to track in real time a 16-foot, 3,456-pound great white, certainly not in the waters of the Atlantic.

“The great white shark is still really an open book,” Skomal told me in his office at the Shark Research Program, where he and his team examine the migratory patterns and social behavior of great whites. “When you turn on the television and see white sharks doing incredible things, typically it’s filmed in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Scientists for decades have been studying this species in those areas. White sharks in the Atlantic have always lagged behind in terms of what we know about its biology, its natural history, its ecology. We didn’t have any of the white shark hot spots you see in other oceans.”

That all changed around 2004, according to Skomal, when the Northeast’s previously imperiled seal population started to flourish three decades after the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 prohibited local fishermen from killing them to protect fish stocks. Once the seals returned to Cape Cod, so did the white shark, the seals’ natural predator. The return of white sharks provided scientists like Skomal with an unprecedented opportunity to study them. For the first time, they had regular access to white sharks in the Atlantic Ocean. “If you can find the species you’re trying to study,” Skomal said, “you can study it.”

And if you can study the species, you can start to figure out its biology, its behavior, and, over time, the size of its population—previously unknown data sets that help scientists get a better understanding of the species’ overall health and, as Skomal and others are starting to figure out, how the health of the Atlantic is directly related to the well-being of white sharks in its waters.

Skomal was part of the team that caught Mary Lee off the coast of Cape Cod in September 2012. Under the direction of OCEARCH founder Chris Fischer, the former Emmy Award–winning host of ESPN’s Offshore Adventures program, Skomal and a group of researchers tagged Mary Lee’s dorsal fin—the great white’s telltale peak—with a Smart Position and Temperature Transmitting Tag. SPOT, as the tag is also known, allowed OCEARCH to track Mary Lee’s movements and, in a technological twist, broadcast her whereabouts to the general public in real time across Twitter, Facebook, and the organization’s other social media platforms.

Because collecting data from free-swimming sharks is next to impossible, the catch-and-release work of OCEARCH is helpful. If scientists are ever going to understand these apex predators and their role in maintaining the world’s oceans, they need to examine them up close. Watching the operation unfold is a thing of beauty. In the video OCEARCH released of Mary Lee’s capture, Fischer spots the shark while chumming the waters in a skiff. Once he and his crew catch it, Fischer radios ahead to Skomal, who’s waiting a few miles away on the OCEARCH, a floating at-sea laboratory. “We are all green here,” Fischer tells him, calm and collected amid the growing excitement. “We are a full go. Big, big, big mature female shark. Definitely a five-plus-meter fish.”[1]

Towing the shark, Fischer steers the skiff toward the OCEARCH and docks the shark into a floating pen, a 75,000-pound capacity hydraulic platform that is slowly raised out of the water, until the pen looks like a wood-paneled pool deck extending off the massive vessel. Then, with the precision of a NASCAR pit crew, Fischer and his team get to work. To lessen the shark’s nervousness, one man covers the shark’s head with a large towel. He then inserts a large hose into the shark’s mouth, providing the captured shark with a continuous flow of fresh seawater so it can breathe in the open air. While that man caters to the shark, others frantically start tagging her, measuring and sexing, drawing blood samples, and performing a quick muscle biopsy to identify reproductive habits and, according to the OCEARCH website, assess organic and inorganic contaminants. One man, who I assume drew the short straw, scraped bacteria and other marine parasites from the shark’s teeth. Before releasing the shark safely back into the sea, Fischer christened his great white Mary Lee, after his mother. “I didn’t know if I was ever going to have the opportunity to name another shark,” he later admitted during a press conference.[2]

The entire operation—catch, tag, and release—took less than fifteen minutes, but those fifteen minutes ultimately produced more than five years’ worth of new research about great whites, the ocean’s most mysterious and most misunderstood inhabitant.

“What we’ve done, for the first time in history, is establish a proven method of capturing the ocean’s giants and releasing them alive,” said Fischer. “And, in between, giving the leading scientists fifteen minutes of access to use all of the latest technology and to do all of the research projects they’ve ever dreamed of.”[3]

To achieve Fischer’s stated goal of providing a brighter future for the white sharks, OCEARCH and their collaborators first need to learn the fundamental pieces of the white sharks’ life. If scientists are to preserve the great whites, they need to understand their behavior, biology, reproduction, and range movements. This list is by no means exhaustive. One important place to start is with the population size and the health status of the great whites on the East Coast. Another important area to explore is where the sharks mate, give birth, and grow up as juveniles. To this day, no one has ever witnessed a great white giving birth. If a scientist can determine exactly where white sharks mate and mature, for instance, they can petition the government to protect those maritime areas.

OCEARCH has worked with scientists from different organizations, and their ongoing tagging program has catalogued hundreds of sharks, which are added to OCEARCH’s open-source database to aid researchers in their work.

Still, as we enter this golden age of shark research, Skomal was quick to remind me, “There’s a lot for us to learn.”

Fischer told the Associated Press in 2013 that he expected Mary Lee to be more of an offshore fish, taking advantage of the Atlantic’s bountiful schools and, potentially, hanging out in the North Atlantic right whale’s birthing habitat off the Carolinas. Instead, Mary Lee hugged the East Coast, traveling from Cape Cod to Charleston, then up and down the Southeast, swimming between Jacksonville, Florida, and Wilmington, North Carolina, before heading around Cape Hatteras, toward New York, a few miles offshore from Times Square. While Mary Lee didn’t pinpoint potential birthing sites, her path did help to confirm what scientists knew about the distribution of white sharks off the eastern coast of the country. Before she could spill any more secrets, however, Mary Lee went offline. The loss of Mary Lee was a setback, but the best approach as far as Fischer, Skomal, and everyone else was concerned was to keep tagging as many white sharks as they could and, as a result, uncover as many of the species’s hidden secrets as possible.

On a subsequent expedition, Skomal and his team pinned another white shark—this one named Luci—with a sophisticated pop-up satellite archival transmitting tag, which over time collected data about the shark, including the depths of its dives. Figuring out a shark’s migratory pattern was useful, but piecing together a shark’s movements as it ventures nearly a mile below the surface of the ocean would help scientists figure out how deep a shark can dive and, once it’s down there, what sharks might do at those depths. After receiving via satellite Luci’s data, Skomal and his team were able to piece together, meter by meter, one of Luci’s most spectacular dives as she cruised along the East Coast of the United States. Skomal established her position at 600 feet below the ocean’s surface. While there is plenty of sunlight at the surface, light quickly fades as the depth slowly absorbs it. Continuing the descent, Luci freely exited the sunlit zone, speeding through the enveloping darkness past 660 feet, where only 1 percent of the light penetrates the increasing density.

In 2014, a scuba diver named Ahmed Abdel Gabr, a former member of the Egyptian army, set the Guinness World Record for the deepest scuba dive. Having spent four years training, he successfully dove 1,000 feet under the Red Sea, proving that humans—or at least one with seventeen years’ experience as a diving instructor, three canisters of oxygen strapped to his back, and a support team in tow—could survive a deep-sea immersion. Abdel Gabr’s descent took twelve full minutes, while Luci blew past this depth in a matter of seconds.

Past 1,000 feet, water pressure begins to reach staggering proportions. One atmosphere at sea level equals 14.6 pounds of pressure per square inch, the same as the weight of the earth’s atmosphere. This means that, on land, each square inch of your body is subjected to a force of 14.6 pounds. Water pressure increases about 1 atmosphere every 33 feet of depth, which at 1,000 feet, translates to 30 atmospheres, or roughly the equivalent of one large, 450-pound, adult pig squatting on every square inch of your body. To withstand water pressure at this depth, German engineers reinforced the hulls of U-boats, which allowed them to dive beyond 1,000 feet, but even these engineering marvels couldn’t survive a dive beyond 1,200 feet. Like early explorers venturing across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, Skomal and his team were discovering something entirely new, something truly groundbreaking, a high point in shark research.

A deep dive creates problems for many animals. For humans, high blood nitrogen pressures can exert a narcotic effect, known as “nitrogen narcosis,” which during ascent may lead to nitrogen bubble formation, a phenomenon known as “the bends.” Great whites avoid this problem at this depth because they don’t have lungs or swim bladders.

Well beneath the sunlit zone, which ends at 660 feet, Luci breached the middle of the twilight zone at 1,750 feet. This bewitching area of the ocean (660 to 3,300 feet) is too dark for photosynthesis. Many underwater creatures live in the dim light here during the day but travel up the water column to hunt at night in the sunlit zone. Sharks are highly suited to this area because, like lions, they can see in the dark, thanks to the tapetum lucidum, a layer of tissue behind the retina that reflects light through the retina a second time, increasing the light available to the eye’s photoreceptors. Because Luci’s eyes can take in light even in near darkness, she would have still been able to attack unsuspecting prey, if she were so inclined. But she wasn’t finished diving. Luci easily beat the maximum depth of a nuclear-powered submarine (1,750 feet) and, 950 feet later, eclipsed the height of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s tallest building.

