MAN IN THE NEWS : When the Shark Bites, an Unusual Expert Surfaces

There’s an inevitable aftermath to an encounter with a shark off the California coast: an encounter with insurance salesman Ralph S. Collier.

No, he’s not out looking for business, but rather collecting data on the attacks. For more than 30 years, Collier has been a weekend warrior of the shark expert set, rushing out to record firsthand accounts, interview witnesses, examine bite marks and read autopsy results.

Collier, of Canoga Park, does not have a biology degree. He is not a scientist. He is not on staff at a university. He just likes sharks.

Santa Barbara County coroner’s investigators said they never got around to calling Collier after a shark attack last week off San Miguel Island killed veteran diver James Robinson.

Collier called them first.

But coroner’s investigator Larry Gillespie said he was planning to call Collier anyway. Gillespie plans to review his findings with Collier next week, when he will ask Collier’s opinion on the species and size of the shark that killed Robinson, as well as possible reasons for the attack.

“Based on his expertise, even if it’s just from amateur research over the years, we’re going to rely upon what Ralph says,” Gillespie said. “If he says the shark is so many feet long and so big around, we’re definitely going to use his findings.”

Collier says his credentials come not from academic training but from doing such research “longer than anyone else on this planet.”

There are those who reject that claim, but none dispute his passion.

“I’m just trying to understand why (sharks) do what they do,” Collier said. “I did it the same way everyone else did it back then. We started gathering information and learned as we went.”

Some ichthyologists, the scientists who study fish, say Collier is the shark attack version of an ambulance-chaser. A “shark groupie,” one called him.

But others maintain that he has something to contribute.

“Isaac Newton never held a professorship,” said Richard Rosenblatt, a professor of marine biology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who, like many in the academic world of fish, is familiar with Collier. “He has made sharks his hobby and there is nothing wrong with that.”

Others, like Peter Klimley, a UC Davis marine behaviorist, have sought Collier’s assistance. Klimley asked Collier to write what he called a modest piece on the variety of objects great white sharks have attacked for a book Klimley is editing called “Great White Sharks: Ecology and Behavior.”

“He does know something,” Klimley said, “but there are more so-called experts who deal with white sharks than there are soccer players in L.A.”

And by interviewing witnesses and victims, Klimley said, Collier might sidetrack victims from talking with trained experts whose full-time jobs include collecting such data.

There was no single dramatic event that piqued Collier’s interest in the big killers; he has just wondered about them for as long as he can remember.

He tries to make contact with either the victim or a witness within 24 hours of the attack, he said. Most important, he wants to know what the victims were doing just before the attack and how long they were doing it.

Then he adds Coast Guard and police reports to answer a battery of questions: What was the weather? Was the sky clear or cloudy? What was the water temperature? Air temperature? Clarity of water? Topography of the ocean floor? High or low tide?

Collier takes all the information, reports and pictures and tries to piece together what happened and in what order. He has learned to determine species and size by examining the size and shape of bite marks left in anything from surfboards to human flesh.

“It has always astounded us that more people have not been killed by white sharks off this coast,” Collier said. “Which again leads me to believe that a motivation for a high percentage of shark attacks on humans isn’t because they think we’re food--it’s because they don’t know what we are, so they swim up to take a bite out of us to figure it out.”