Fishing Around : Insurance Salesman Makes a Hobby of Shark Attack Data

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 selling shark bite coverage, 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 beach-front 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, founder of the Shark Research Committee in Van Nuys, 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 disputes his passion.

“I’m just trying to understand why (sharks) do what they do,” said Collier, who added that he is one of five experts chosen to oversee the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida. “I did it the same way everyone else did it back then. We started gathering information and learned as we went.”

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

In the late 1950s, when he was only 16, he said, the U.S. Navy began studying sharks and shark attacks and sought volunteer investigators. Collier, now 50, was all too happy to assist.

A 1959 attack off San Francisco was his first case. A young man swimming with his girlfriend was attacked by a great white shark. The story was that the woman grabbed onto her boyfriend and wrestled with the shark for him. She won, Collier recalled.

Collier jumped in his car as soon as he heard and drove from the Los Angeles area to San Francisco to investigate, beginning a process of data compilation that he has refined and used ever since.

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 human flesh to surfboards.

“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.”

Some ichthyologists, the scientists who study fish, sniff that 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, such as 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 whites 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.

All of this is no matter to Collier, who goes about his self-appointed tasks with the dedication of Jacques Cousteau.

“The ultimate objective is the truth,” Collier said. “I could write what we do know about sharks on a piece of paper and it would take up 10 lines; then I could write what we don’t know and it would take up a whole tablet.”