At 3,000 feet, Luci entered the ocean’s dark zone. No light can penetrate this depth. No plants can grow there. The only source of food is the “snow” of waste from above. To the surprise—and celebration—of Skomal and his team, Luci bottomed out at 3,700 feet, where she was surrounded by total darkness except for the occasional bioluminescence of nearby fish, jellyfish, and crustaceans, which flashed in the water like lightning in the pitch-black sky.[4]

Luci is not the only shark star with such diving capabilities. In New Zealand, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) tagged a 16-foot-long shark they named Shack, which set the world’s record for the deepest known dive by a great white shark at 3,900 feet. According to NIWA, Shack “regularly … deep dives between 3,200 and 3,900 feet while crossing the Pacific Ocean.”[5]

Nature has designed great whites like Luci, Shack, and others to routinely dive to great depths around the world. They inhabit one of the most inhospitable places on the planet. The pressure at this level is staggering, roughly the weight of a grand piano on every square inch of a great white’s body. At this depth, Luci was the only living thing with solid mass; every other creature was gelatinous and had strange, translucent appendages. Temperatures at 3,700 feet are equally unfriendly at 35° to 39°F, which Luci combated by generating her own body heat. While Skomal and his team studied the mechanisms of Luci’s singular descent, they remained mystified about the reason for the dive. The Marine Conservation Science Institute’s Michael Domeier has theorized that, at these depths, sharks like Luci are likely hunting a giant squid, a mysterious, deep-ocean dweller. Most squid live at the surface and are only 2 feet long, but at 3,000 feet, they grow twenty times bigger. At these depths, squid, worms, and sea crabs grow to monstrous sizes because of a phenomenon known as “abyssal gigantism,” a condition scientists link to either the deep-sea environment’s higher atmospheric pressure or its colder temperatures. For years, people doubted giant squid really existed. Then some began washing up on beaches around the world. A squid measuring 30 feet in length beached in Galicia, Spain, while other recent discoveries proved that female and male giant squid can grow as long as 43 and 33 feet, respectively. Before Skomal confirmed great whites can dive to this depth, the only known predators of giant squid were sperm whales. But as Luci bottomed out, it wasn’t too hard to imagine great whites and giant squid waging epic battles at the bottom of the ocean floor.

ONE OF THE GREATEST IRONIES ABOUT WHITE SHARKS IS THAT they aren’t white—or at least not entirely. Only their underbelly is white. This design is shrewd, because in deep-sea water the shark’s blue-white countershading camouflages them when pursuing prey.

Great whites are one of the largest carnivorous sharks in the ocean; however, they are only sixth in overall size compared to other sharks, a fact that belies the notion of the great white as a killing leviathan. The largest sharks, which are harmless to humans, belong to the filter feeder category—the whale, the basking, and the megamouth sharks, all of whom are larger than the great white. Like great whites, the Pacific sleeper and Greenland sharks are carnivorous but larger, according to Greg Skomal. Unlike many species, where males are bigger than females, female white sharks like Mary Lee are larger than their male counterparts, which on average measure between 11 and 13 feet and weigh between 1,500 and 1,700 pounds. Mature females grow to 15 or 16 feet and can weigh up to 2,500 pounds. While males can easily reach 17 feet, it is not unusual for a female shark to grow to 20 feet in length and weigh 4,300 pounds, equal to the length and weight of an adult giraffe, as difficult as that is to imagine. A white shark caught in Cuba in 1945 measured 21 feet in length and weighed a staggering 7,300 pounds, or 3.5 tons, a weight equal to six adult grizzly bears. The reason female white sharks are larger than males is simple: as Skomal told me, females need considerable strength and abdominal space to carry their pups during the white shark’s long gestation period, all while continuing to hunt. It takes longer for a white shark to develop in utero than it does a human, mainly because once they are born, shark pups are on their own. Unlike dolphins and orca whales, which protect their babies, white sharks leave their pups to fend for themselves. The great white pups eat what they can catch, which in their infancy is fish. As white sharks mature, they start hunting seals and other larger mammals.

“[Pregnant white sharks] are older animals,” Skomal explained. “They’re in their twenties and thirties when they reproduce. And they’re not capable of reproducing until they hit those sizes and those ages. When an angler removes a young, or small, great white shark from the ocean, it has a significant impact on the population because that shark probably hasn’t lived long enough to breed.” The population replacement rate for the white shark is extremely low, which makes the species vulnerable to exploitation. “They’re maturing at a late age and only giving birth to a handful of young, most likely, every two to three years. We have to be particularly conscious of this when it comes to sustainability, conservation, and management of the species.”

While there is still no reliable data about the world’s total great white population, scientists believe that the total number is dropping, largely because of overfishing and other environmental factors. White sharks are currently listed as vulnerable, a tick above endangered, on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species.

The white shark’s vulnerability belies the popular misconception of the species as bloodthirsty man-eaters. “When people think of white sharks,” Skomal told me, “they think all kinds of things. Most of them are fairly negative, which came out of Jaws. Hollywood has done a very good job of scaring the hell out of people.”

The nearly five-decade-long counterattack against sharks is not just the result of the cultural impact of Jaws. It is also the result of the rapid expansion of the commercial fishing industry during the 1980s. These developments endanger the species and, in the process, upset the delicate balance of the marine ecosystem.

A fear of sharks has led people to seek the thrill of catching them. But what I have found out about the great white is extraordinary. In sharks and in life, fear is often the absence of knowledge. “The more people know about these animals,” Skomal said, “the more likely they are to revere them as opposed to fear them. The more we’re learning about sharks, the more we’re learning that they’re an integral part of the marine ecosystem.” Fischer and Skomal and an entire generation of marine biologists and conservationists have dedicated their careers to trying to change the public’s perception of sharks, specifically great whites, as underwater monsters.

Like most teenagers of his generation, Skomal discovered marine life from TV shows like The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau and National Geographic, which brought color images of sharks and other underwater wonders to living rooms around the world for the very first time. But what really impacted Skomal were his family vacations to the Caribbean, where he fell in love with the ocean, mesmerized at an impressionable age by coral reefs and the variegated fish species he saw scuttling about their natural environment.

“When I was, like, twelve, thirteen years old, I wanted to study sharks, but I figured by the time I got old enough to do it, it would all be done,” he said. “How naive was I?”

Later, after resolving to learn everything he could about the ocean, Skomal enrolled at the University of Rhode Island, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. He later returned to school to earn his PhD at Boston University. While searching for a full-time researching job, he volunteered at a federal laboratory. Surrounded by field scientists with years of experience, Skomal conducted scientific investigations, developing in the process an unshakable passion for great whites. In 1987, he landed a full-time job as a senior fisheries biologist at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, where he quickly realized that most of the scientific knowledge about great whites emerged from hot spots in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Fortunately, his career coincided with the return of great whites to the northeastern Atlantic Ocean, once the seal population returned. “I was at the right place at the right time,” Skomal told me. The entire Atlantic Ocean was suddenly his to explore and research, uncontested. “Many white sharks come up to Cape Cod in the summertime, and simply move in the wintertime down to the coasts of Florida and Georgia and South Carolina. But then we have a component of the population that wanders the Atlantic, and those are most intriguing to me. You know, not just the coastal migratory pattern, but the ones moving out into the central part of the Atlantic, where they’re diving to great depths.”

Like Fischer, Skomal has a nose for finding great whites. To date, he and his team have tagged and tracked more than 150 great whites and have identified approximately 350. In a 26-foot skiff, he regularly patrols the waters off Cape Cod’s Monomoy Island, an 8-mile-long run of sand extending southwest from Chatham. The island is a popular congregating spot for seals. Often, Skomal films these encounters. From his boat, he looks out for the great white’s unmistakable shadow underwater: a dark mass moving through the green water. When he sees a shark, he approaches the prow and plunges a tag into the base of the passing shark’s dorsal fin. No worse for wear, the shark swims on, unbothered.

As Skomal described it, hunting for sharks sounds routine and uneventful, like swimming laps in a pool. But it isn’t always this easy or stress-free. Once, trying to get a close-up of the shark’s face to help identify it, he attached his GoPro on a pole and plunged it into the water. He had done this scores of times but on this occasion, an 11-foot female went right for the camera. “It kept coming and then opened its mouth and bit it,” he said, calling the shark’s action exploratory, rather than predatory. If it had been the latter, he reminded me, the shark would have destroyed the camera and, in all probability, pulled Skomal into the water during their brief tug-of-war.

Skomal added that this shark was not one of the 150 sharks in the area that were already tagged by his team for research. He and his team will now review the video to look at her markings and determine if she’s brand new to the area or if she is one of the 350 sharks his team has tracked previously. These experiences and the research information that come out of this tagging program have helped to answer a number of questions about great whites, including their life expectancy, which has confounded scientists for years.

Previous studies concluded that great whites live into their twenties and thirties. However, as scientists continue to collect more information, such estimates are proving problematic. Schoolchildren know that as trees grow, they lay down rings on an annual basis. Each ring represents a year. Sharks similarly lay down band pairs of rings on their vertebrae, which is thought to be on an annual basis. While this trait was known in small to medium-large white sharks in the northwestern Atlantic, what was not known was that, after maturity, the largest sharks may experience a change in the rate of vertebral material deposition. Another difficulty scientists encountered while trying to determine a shark’s age was that some bands become too thin to read accurately.

The best scientific method to determine the life expectancy of great whites is radiocarbon dating. This well-known method uses the properties of radiocarbon (carbon-14), a radioactive isotope of carbon, to determine the age of an object. But where could scientists find the white sharks for the test? It just so happened that a lab in Narragansett, Rhode Island, contained the largest collection of vertebrae samples from white sharks caught in the northwestern Atlantic Ocean from 1967 to 2010. Using this material and the National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometry facility at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, scientists were able to determine that great white sharks can live to over seventy years,[6] which means that great whites are alive today that, as pups, heard the sound of US depth charges attacking Nazi submarines in World War II. Based on the data they collected from Mary Lee, Skomal estimated that she is in her early thirties, a woman in her prime. Because she likely has another forty years in her, if she were still online, she would have helped scientists identify her preferred breeding ground and pup nursery, which could have provided Skomal and other scientists with invaluable insights to assist with management of the species.

Tagged great whites appear to give birth in certain areas, although this process is not fully understood. Further complicating the issue is the fact that white sharks are found all over the world, which multiplies potential nursery sites exponentially. Based on tagging programs and circumstantial evidence, however, scientists are beginning to zero in on a few nurseries. Some are believed to be located off Taiwan and Japan. Another possible location is the Sea of Cortez off Mexico, because several tagged females went there from April through August, though scientists were unable to prove this hypothesis.[7] Montauk, Long Island, is likely home to a nursery, 100 miles east of Manhattan. Some organizations have tagged numerous juvenile great white sharks in this area. Given the proximity to the Long Island Sound, this site offers great white pups plenty of baitfish. When Mary Lee was pinging off near Montauk, rumors abounded that she was about to give birth.

The behavior of white sharks, however, is far from predictable. According to Skomal, there is no such thing as a typical day in the life of a great white. “When I tried to come up with the average day in the life of a white shark, I found that it’s really difficult to do,” he explained. “Now, we’ve tagged one hundred and fifty-one white sharks in the last ten years … a fairly respectable sample size for that species. It’s an elusive shark; we don’t believe its population size is very big. So, our database should give me a nice snapshot of what they’re doing. And what we’re finding out is they’re doing whatever they want. Some white sharks will hang around Cape Cod for the whole summer, and they get into a routine of just basically moving up and down the coastline over the period of three or four months. Other sharks may stop by Cape Cod before moving on up into the Gulf of Maine; other animals might only be there for just a couple of hours before heading off deep into the Atlantic Ocean. Every shark seems to be very different. And I’m not getting any real patterns that tell me what the average day in the life of a white shark is really like.”

I asked Skomal how close sharks get to shore. “We’ve tagged white sharks, literally, within feet of the shoreline … almost touching the sand of the beach itself. They are hunting in that very shallow water for seals. So there’s no doubt in my mind that they’re moving within close proximity of humans, quite possibly routinely, and they have been doing that for hundreds of years.”

So much for the great white’s reputation as an insatiable underwater assailant hell-bent on killing unsuspecting beachgoers. In fact, a great white’s proximity to land makes it more vulnerable to humans. While great whites are classified by the US government as a “prohibited species,” commercial and recreational fishermen alike can still catch white sharks as long as they don’t keep them. Usually, when a recreational fisherman encounters a white shark, the shark is feasting on a dead whale. Most recreational fishermen are content to film and photograph a great white in action, because they are a difficult and dangerous species to capture. However, some recreational fishermen do target them. White sharks are hardy animals, but if one is hooked deeply or in its gill, or banged against the side of the boat, the damage can prove lethal. Longline commercial fisheries, on the other hand, inadvertently capture white sharks as bycatch, which for the time being is simply the cost of doing business in the open seas. Because they are prohibited from keeping or selling great whites, they let them go—sometimes after the sharks are already dead. Skomal described this act as “cryptic mortality.” “The species is unquestionably vulnerable to directed exploitation,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s unclear how great whites are faring.” And there is always the situation where fishermen can get away with murder.

When a great white shark washed up on a beach in Aptos, California, the question became, how did this shark die? The nine-foot-long shark appeared healthy. As the Department of Fish and Wildlife inspected the fish, they noticed three bullet holes from a .22 caliber rifle. The case was solved only through an anonymous tipster who revealed that the shooter was a commercial fisherman, Vinh Pham. Upon questioning, he said that the shark “was disturbing his fishing activity.” The punishment for the crime of murdering a great white in cold blood—$5,000 fine and no jail time. He did not even lose his fishing license.[8] As long as our society values one of the world’s great apex predators as worth nothing more than a small fine, the killing of great whites will continue.

Aerial surveys suggest that great whites are rebounding off the northeast coast of the United States, and Skomal’s work conducting surveys in these waters since 2009 bears this out. In his first year, he spotted only five sharks in the Cape Cod area. Seven years later, in 2016, he spotted approximately 150. Still, the exact population of great whites in the United States remains unknown. Similarly, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) can’t accurately estimate the total population of great whites around the world, even though it can tabulate the populations of other vulnerable and endangered species, including snow leopards (5,000), tigers (3,000), and black rhinos (4,800). The absence of hard numbers is troubling, because without them, conservationists are unable to come up with a plan to help protect the world’s disappearing white shark population. And that population becomes increasingly vulnerable as individual sharks traverse the oceanic hemispheres; great whites like Mary Lee and Luci aren’t only record-setting divers, they’re also marathon travelers. A look into the past can explain how they became such great swimmers.

The age of the fish began about 530 million years ago, during the Cambrian explosion. Nature kept coming up with new designs, and 450 million years ago during the Silurian period, nature developed the relative to our modern sharks. For the next 150 million years, nature tinkered with, developed, and improved the sharks; evolution adjusted the jaws, molded and rounded the head, and experimented with new shark species. For example, the Helicoprion shark grew a table saw–like set of teeth on its lower jaw in the Permian period, 280 million years ago, though it became clear that this variation on the species didn’t work. During the Carboniferous period, 300 million years ago, sharks dominated the oceans and split into subgroups like skates and rays. By the Jurassic period, 200 million years ago, the predecessors of today’s sharks appeared. New species kept appearing through the ages, like Hybodus, which had horns but then went extinct. By 60 million years ago, nature had developed the sharks we recognize today. One of nature’s most enduring creatures, the shark’s design was extraordinary, allowing it to survive and rule the seas for literally millions of years as one of the world’s top apex predators.

The previous blueprint for fish required bones, along with supporting vertebrae, scales for protection from the water, and swim bladders that gave fish their remarkable buoyancy. Because all fish had to do to escape danger was to use its vertebrae to flick its tail for a quick getaway, fish brains were small. Over time, however, nature threw away this blueprint and started all over with the shark. The bones were discarded in favor of cartilage, which offered the shark structure and support, and a new material called dermal denticles replaced scales. Denticles turbocharged the shark’s speed in the ocean since they reduced resistance. While fish were good at escaping, sharks developed a brain to help become supreme hunters. Numerous popular articles have described the brain of a white shark as being the size of a walnut, a misleading comparison. The brain of an adult white shark is shaped like a Y, and from the scent-detecting bulbs to the brain stem, a shark’s brain is bigger and more complex than previously believed. In comparison, the brain of a human comprises two wizened hemispheres, roughly the size of a head of lettuce. Of course, because large animals tend to have larger brains, a more meaningful comparison is between brain weight versus body weight. The brain of a 1,000-pound great white shark can weigh 35 grams, or about 0.008 percent of its total body weight. In comparison, the human brain weighs 1,400 grams, or 1.9 percent of our total body weight. Relative to the body weight of birds and marsupials, however, the great white’s brain is large.[9]

An astonishing structure, the brain of a great white shark is composed of millions of neurons, or nerve cells, which contain supporting structures. The brain coordinates the shark’s many movements, from clenching and opening jaws that can either rip prey apart or, if the situation calls for it, delicately grasp an object, to lashing its tail to scare off a competitor. The shark’s brain is arranged in a linear fashion. Specialized regions line up like a jeweled necklace, from the brain stem to the posterior cranial nerves, which are responsible for conveying information from the shark’s inner ear, lateral line, and electrosensory systems. Moving toward the top of the brain, next is the cerebellum, where sensory inputs come together to help generate movement. A white shark’s cerebellum is well developed, which can explain the shark’s speed and reflexes. In the shark’s midbrain are the optic lobes, which process what the shark sees. A special vessel arrangement near their eyes warms them and the brain for faster processing. Another advantage of this capability is that it helps the shark travel through waters where the temperature changes very quickly.

After the midbrain is the cerebrum, where the shark thinks. In this area of the brain, home-ranging and social behavior occur. Great whites use this part of the brain to identify and track prey, process environmental markers for food sources, and recognize potential mates, to name just a few items. The cerebrum is also where the shark’s brain splits into the two cerebral hemispheres, a unique feature among vertebrates. At the top of this Y are the olfactory tracks that the shark uses to smell.[10] Because some 70 percent of the shark’s brain is dedicated to this sense, the shark is perpetually enshrouded in a world of scents. The reality is that great whites are intelligent and are endowed with a brain superior to that of the other fish.[11] For instance, salmon have a fraction of the cerebral endowment of a great white.

Denticles, which replaced the scales of fish, became the new skin for the shark. Denticles are essentially modified teeth with an inner core made up of tissue and blood covered by a hard outer layer of calcium carbonate. Each one has its own unique shape, but the basic structure is similar. Think of the design like a bicycle helmet with a round front and three main ridges flowing from front to back. Each ridge tapers into points at the tail end. The denticles are crammed together like overlapping shingles on a roof, covering the shark. If you rub your finger over a shark from head to tail, the denticles feel smooth, but run your finger in the opposite direction, and the skin is rough.

Inspired by the shark’s denticles, engineers at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have been studying and testing ways to improve the aerodynamic performance of airfoils, or wings. The engineers took a smooth airfoil and arranged 3-D printed shark denticle devices on its upper surface and investigated the effect on aerodynamic performance. Using a complex software program, engineers performed tests in water tanks and made computational analyses of fluid dynamics. They discovered that the airfoil with the attached shark denticles resulted in the formation of vortices behind the attachment. A short separation bubble appeared in its wake. The denticle is essentially a vortex generator, and these vortices are responsible for up to a 10 percent reduction in drag.[12] The Harvard engineers also discovered that the denticles enhanced lift and even helped to maintain lift at higher angles of attack. Therefore, the shark’s denticles simultaneously enhance lift and reduce drag, resulting in large lift-to-drag ratios.[13]

As this explains the shark’s lightning speed in the water, engineers are looking into copying the shark’s design and applying it to any wing on a plane, helicopter, or other aircraft. Engineers can also use the design on wind turbines to enhance their performance. In coming years, different wing shapes may appear with improved performance, and if so, society will need to thank the sharks for providing the design’s inspiration.

Besides the brain and denticles, nature made other improvements to the shark, and a significant one was the liver, which holds an oil reserve that helps sharks stay afloat and traverse long distances. Through evolution, fish came to rely on a swim bladder for buoyancy, which prevents them from wasting too much energy. A fish’s swim bladder is usually two gas-filled sacs located in its dorsal portion. However, without a swim bladder, sharks still required something to ensure buoyancy. Working double duty, an oil reserve in the shark’s liver solved the flotation problem and provided sharks with the energy to propel themselves through the water for long distances.

But other developments beyond the shark’s internal oil reserve made long-distance travel possible. The shark has pectoral fins that stick out from its side like wings on a plane. The shark uses its tail to move forward but uses its pectoral fins to pitch up or down. Although the oil in its liver allows for buoyancy, most sharks have a negative buoyancy, which means that because their bodies are denser than the fluid they replace, they have a natural tendency to sink if they’re not moving forward. The great white, however, turned this seeming disadvantage into an advantage. When great whites begin their trip with a slight downward orientation of the pectoral fins and the tail for propulsion, the negative buoyancy allows the shark to simply glide downward with minimal effort. After reaching a certain depth, the shark makes an upward adjustment with its pectoral fins and, as its tail powers the shark along, it can once again ascend. This type of swimming is known as “drift diving,” which makes the shark very effective at traveling long distances, since drift diving requires far less energy—sometimes 50 percent less than the energy required for swimming forward at a specific depth.[14]

Mary Lee, Luci, and their fellow great whites make staggeringly long voyages around the world this way. Great whites have been tracked going from Mexico to the Hawaiian Islands and back again. As any car owner knows, a trip of this length would require a lot of stops at the gas station. In fact, a typical car would have to stop and fill up the gas tank thirty-seven times for a comparable journey. Where can the sharks pull over and refuel? As it turns out, the sharks don’t hunt on these migrations, so they rely on internal stores of energy. Unlike whales and terrestrial animals that can draw from energy stored in blubber or fat during long-distance migrations, sharks don’t carry blubber; they bulge with muscles, like Olympic swimmers. To travel long distances, sharks rely on their body oil, which is held in the liver like a giant storage tank. A shark’s liver, which sits in the abdominal cavity, is huge, extending roughly from the shark’s esophagus to its pelvic fin. Oil in the liver accounts for a quarter of the weight of a great white, which means a 2,000-pound great white is carrying 500 pounds of oil, or roughly 60 gallons of oil, more than twice the fuel-tank capacity in a Cadillac Escalade.

Before NIWA started tagging sharks in 2012, they thought that great white sharks lived in cold water only. But after five years of diligent work, they now know that great whites in New Zealand migrate to tropical waters in winter, abandoning the area between April and September for warmer temperatures in the north. In migrating these distances, Shack and other great whites confirm they are remarkable travelers and superb at long-distance migrations that can match the travels of whale species like the grays and humpbacks. The maximum distance one New Zealand shark migrated in winter was 2,000 miles. The tag data reveal that great whites routinely travel 100 miles a day, whereas humans walk an average of 2.5 miles a day.

Now that science can track where the sharks travel, the information can be of great importance in helping protect and manage shark populations. Perhaps the best way to understand this is through the life-and-death experiences of whales in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, 25 miles east of Boston, between Cape Ann and Cape Cod in Massachusetts Bay. This 842-square-mile federally protected marine sanctuary is a safe haven for whales and other marine species. When scientists were tracking humpback and right whales in the sanctuary, however, they discovered that the whales’ path crossed against ships entering and leaving Boston Harbor. As a result, whales were being killed by ship strikes. Authorities changed the shipping lanes, increasing shipping costs but dramatically reducing whale fatalities. The same analogy applies here to the sharks. By knowing the migrations of tagged sharks, we can use emerging information about mating and breeding areas to protect the species.

A similar rush to understand great whites and their migrations is underway in the Pacific, where great whites feast on a rich diet of blubbery elephant seals and sea lions along California’s central coast. For reasons that remain unclear, however, great whites make a strange migration in the spring. Like sailors following a siren call, the sharks leave behind the coast’s rich cornucopia of blubber for a patch of territory more than 1,000 miles away, halfway between the Baja Peninsula and Hawaii.[15] Nicknamed the White Shark Café, this area, which is approximately the size of the state of Colorado, hosts what some people have started to refer to as Burning Man for sharks. One plausible explanation for the sharks’ mysterious journey is sex. In some species, females visit an area to find a mate in what is called “lekking.” (A “lek” is an aggregation of males.) In the Café, where the Pacific’s chlorophyll-low waters offer great clarity, female white sharks check out male sharks, specifically their fins and muscle tone. To show off, male sharks execute rapid oscillating diving patterns known as “bounce dives,” which require great strength and stamina. The shark will dive at night 500 feet straight down before returning back to the surface, creating a birdlike V-shaped pattern in the water. During the day, sharks increase these dives to 1,500 feet below the surface. One industrious male completed ninety-six dives in a single twenty-four-hour period, and the males keep up this behavior for three months inside the Café. The females watch this behavior and select the most prepossessing male. At the same time, the males might be moving at various depths to find the female pheromones, which they can track to their source and make a display of beautiful dives to woo the female.

Like most other reasons for doing something, if it isn’t for sex, it’s probably for food. It’s entirely possible female white sharks headed there as culinary tourists, innocently engaging in foraging behavior, until the males showed up and turned the Café into a pickup bar. Still, scientists point out that the females do not make the same bounce dives as the males, and though humans have explored only 5 percent of the world’s oceans, the proponents of the sex theory are confident that the Café isn’t home to a unique food resource that would draw females back and forth from California, an exhausting round trip totaling 5,000 miles, approximately 700 miles farther than the wildebeest’s annual grass-munching trek across eastern Africa. At this stage in the research, no definitive conclusion has been reached.[16] Foraging, mating, and—like their Burning Man counterparts—communing as one species all remain under consideration. Perhaps it’s all three at once.

To better understand the sharks in this area—and to protect great whites on the high seas—scientists have descended on this site with an armada of ships and tools. Reflecting the importance of this area, a 2016 UNESCO/IUCN report identified the White Shark Café as a potential World Heritage Site.[17] If this site is approved, great whites will have an area protected from fishing vessels, which will give the species a better chance for survival. Of course, as we’ll learn later, fishing fleets from around the world want to exploit this area of the Pacific. Given the increased vulnerability of the great white, it would be a double tragedy if fishing activities in protected areas interfered with the mating of the species. Like the work in the Atlantic with Mary Lee, the more knowledge society has about great whites, the greater the likelihood that the proposed fishing regulations will be effective. The race is on between the industrial fishing fleets of the world and the scientists to unravel the mysteries in order to implement the optimum regulatory fishing decisions.

In the meantime, scientists like Greg Skomal continue to tag and track great whites to gather as much information as they can, hoping a currently unknown shark, just waiting to be discovered, can offer unimagined insights—just as Mary Lee did before she went offline.

MARY LEE’S DISAPPEARANCE REMAINS A MYSTERY, AND IT ALWAYS will, though Chris Fischer doesn’t believe a commercial fishing vessel got her. Nor does he worry about a recreational angler cosplaying Quint from Jaws. Neither scenario is likely, he said. “Mary Lee’s the queen of the ocean. She’s a mature white shark that absolutely dominates wherever she goes.” Fischer and Skomal both believe that, after five years, the battery in Mary Lee’s tag simply ran out of juice. Like them, I often imagine Mary Lee is still out there. Perhaps she found a mate and delivered another litter of pups, somewhere off Montauk—close to the likes of Julianne Moore, Robert De Niro, and other A-list celebrities in the Hamptons, who are likely unaware of the royalty swimming in the waters nearby: the great white whose secrets revealed to scientists how to start safeguarding the ocean and its underwater denizens for future generations.

CHAPTER 2

MAKOS, THE F-35 OF SHARKS

THE WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION (WHOI) is the largest independent oceanographic research institution in the United States, with more than a thousand staff members. Established in 1930 in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, WHOI operates ships around the world, where scientists and engineers work to understand the ocean and its relationship to the rest of the planet. I went there to meet Jelle Atema, an expert in shark sense.

Born in the Netherlands, Atema whittled flutes out of wood as a boy and observed animals in the nearby woods, developing at an early age a love of music and nature, neither of which he’s been able to shake. Later, he studied biology at Utrecht University, one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands, before earning his PhD at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1970. Four years later, he joined the faculty at Boston University’s Department of Biology and Marine Program, where he matured into a tenured professor, internationally renowned biologist, and, in his spare time, a world-class flutist, performing at venues throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. It’s no wonder, then, that Atema now goes by the nickname “The Original,” a sobriquet he picked up in 2017, when attendees at an annual ocean conference noted that Atema was the only researcher present who had attended the inaugural conference forty years earlier.

Atema has published 175 papers at the WHOI—all of which have focused on how aquatic animals employ their underwater senses. Through the years, sharks have proved to be a particular interest of his, mostly because the species is constantly in search of prey, which makes their individual senses an invaluable source of information. Like most animals, sharks rely on their acute senses of scent and sight, taste and hearing, to move about. But unlike other animals, sharks are equipped with something called “flow detection,” a keen ability to track trace odors left in the wake of a prey. Though it’s long been rumored that a shark can detect a single drop of blood a mile away, Atema told me this overstates the powers of a shark’s olfactory system—not to mention the primary laws of physics. For the odor of a single drop of blood to reach a shark, it would have to remain intact. Anyone who’s ever cut themselves shaving knows that blood quickly dissolves in water. Still, Atema told me, “if a lot of blood gets into the water, and a moderately diluted drop of it reaches the shark a mile away, the shark can probably locate the source” by following the flow patterns across 5,280 feet underwater. Odor alone, though, isn’t enough for a predator to locate its prey, because odors can’t indicate the direction of their origin. However, as animals move through the water, they leave behind an odor trail, inadvertently scenting the water in much the same way humans and other animals coat the air with their respective odors when they move across land. Called “odor plumes,” these flavor-scented eddies are complex three-dimensional structures that attach to water particles. Picture the oily residue in the wake of a moving boat. Many sea animals use these swirling eddies of water to locate prey, potential mates, and, when they’re ready to call it a day, the location of their homes. Because odor reaches each nostril at different times, sharks and other aquatic animals can determine the location of the plume and thus which direction to swim toward.

In addition to their noses, sharks use their skin to find prey. A shark’s lateral line, a racing stripe of an organ that runs the length of a shark’s body and across its head, has evolved with breathtaking accuracy. One can make out the thin lines in profile photos of sharks. With exquisite sensitivity, the lines can detect movement, vibration, and pressure gradients in the surrounding seawater. Filled with fluid, the canal-like lateral lines are sheathed with epithelial cells with short hairs called “cilia” that sway within the fluid when they come in contact with water motion. Sharks can detect vibrations as low as 1 hertz. The number of hertz equals the number of cycles per second. The human hearing organ operates in a higher bandwidth at roughly 20 to 20,000 hertz and peaks in the 300 hertz range while sharks have greater sensitivity and can operate at a lower bandwidth. Another way of stating this capability is that sharks can detect motion as minuscule as the width of an atom. Lateral lines convert the movement of the cilia into electrical impulses. The shark’s brain processes this information to give directional information.

To test the accuracy of lateral lines, a German experimenter manufactured a trail in a swimming pool using a toy boat and set a trained seal after it. (While seals lack a lateral line, they do have whiskers, and lateral lines and whiskers work in a similar manner.) The manufactured trail featured a 90-degree angle—a hard right-hand turn. In a burst of creativity, the experimenter blindfolded the seal, hypothesizing that, even hunting blind, the seal would stay locked on to the turbulence of the trail through the turn. It did.[1] Like the inspired experimenter, Atema has spent years conducting original research about the uncanny underwater sensing abilities of aquatic animals. He started with sharks and then moved on to lobsters and other aquatic animals. In his shark research over the past fifteen years, he has focused his work at WHOI and Boston University, trying to figure out exactly how sharks employ lateral lines to sense and locate prey, eventually proving that sharks rely on the deadly one-two punch of their lateral lines and olfactory senses to hunt. He published his findings in a seminal 2014 paper, which included a schematic of how shark senses operate, separately and in tandem, during a hunt.[2]

Atema was able to piece together why sharks make mistakes and on rare occasions accidentally bite humans. A shark will make visual contact with its prey before striking. Underwater, visibility is limited and varies considerably based on conditions. On sunny days, for instance, when the water is clear, a shark can see the length of a football field. Conversely, on cloudy days, when the water is churned and murky, a shark might only be able to see a few feet in front of its nose. Under these conditions, a shark may not be able to know precisely what it is attacking, which explains why sharks sometimes mistake surfers for seals.

Sharks have the ability to sense small changes in electrical fields in the water. This sense, called “electroreception,” is vital to understanding sharks’ remarkable hunting skills. Electroreception occurs in organs called the “ampullae of Lorenzini,” a series of dark pores leading to canals (ampullae) that are scattered under the skin across a shark’s head. They allow the shark to sense electrical pulses of fish. Named after Stefano Lorenzini, an Italian physician and noted ichthyologist who examined shark cadavers in seventeenth-century Florence, these pores reminded Lorenzini of canals (ampullae in Latin), hence the name. Lorenzini speculated that they may be chemoreceptive, but Atema’s mentor in the Netherlands, a man named Adrianus Kalmijn, demonstrated their electrical function in the 1960s. At the same time, Kalmijn, Atema, and other students determined the sensitivity of the shark’s lateral line to water motion. Sharks typically have thousands of electro pores, a number that remains fixed throughout the shark’s life.[3] The scalloped hammerhead shark, for example, has more than three thousand electro pores. The exact arrangement of the canals varies from shark species to shark species.

Part of the excitement about these discoveries is that the new information is overthrowing old assumptions about sharks. For instance, it was once believed that when an animal’s muscle contracted, it created a low-power electrical field, which the shark picked up. Scientists then discovered that all living tissue generates a tiny electrical field in seawater. The electrical resistance of an object is a measure of its opposition to the flow of the electrical current. Because the skin of a fish or a sea lion offers substantial electrical resistance, the internal electrical field flows out of the mouth and anus, two low-resistance areas, creating a dipole field that sharks can detect, though that field is minuscule. Muscles and nerves also generate electrical fields, but these are not the main source of detection.[4] A shark’s ability to pick up extremely low voltages is extraordinary: the threshold of sensitivity is as low as 15 billionths of a volt.[5] A shark, whose tissue is only flesh and blood, matches humankind’s most technologically advanced instruments for detecting electric fields. Injured or sick fish produce stronger electrical fields, but even these fields are faint. Besides predation, this system is also believed to help sharks navigate by sensing the earth’s electromagnetic fields.

A shark’s bite must be exquisitely timed, and the ampullae are key to this timing. Many attacks between hunter and hunted end in failure. If the bite is off a millisecond, the predator will miss its prey. The ampullae, which are only effective at distances of 3 feet or less, are used in the final stages of the attack. Atema’s 2014 paper demonstrated that, regardless of species, virtually all sharks hunt the same way—from the relatively small dogfish shark to the mako, one of the top apex hunters in the ocean.

Spanning the globe, makos are found everywhere, from Montauk to Mumbai, patrolling tropical and temperate waters alike. The mako is one of the most remarkable and unique sharks in the ocean. The word “mako” is a Maori word, though no one can say with any certainty what it means. Though many believe it’s a corruption of “mackerel,” it’s more likely simply the name for the shark. The mako has a dramatic contrast between the vibrant ultramarine color on its dorsal surface and its snowy white underbelly, which camouflages the mako from prey above and below. Between the two, alongside the shark’s body, runs a band of reflective silver.

The mako’s countenance is severe, and its eyes are black with purpose. Its teeth, which flash like a dagger upon coming into view, are not serrated like the teeth of the great white and other sharks. They are designed to grab and hold prey, not to tear flesh into pieces. Sharks do not chew their food. The teeth of most sharks are slanted inward when the mouth is closed, but they straighten when the jaw opens. The mako’s teeth, however, remain upright in the bottom jaw, readying them for action.

Three characteristics define mako sharks: intelligence, speed, and toughness. As a species, a mako is basically a fearless, seagoing linebacker on a Fulbright scholarship.

The mako has one of the largest brain-to-body ratios of all the fish in the ocean, which has prompted several international tests to determine a mako’s intelligence and ability to identify objects. A New Zealand scientist demonstrated that the mako can differentiate items and recognize shapes. Perhaps more telling, the sharks involved in the study, after initial caution, started to recognize the scientists as nonthreatening coinhabitants of the water. They allowed scientists to restrain them briefly, and even touch them.[6]

A second defining characteristic of the mako is its speed. Makos can grow to weigh more than 1,000 pounds. Despite its significant weight, the mako is the fastest shark in the ocean. Researchers have clocked the great white at 30 miles per hour, but the shortfin mako can achieve extended bursts of 45 miles per hour. Some people claim makos can reach 60 miles per hour, although scientists consider these estimates excessive. (While the mako beats out all other sharks, the sailfish is the fastest fish in the ocean, clocking 65 miles per hour, the speed limit on the New Jersey Turnpike.) The mako’s speed is a product of its shape: a perfectly proportioned cylinder that reduces resistance. The mako’s head narrows to a single point, creating a sharp snout that helps the shark slice through the water.

The mako also generates speed across long distances because of its unique tail and musculature. Although the tail of every shark species is vertical—as opposed to the horizontally aligned tails of dolphins—each shark features a distinctive tail, or caudal, fin. In most sharks, the caudal fin’s upper lobe is longer than the fin’s lower lobe. This is true of the thresher shark. The mako, however, is armed with upper and lower lobes equal in length. At the same time, the mako’s red muscles, which process the transportation of hemoglobin through red blood cells, run up and down both sides of its body. While red muscles help sharks swim continuously, the location of the mako’s red muscles is a significant distinction. Among sharks, only the great white shares a similar location of red muscles. Like a strong core in humans, the red muscles help steady the body, limiting wasted lateral movements. Various motion studies show that the body of a mako remains fairly stable when it swims. This lack of lateral movement preserves kinetic energy. The mako uses this excess energy to swing the equal lobes of its caudal tail side to side in wider, more efficient arcs than other species. Together, the mako’s symmetrical caudal fin and the location of its red muscles allow the mako to generate and sustain such high speeds over long distances.

Another boost to speed comes from the mako’s massive gills, which, if laid out flat, would cover a surface area of 56 square feet, and are nearly three times larger than the gills of a blue shark. These massive gills filter and process large quantities of oxygen-rich seawater to power the muscles. And, because makos are endothermic, they can increase their body temperature—sometimes to as much as 20°F warmer than the surrounding water. Thanks to an internal network of blood vessels, the warm blood coming from their large swimming muscles symbiotically transfer heat to the cold blood operating the gills, which in turn delivers some much-needed oxygen back to the swimming muscles. Unlike most cold-blooded animals, including most fish, which dissipate heat out of the gills, the warm-blooded mako holds on to most of this heat, circulating it back through the body. The additional heat makes their muscles more effective—a 20°F increase in body temperature allows a threefold increase in muscle power[7]—rivaling only great whites in this ability.

Atema pointed out another advantage to being warm-blooded: “It increases sensory perception and brain function.” The mako is nearly unmatched in its dominion.

The mako’s speed allows it to prey on a wide diet: mackerel, billfish, and even other sharks. However, in deep waters, makos turn to tuna, a much more difficult prey. Catching tuna, which swim like underwater silver bullets through the blue netherworld, presents a unique challenge for makos and, for humans, a fascinating glimpse into the wonders of evolution. To catch tuna, makos had to develop speed, which in turn put pressure on tuna to respond. Like the gazelle and the cheetah, tuna and makos battled back and forth for supremacy and the edge for survival. Evolution worked to develop the adaptations for each species to survive, but instead of diverging, the two converged. Remarkably, tuna and mako morphed into near replicas of each other, as if the gazelle grew the limbs of a cheetah. They have similarly shaped tails, where the upper and lower lobes are the same size. Both have horizontal keels that act like small fins; these are shaped in a way that complements both species’ speed with stop-on-a-dime levels of maneuverability.[8] Both developed the ability to warm their blood.

The third characteristic that defines makos is their toughness. They have the strength for sprints and the stamina to sustain the 6,000-mile round trip across the Atlantic between the United States and Britain. More important, they fight like a prize fighter and have the heart to fight to the death. Hooked by fishermen, makos jump completely out of the water, an act of athleticism rivaled only by great whites. To exit the water, the mako needs a starting velocity of 22 miles per hour. As its speed hits 45 miles an hour, the mako can jump 15 to 20 feet, exceeding Michael Jordan’s vertical jump of 48 inches.

The sensors jammed into a mako shark’s head resemble the cockpit of the F-35 fighter jet. The mako’s sensors are equal in sophistication to the fighter jet’s advanced systems except they are bundled in nerves, flesh, and blood.

Combined, these three characteristics—intelligence, speed, and toughness—make makos one of the world’s greatest apex predators.

Here is a true story of the battle between a mako and a sea lion, one of the largest mammals in the ocean. The story is informed by Atema’s detailed, scientific explanation, based on his decades of studying the underwater-sensing abilities of these sharks.

Off Los Angeles, an angler landed the largest mako ever caught, a record shortfin weighing in at 1,323 pounds and measuring 12 feet long. The angler donated the shark to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which in turn autopsied it. When NOAA scientists examined its stomach contents, they found in the shark’s belly a California sea lion,[9] swallowed whole a week earlier. It takes time to fully digest such prey. The sea lion’s head, with its eyeballs, whiskers, and teeth, was still clearly discernible. Its winged flippers and dog-like head were pocked with wounds from the shark’s pointed teeth. The shark’s stomach juices had eaten away most, but not all, of the sea lion’s skin. The seal’s rib cage and other bones were still intact, waiting for the shark to slowly dissolve them.

To catch the sea lion, this mako required all of its skill, cunning, and strength. Endowed with incredible strength and world-class speed, sea lions are also armed with razor-sharp teeth and ferocious, powerful jaws. Sea lions can weigh as much as 800 pounds and can travel at speeds of 25 to 30 miles per hour. With a short turning radius and powerful muscles, they can catch up to 50 pounds of fish a day, including species as large and fast as tuna. Sea lions are a worthy match for makos.

Here is a dramatic reconstruction of the battle. This mako usually patrolled far out at sea, but on this day it stayed close to the Los Angeles shoreline for some reason. In the vicinity, a large sea lion, hugging the coast, was making its daily rounds for fish not far from south Los Angeles’s Huntington Beach. The sea lion broke the surface for air and dove back down. This sound did not attract the mako. Instead, it was the sea lion’s odor, which the mako detected about a third of a mile away. Gliding along the coast, the mako followed the odor plume, cutting west when the sea lion cut west, unaware that the ocean’s most deadly and relentless hunter was tracking it for a kill. When the sea lion broke the surface again for a gulp of air, the shark followed, its dorsal fin breaching the surface in the same place for a brief moment before submerging again in pursuit of the sea lion among the shadows of the green kelp beds. Without any visual clues, the mako closed the distance from half a mile to less than a quarter of a mile, using its sense of smell and its lateral lines to track its unsuspecting prey.

After half an hour, the shark finally gained a visual of the sea lion, which meant that the mako was near enough for the sea lion to recognize it. Fear released power, and, fighting for its life, the sea lion soared like a rocket, flipping and undulating to evade the mako. Though the sea lion likely reached speeds as high as 30 miles per hour, the mako was able to keep pace, using its secondary dorsal fin to turn in tandem with the sea lion and pull within 3 feet of it. Like an F-35 pilot with a missile guidance system, the mako’s ampullae sensed the sea lion’s electrical field, its large brain ablaze with the signals it received from its muscles and pectoral and caudal fins. With one last lunge, the ampullae-directed jaws tore into the sea lion’s rib cage. Red blood swirled in the blue water. The sea lion lashed back at the shark and, in a futile attempt to break free, tried to bite the shark with its formidable teeth, though it couldn’t penetrate the denticles of the mako’s rough skin. Finally, after twenty minutes and a half mile, the mako swallowed the sea lion whole.

In this attack, all the mako’s senses came into play, from the moment it sensed the odor to the moment of the final bite. The mako was just too strong and quick for the sea lion, an epic battle between species that has been waging for eons, since the Silurian period—prey and predator battling for survival and evolving over millions of years to create even a small edge that might mean the difference between life and death. In the evolutionary process, nature has created a dazzling array of species, each with its own remarkable adaptations. Equally important, nature maintains an exquisite balance among species, which keeps the system intact, a dynamic equilibrium within an ecosystem in which the diversity and population of animals remain relatively stable. If too many sea lions survive, they feast on too many fish, disrupting the balance of the surrounding ecosystem. The makos maintain this delicate balance as apex predators.

To humans, it may seem cruel for the sea lion to be eaten alive, but that is nature’s way. An efficient and quick death is perhaps better than suffering. When the sea lion disappeared into the mako’s cavernous maw, it should have been forever, but it wasn’t. A week later, another apex predator entered that same area. A sports fisherman, chartering a boat with state-of-the-art electronics, a large bait capacity, and powerful twin diesel engines, let out his fishing line just outside the Los Angeles Harbor and hooked the mako. As soon as the mako clamped down on the hook, it realized its mistake and made a run for it. The reel sang as the line tore through the rod’s tip and into the water. The shark took out a quarter of a mile of fishing line. As the struggle continued, the shark, in an attempt to spit out the hook, leaped over 20 feet out of the water, fighting for its life. Over the next hour, as the fisherman struggled to reel in the mako, it executed five leaps.

Finally, after two and a half hours, the fisherman hauled the exhausted mako close to the boat, and one of the crew yanked the shark aboard with a large gaff hook. The crew, captain, and fisherman all gasped in shock at the size of the mako. Large makos are typically 8 or 9 feet long, but this one was 12 feet. Impressed with his catch, the captain took the mako to a special weigh yard, where a certified weighmaster registered it at 1,323 pounds, 102 pounds heavier than the previous world record for a shortfin mako shark caught off the coast of Chatham, Massachusetts.

According to California law, a sports fisherman cannot sell shark meat. He or she can consume it, however, for him- or herself, or donate the shark for research. At the NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center, the mako sat on a table, waiting to be autopsied. The specialist came in, sliced the mako to get to the stomach contents, and removed the sea lion from the shark’s belly. A week after the epic battle, hunted and hunter both were dead.

Anglers pursue makos because their dreams of an epic battle with the big shark can turn into reality. Makos charge boats, sometimes jumping right into them. In mako fishing, you might lose not only your fish but also your rod or even your arm. This big game fishing carries a real element of personal danger.

For anglers, the mako is the prize shark to catch; the fight it puts up is legendary. History is replete with epic battles like the one between an angler and a mako off Nantucket. The mako flew out of the water and into the boat and whacked the fisherman across the ribs and stomach. Thrown almost the entire length of his 13-foot boat, the fisherman found himself forced against the cabin door, the wind knocked out of him. Gathering himself, he looked down; 8 inches from his left foot was the gaping mouth of a 286-pound mako, its rows of razor-sharp teeth exposed. The shark, it seemed to the stunned fisherman, was eyeballing him, trying to gauge whether he was predator or prey. Suddenly, the shark came to life and, for the most terrifying two to three minutes of the fisherman’s life, started chasing him around the cramped cockpit. The fisherman grabbed a baseball bat and struck the mako, which only emboldened the shark. Finally, after six blows, the fisherman killed the mako, though not without first enduring a litany of injuries, including three fractured ribs and a lacerated elbow.[10]

Here is another story from one of the most famous shark fishermen of all time, Frank Mundus, the inspiration for the Quint character in Peter Benchley’s Jaws. His story takes place on a fishing trip in Brielle, New Jersey.

As the mako zoomed through the air toward our boat on a parabolic trajectory, he came down squarely across one of the rods. Down the rod slid the shark’s bulk shearing off the rod guides as it went. The startled fisherman, seeing a few hundred pounds of mako about to be deposited in his lap, had the presence of mind to get the hell out of there. He jumped out of the fishing chair, going over backward, and landed on his head on the deck, almost breaking his neck. The mako slid into the cockpit and promptly took over.

Pandemonium broke loose. The shark went berserk. Bouncing and twisting violently, he slammed his way from gunnel to gunnel. He smashed fishing chairs; he sent chum cans flying to spew the contents all over the place. All hands beat a hasty retreat to the cabin and barricaded themselves behind the companionway door. Seconds later the mako crashed against the door knocking its knob out by the roots.[11]

In my travels, I heard a more recent—and much more sinister—take on a familiar tale. In 2017, three men—Michael Wenzel, 21, Robert Lee Benac, 28, and Spencer Heintz, 23—gassed up a high-speed boat and headed out to fish. Along with a case of beer, they took along a revolver and 50 feet of rope, hell-bent on catching a mako in Tampa Bay.

It wasn’t long before the three men caught a mako. As they reeled it in, they brought it alongside the boat. Exhausted after its struggle, the shark was moving slowly, like a punch-drunk boxer in the fifteenth round. Wenzel went over to the boat’s helm and removed the gun from a small cabinet. Aiming the muzzle at the shark, he pulled the trigger. A bullet ripped through the shark’s sandpaper-like skin, lodging in its liver. Because sharks are powerful animals, a single gunshot isn’t always enough to kill them, at least not right away, which gave the men some time for “fun.” It was time to teach this shark a lesson.

Next, they pulled out the rope and tied one end around the tail of the shark and the other around a cleat at the stern. Wenzel returned to the helm and gunned the engine, dragging the shark at 40 knots in the wake of the boat for more than five minutes.

The three men took a video of the ordeal. In the video, Wenzel, Benac, and Heintz are laughing and smiling as the shark struggles in the water. The ordeal and gunshot wound are too much for the shark, and it ultimately dies under this torture. The men hold up what is left of the carcass to the camera: a heap of blood and tissue and, because most of the shark’s skin was torn apart, exposed cartilage.

The men were proud of what they had done. To show off, they sent the video to Mark Quartiano, a legendary charter fisherman in Miami known as Mark the Shark. Quartiano takes people out specifically to catch sharks, and by his own account he has killed hundreds of them. Yet after viewing the video, he was filled with outrage. “I was horrified,” Quartiano told CNN. “I’ve been shark fishing for fifty years, and I’ve never seen a disrespect for an animal my entire career that was that evil.”[12] Quartiano said he decided to publish the video to Instagram, so the fishermen could be identified and caught. Under the hashtags #sowrong and #notcool, the video racked up thousands of views. It attracted the attention of Florida wildlife officials, who began an investigation. Working with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the Hillsborough County State Attorney’s Office charged two of the men, Wenzel and Benac, with two separate charges of aggravated animal cruelty, a third-degree felony, and a misdemeanor charge of using an illegal method to take a shark. In his police photo, Wenzel is smiling.[13] Florida governor Rick Scott said he wanted laws to prevent “such inhumane acts.”[14] (As of this writing, there has been no court decision regarding guilt or innocence.) The men who tortured the shark were shocked that Quartiano had, in their eyes, betrayed them. In disgust, they hurled at him what they considered the ultimate insult; they called him “a PETA-lover.”

I met Mark the Shark in his office, which is located on the banks of Biscayne Bay, directly across from downtown Miami. Dangling from the ceiling were scores of shark jaws, turned white with age and filled with multiple rows of enormous jagged teeth. Jaws more than a couple of feet wide meant those sharks must have been 20 feet long, if not more.

Quartiano is a muscular, powerfully built man with blond hair and blue eyes. In a past life, he could have been a Viking raider, or in a more recent one, a WWE wrestler. He considers his boat the best office in the world. We talked about his business and, as he describes it, his role as the “last shark hunter on the planet.” He told me, “Some charter guys don’t even want to go shark fishing anymore because there’s just so many restrictions on these fish. Doesn’t even pay when they get the fuel and they got their boat and they can’t catch a fish and keep it. It doesn’t make any sense for some of these guys.”

Quartiano views his job as being to catch the largest fish in the ocean for clients who come from all over the world.

“We take out every kind of person,” he said. “Right now, we’re taking out a lot of kids. The new generation is fascinated with sharks. And we can let them go or tag them, and it’s an experience these kids will never forget.” He added, “Then other clients are the trophy hunters who yearn to catch a big shark—a hammerhead, a big tiger, or a big thresher shark. Something big.”

Due to the Gulf Stream, the Miami area is a highly productive fishing ground, which means it’s also a rich territory for sharks. The Gulf Stream, a warm water current, originates in the Caribbean and travels all the way to Europe, distributing the warmth from the equator to the northern reaches of the planet. The Gulf Stream creates the mild, wet winter for Europe, and without it, continental winters would be much colder. The Gulf Stream also acts like a giant highway for fish traveling from the Caribbean up to the Gulf of Maine. Some species of Caribbean fish, like triggerfish and mahi-mahi, inadvertently get sucked into the current and end up off the coast of Massachusetts and New York, falling victim to the Atlantic’s icy waters in winter. In addition to the Gulf Stream, Miami possesses some of the best reefs in the world, which are situated only a mile or two from shore. The twin presence of large reefs and the Gulf Stream attracts big game fish. This cornucopia of trophy fish like sharks brings in fishermen from all over the country.

When I asked him about his reputation, he shook his head. “Mainly, a lot of people think that I’m just going out there and killing everything that swims, and [that’s not the] case at all. I mean, we catch and tag so many fish all year long. Nobody wants to hear that part.”

Clients make the ultimate decision about the fate of the shark, according to Quartiano. “They’re the ones that say, ‘Mark, I want to kill that fish. I want to put that fish and those jaws on my wall.’ A lot of groups do put pressure on me, as far as the catch and release. But again, a lot of these fish aren’t going to survive when you catch them. Unfortunately, they’re gonna die on the line. So, really, if you care about these animals, you just leave them alone.”

I asked him what has happened to the shark population over his career. “The commercial fishermen definitely have had an impact on the shark population over the last twenty years or so,” he told me. “We used to guarantee our customers a shark; otherwise, they wouldn’t pay. Now, because of all the pressure on the sharks in this area, we can’t do that.”

Quartiano doesn’t think putting pressure on recreational fishermen to cut back their fishing is going to replenish the shark population. “It’s the commercial guys that wipe out just about everything, with their indiscriminate killing of everything. The bycatch is enormous and is just tossed back into the sea. Stop or just cut down the commercial fishing on some of these big game fish and we’ll be fine.”

I did some fact checking on Mark the Shark’s statement, and while statistics are not readily available for recreational shark fishing, it can have a significant impact on fish populations and sometimes even more so than commercial fishing; in 2013, the annual landings of sharks in recreational fishing (4.5 million pounds) exceeded that of the commercial sector (3 million pounds).[15] One research paper studying the impact of recreational fishing on sharks concluded that this trophy-hunting activity presents a growing risk to shark populations.[16] In spite of this concern, as long as the killing of sharks is romanticized and celebrated, Mark the Shark will continue to have a business, and anglers around the world will continue to make sport of hunting sharks, a sanctioned pastime that kills thousands of sharks every year.

Some conservationists in California were dismayed when the record-breaking 1,323-pound mako was destroyed instead of released. Unlike great whites, makos are considered “endangered” on the IUCN’s Red List. One reason they are endangered is that makos need an extended time to reach sexual maturity. Female makos reach sexual maturity at age eighteen. By this time they have usually grown to 10 feet in length, big enough to carry shark pups over their fifteen-to-eighteen-month gestation period, after which the female gives birth to a litter of four to twenty-five offspring.

Another reason the population grows slowly is that these animals do not breed that often. Males and females converge to mate only between late summer and early fall. Female makos wait about eighteen months after giving birth to get pregnant again because the pregnancy is so stressful. Therefore, females only reproduce every two or three years. As a result of this breeding pattern and overfishing, the species has been struggling. They often end up trapped in gill nets, snatched up by longlines as bycatch, and killed in shark tournaments like the one I witnessed in Montauk, which places further pressure on the shark.

Because I wanted to understand the fascination with killing sharks for sport, I revisited a mako-only shark tournament in Montauk, the Super Bowl of shark contests. There I met a kindly gentleman I’ll call Tom, a longtime veteran of these tournaments. Tom was in his early sixties and had been a fisherman almost his whole life. He explained how the tournaments operate. Fishermen pay an entry fee to participate, usually $975 to $1,000. Participation doesn’t require qualification or technical skill, just access to a boat and some fishing tackle. Fishermen vie against one another in different categories, including species and size: largest shark overall, the largest mako, the largest thresher, and so on through the water’s numerous shark species. The winner of each category receives a trophy and prize money, which the tournament director presents at the end of the tournament. “The fishermen aren’t just interested in catching a shark,” Tom told me. “They want to spice things up, and the way to do that is to add an extra element of fun.”

And there’s no better way to have fun than gambling, according to Tom. The night before the competition begins, fishermen gather for a celebratory dinner, typically at one of the restaurants along Montauk’s marina, where they wager on the weekend’s outcome. Rounds of drinks loosen lips, and boasting loosens the fishermen’s wallets, kicking off a betting frenzy. While different types of betting are popular at tournaments up and down the Atlantic, the preferred game here is the Calcutta auction, in which the participants auction off the boats. Whoever bids the highest for a boat then “owns” it throughout the weekend tournament. If that boat catches the largest shark, or the largest shark in a specific category, the “owner” is entitled to a portion of the prize money and the betting pool. “Someone can buy their own boat or someone else’s boat,” Tom said. The boat owners can each wager anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000. Adding up all the bets from all the boats means that the prize money can total half a million dollars or more.

With that much money at stake, the temptation to cheat is great. The participants realize that some extra help can earn them tens of thousands of dollars. One way some cheat is to add lead weights inside the fish. Another 50 pounds on the scale can tip the shark into the winner’s circle. This approach is risky because it is easy to spot, so some fishermen resort to other measures, such as adding water into the guts of the fish. Water weighs over 8 pounds per gallon, so this approach can give a dishonest team that crucial edge. Unsuspecting judges can easily miss this, but the more seasoned ones will make sure that all excess water has been drained from the shark’s body cavity. Another nefarious trick is to purchase a large shark from a commercial trawler, which are prohibited from entering the tournament but often have unwanted sharks.

The tournament has a time limit: the teams have to be back at the dock at 6 p.m. unless they radio in that they are at the inlet. The more time out, the better the odds of catching something, so some teams will radio at 6 p.m. that they are at the inlet when they are, in reality, still far at sea in the prime fishing grounds. Then they will run the engines flat out to get back within a reasonable time.

To experience the tournament firsthand—and to film it as part of a documentary I was making about shark hunting—I hitched a ride on one of the competing boats. Shortly after six in the morning, my camera crew and I arrived at the dock. It was a gorgeous June morning, the sun already bright above the horizon, and the sky had a touch of pink against the bottom of the cumulus clouds above. The boat’s captain, whom I’ll call Stan, welcomed us aboard. A happy, heavyset man in his fifties, Stan sported a neatly trimmed goatee and spoke in a gravelly voice that reminded me of Robert De Niro’s character in Raging Bull. Showing us around the boat, he fingered a cigarette and drank regularly from a blue Solo cup, which was filled with an unidentified liquor. Unsolicited, he showed me the battle wounds on his hands. “Tore up this finger with a hook,” he said. A chunk of his thumb was missing. “Took another hook here,” he noted, pointing to a jagged scar on his wrist.

Besides the occupational hazards, I asked Stan how he was feeling. “Lucky,” he said. “Better to be lucky than good. Today’s our day.”

The six members of Stan’s crew must have felt the same way. Despite the early hour, they were prepping the boat with enthusiasm, unconcerned with the cameras and the men carrying them. While I fastened a life jacket, I noticed none of his crew bothered to put one on. Sam, an older man in his late fifties, loaded Igloo coolers with ice and bluefish, which would later be used as chum for the sharks. With the weather-beaten face of a lifetime fisherman, he packed the containers like an expert, as casually and efficiently as if he were readying a backyard barbecue.

The tournament director assigned me to this crew and boat, a purpose-built, top-of-the-line charter, which, at 60 feet long with an 18-foot-wide beam, was clearly designed for luxurious fishing. The spacious cabin had leather-padded chairs and other amenities: a wet bar, plush carpeting, and a refrigerator, fully stocked. Near the stern, a wide soft sofa in the main cabin invited guests to gaze out over the ocean, eating and drinking below board, while the fishermen hunted sharks.

We embarked from Montauk Harbor and moved past the town’s iconic lighthouse. The stern sent out a wide wake behind us, and a short twenty minutes later, we were out of sight of land and in the choppy, blue waters of Long Island Sound. Close to fifty other boats jockeyed for position in the open sea. Stan cut the engine and settled the boat in one of the most productive fishing grounds in the world, where he suspected makos congregate. Because warm waters bring fish, makos track the Gulf Stream up the East Coast, from Montauk to the Gulf of Maine. The fish that live in Long Island Sound will eventually mature and migrate into the Atlantic Ocean off Montauk.

Sharks have no interest in these boats, nor the usual bait of squid or fish parts. To attract the sharks, live bait was needed to supplement the chum. Stan’s crew took out fishing rods and quickly caught two bluefish. They hauled the fish on board and tossed them into a live bait well. Sam held down the fish, while Stan jammed a fishing line through the bluefish’s heads, just above their eyes. He attached the line to a loop and threw it back in the water. The blues swished their tails to escape, but the fishing line held them. Assigned the task of making chum, Sam put the bluefish from the Igloo into an electric meat grinder. Blood and fish parts oozed out and fell into a white bucket. He emptied the bucket’s contents overboard, creating a slick of red across the blue ocean. The current took the scent out past the boat into the sea.

His task completed, Sam set down the bucket and kicked back, waiting for the sharks to show. “Now is the time to drift and dream,” he said.

As the boat bobbed in the water, I took the opportunity to talk to Stan’s twenty-five-year-old son, Barry, who grew up fishing. “I’ve been doing this pretty much my whole life,” he said, punctuating our conversation with a cigarette. “Sometimes you expect one thing to come out of the water, and something else entirely comes up. There’s always that unknown. It doesn’t get old.”

Another half hour passed, and nothing happened, then an hour. Still nothing. We were staring down sheer boredom. The crew puttered around, throwing more chum out into the water. Some men drank beers to cool off and pass the time. Sam turned on the radio, drowning out the sound of the waves lapping on the sides of the boat. As I stared out over the horizon, I wondered how long I was going to be stuck out there. Then, far beneath the waves, a mako picked up a scent and decided to veer off course and investigate. The fishing pole started to twitch, just a slight bend at the tip of the rod. The rod stopped twitching and straightened. But it started again, a little more bend in the rod each time. A shark was nibbling at the bait, testing to see if there would be any reaction and what kind of resistance it might encounter. And then the shark decided to strike. Suddenly, the line ripped out of the reel and charged down the length of the rod into the sea. The shark was making a run for it. Sam grabbed the rod and placed it in a holder in the captain’s chair at the stern of the boat. Barry hopped into the captain’s chair, strapping himself in for what proved to be a lengthy, exhausting battle. The mako shark is built for speed, and its muscles powered its tail like a modern diesel train.

Barry started reeling in the line, but every so often the fish decided to fight back and make another lunge out to sea. Barry could only watch as the line he had struggled to bring in darted back out. This process—Barry reeling in the line, the mako taking it back out—carried on for half an hour, then an hour, then two hours. Barry’s gray T-shirt was drenched with sweat, and his face showed the strain of his struggle. The strength of the shark had taken its toll on him. At that point, he stopped reeling to give his tired hands and forearms a break. Staring at the sky, he took a deep breath, then continued reeling in the line. I was standing a few feet behind him, amazed at Barry’s determination, and the shark’s. Anglers live to catch makos. “They fight hard,” Barry said. Like clockwork, the shark jumped out of the water about 20 feet in the air. The entire crew cheered, but this wasn’t a game for the mako; it was life or death for the shark. To my amazement, the shark jumped again, achieving the same height as its previous jump. I counted five total jumps, a feat that required amazing strength and will.

Realizing this standstill could continue for another couple of hours, Stan started the engines. When I asked him what he was doing, he said, “If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain.” Thick black smoke poured out of the exhaust pipes at the stern of the boat. The engine noise drowned out the radio, and yard by yard, the boat backed up methodically toward the shark’s position, closing in on the kill. I couldn’t help but think they were cheating, because two hours into the fight, the mako was no match for the boat’s twin 1,200-horsepower engines.

Barry unstrapped himself and stood up next to the gunwale. He frantically reeled the line. I peered into the frothy mix of blue and white water and made out a shadow. Barry saw it, too, and strained to get the shark to the side of the boat. Stan pulled out a gaff, a large stainless-steel pole with half a harpoon on the end. He gashed the shark in the gills. Trying to drag it out of the water, he yelled, “C’mon, you sonuvabitch!” The shark was now clearly visible. It rolled over, exposing the contrast between its dorsal-side marine blue and the white of its underbelly. Just below the water’s surface, the head of the shark appeared, and with a final yank of the gaff, Stan managed to pull the mako on board. I could see a part of the baitfish sticking out of the shark’s mouth. The shark thrashed around, moving its head frantically from side to side. Its sandpaper skin scratched the floor. It sounded like a saw trying to tear apart the wood. Someone—in the melee, I couldn’t tell who—yelled, “Watch your feet!” Blood splashed over the floor of the stern. I had to turn away. I couldn’t watch the shark suffer. I stared at the opposite horizon, but I couldn’t silence the violent sounds of the shark scratching against the floorboards.

Sharks can survive for a long time out of the water, and as I discovered, it is difficult to tell when the shark has died. Anyone presuming a shark is dead runs the risk of getting bit. To protect the passengers, or perhaps to expedite the process, Barry unsheathed a knife. Though I didn’t want to, I returned my attention to the shark. Barry straddled the fish, positioning himself right behind the shark’s gills, far enough away from the shark’s mouth that it couldn’t turn and bite him. He was surprisingly calm as he bent over and entered the knife deep into the mako’s anterior, or front, end. Deeper and deeper he sank the knife until Barry felt the resistance of the spine. That’s when, to my horror, he started sawing back and forth, severing the spinal cord. Blood oozed out of the incision, and the shark twitched, its life slowly ebbing away. Barry stood back, blood smeared all over his fishing wader, and we all waited a few minutes, watching the lifeless shark remain still on the deck, until we understood it was finally, mercifully, dead.

To beat the 6 p.m. deadline, Sam brought us back to port. On our return to Montauk, I asked Stan what he thought about the shark, which remained in the stern, untouched. Shrugging, he said, “A shark is a shark. Something is better than nothing.”

The boat finally arrived at the marina, where Stan and the crew dropped off the shark. A crowd of onlookers waited near the slip, like spectators in the Roman Colosseum, to catch a glimpse of the shark’s bloody, mangled body. One of the dock hands threw a line with a loop at its end so the fishermen could slip the tail of the shark through it. Conquered, the fish could now be hauled up onto the yardarm and weighed. As the winch pulled the line and the shark went up the yardarm, the crowd murmured at the sight. “One hundred and fifty pounds,” the announcer called out to the crowd. It was a young shark, judging by its size and weight, too young to have ever bred. Because the minimum weight requirement for the tournament was 175 pounds, the shark was disqualified. It died for nothing.

My camera crew and I got off the boat. I watched Barry light another cigarette and Stan refill his blue Solo cup. Once on the dock, Stan took the mako’s carcass and cut off the tail. He drilled the mako’s tail onto the pier as a trophy. As I toured the marina, I witnessed other fishermen cut their hauls into pieces. One man chopped up a thresher shark and stuffed its decapitated head into a blue Igloo cooler. The fisherman told me he wanted to take the head home with him to carve out the jaws as a trophy. In the meantime, he draped the thresher’s tail over his shoulders, like a shawl, while his buddy snapped a picture. Other men loaded their shark heads into a 4-foot-long gray cart, which made it easier to transport these gruesome trophies to their vehicles in the marina’s parking lot.

The entire dock was a macabre Dantesque scene in which mako, blue, and thresher sharks were in various stages of dissection. Off to the side of the square waited a tractor with a large front loader. Men, whose dark slickers were wet with shark blood and viscera, filled the loader with shark parts. One man brought over a shark heart, still beating, for the crowd to see.

Some sharks were dangling from the yardarm, blood running down their bodies. Over the next hour, the announcer continued to call out the weight of each shark. Another mako was hoisted on the yardarm. It weighed 356 pounds, which drew a collective gasp from the crowd. It was a few pounds off the leading fish, though, so the captain later butchered it as a visiting family looked on.

The front loader was brimming with heads, fins, intestines, and other body parts. An operator fired up the tractor, and it crept away from the crowds into the shadows of the marina, where these shark parts were tossed into a dumpster.

People were having drinks and eating just a few yards away from the carnage. Some milled around the marina, gazing at the sharks strung up on the yardarm. Children holding on to their mothers’ hands walked in between the shark carcasses. I asked a young mother what she thought about shark tournaments. “It’s great,” she told me, “the whole family can get together.”

The young fisherman who caught the largest mako walked away with $90,000, and Tom later told me another fisherman took home $250,000.

While some humans benefit from the gambling, trophy fishing can have a negative impact on the shark population. Tournaments target the biggest and strongest sharks, and when these are lost, the event has a disproportionately large effect on a species’s ability to sustain itself or recover from overfishing and climate change. In other words, the loss of the strongest individuals hurts the gene pool of the shark population even when relatively few individuals are removed.[17]

Currently, there are approximately seventy official shark tournaments up and down the Atlantic coast, from Maine to Florida, twenty-eight of which target individual shark species. New York State allows these tournaments to take place, and thirty-seven different local businesses and multinational corporations sponsor them. Following the tournament, as I tried to wrap my head around how and why this kind of sanctioned brutality is allowed to continue, I remembered that another tournament was scheduled in Montauk four weeks later. This carnage, championed as sport, would be repeated, an ongoing but totally preventable surrealistic nightmare.

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