It’s Not After You : Experts Say Great White Shark Has Bad Reputation as Man-Eater

Great white sharks are showing their teeth again off the coast of California.

One struck fatally off Santa Barbara two weeks ago, attacking a diver while he searched for sea urchins off San Miguel Island.

Another was sighted last week feeding on an elephant seal between Newport Beach and Santa Catalina Island, only a few thrusts of the tail from a coastline dotted with surfers.

The event was photographed by a commercial fisherman. The media were alerted.

“The man-eater’s estimated length was 18 to 20 feet and its estimated weight was over 5,000 pounds,” said a news release sent out by a saltwater tackle company.

So, once again, great white sharks have been labeled man-eaters.

It’s a reputation the shark can’t seem to shake, an image revived after every attack, after nearly every sighting.

It’s also a reputation, scientists say, that is unwarranted, one that stems from the ignorance of a public whose perception of the great white is one of a giant killing machine and nothing more.

“Being attacked by a great white is certainly a horrific thing, but it is an anomaly,” Ken Goldman, 31, an aquatic biologist at San Francisco’s Steinhart Aquarium, said after the attack Dec. 9 that killed 42-year-old diver James Robinson of Santa Barbara.

Goldman pointed out that through 1993, there have been only 76 confirmed attacks by great whites on humans since 1926, and of those only seven resulted in fatalities.

“So being eaten by a white shark is even more of an anomaly than being attacked,” he said.

Goldman, Scot Anderson and Peter Pyle have spent the last several years studying white shark behavior off the Farallon Islands, a 211-acre grouping of steep, rocky islets rising from the Pacific Ocean about 30 miles west of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.

The Farallons, part of a national wildlife refuge managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and watched over by the Point Reyes Bird Observatory, are one of only a few places in the world where the sharks can be studied in a natural setting, because they congregate around the islands every fall and stay until spring.

“I’ve been going out there since 1987 and the same sharks are there,” said Anderson, 37, a naturalist with the Oceanic Society and a seasonal park ranger for the Point Reyes Bird Observatory. “It’s like a party.”

Anderson is conducting a variety of experiments, but he is concentrating on identifying and photo-cataloguing individual sharks, based on distinctive markings, in hopes of someday determining their migration habits.

Nobody knows for sure where the sharks come from or where they go each spring. One theory, based on captures and stillborn pups that have washed ashore, is that they spend spring and summer off the islands of Southern California and Baja.

Anderson has yet to match any of the sharks at the Farallons with those captured or photographed elsewhere, but he has matched some of the sharks year after year at the islands.

“And I saw a shark eat a seal this year off Tomales Point (near Point Reyes) that we saw at the Farallons in ‘91, so we know the same sharks go to the mainland as well,” he said.

Goldman is basing a research paper on the thermo-physiology of the great white, but also on its swimming depths and movements around the islands. He has tagged and tracked several large sharks.

Pyle, 37, is the supervising biologist on the island, a bird specialist by trade--the islands are home to 28% of California’s sea birds--but a shark expert based on his countless hours of observations. Since 1980, he has spent six months a year watching from his perch atop Southeast Farallon Island, the largest of the chain and the only one where limited access is allowed.

Besides helping by filming and cataloguing sharks when Anderson is not there, Pyle is studying the effects the weather and tides have on shark behavior and gathering data that he hopes will someday be used to help determine population levels of great whites.

Pyle believes there are 50 to 100 great whites that frequent the Farallons each spring.

“We think that with the data we’re getting, we might some day be able to apply that to preventing attacks on surfers and such,” Pyle said. “We might even come up with high-risk and low-risk times for humans.”

Among them, the three scientists have witnessed hundreds of attacks by white sharks on pinnipeds--the sea lion family. And although the sharks are somewhat opportunistic--Pyle has seen them feeding on a blue whale and a killer whale carcass--they are highly specialized hunters, almost exclusively targeting elephant seals.

Pyle theorized that in attacks on humans, the sharks might have mistaken their prey for seals. Robinson, for instance, was clad in a dark neoprene wet suit and diving in an area teeming with pinnipeds when he was attacked.

Four species of pinnipeds frequent the Farallons--northern elephant seals, harbor seals, California sea lions and stellar sea lions, a federally “threatened” species. The animals spend much of their time on the rocks resting and socializing, but in coming and going they must pass through what the scientists refer to as the “high-risk zone,” an area between 30 and 80 feet deep.

There the sharks lurk like phantoms over the rocky bottom, blending in perfectly.

“You can’t even see them,” Anderson said. “They can be only 10 feet down and you won’t see them. There’s no way of knowing one’s there. It’s spooky.”

The sea lions seem to know when they’re passing through the zone. They swim nervously until they’re safely out of it. Pyle has seen fewer than a dozen attacks on sea lions and harbor seals.

The elephant seals, however, are slower, fatter and not as social as the sea lions, and therefore not as fortunate. They are targeted seven times more often than other pinnipeds.

Pyle said the sharks prefer to swim against the current and that most of the attacks occur at high tide, probably in part because there is not as much haul-out space and more animals are forced into the water. At low tide the attacks tend to occur farther offshore, perhaps an indication that the sharks require a good deal of room to charge their prey.

In any event, when an attack occurs, it is an awesome display of nature.

“The shark rushes up from below and grabs its prey and then thrashes it, and water flies,” Anderson said. “It tries to kill the animal on the first bite, then waits until it bleeds to death before it eats.”

The shark will sometimes wait an hour or more before moving in and methodically plucking away at the mammal’s flesh. And more often than not, another shark will come in for a few bites.

“It appears as though they have a sort of pecking order,” Goldman said. “You never see two grab a seal at one time, but when one gets hit they are aware of it, either by sound or smell.”

To tag and track his sharks, Goldman uses a radio-telemetry device concealed in PVC pipe. The device is stuck in a piece of meat and fed to the sharks while they feed on their prey. The device has a life span of 100 days and Goldman can pick up its signal, under good conditions, from about half a mile away.

Goldman said white sharks, as far as he can tell, are not territorial, but added that the bigger animals seem to have certain areas where they prefer to hunt.

He tracked his first shark in 1991, a 14-foot male he named Boots. Boots was followed for five days over an eight-day period, swimming at an average depth of 50 feet.

“He had a couple of locations on the west side of the island that he liked to hang out in, and then he would take these treks from one to five kilometers from the island,” Goldman said. “He swam out and right back.”

A 17-footer named Ambergris was tagged last year and tracked for 10 days over a 17-day period.

“This shark had one major preferred spot (off the southwest side of Southeast Farallon) and he really liked that spot,” Goldman said. “He swam between 60 and 90 feet most of the time. He had a couple of other spots he visited, but he spent about 75% of his time in that location.

“To me the most impressive thing is that these animals spend a lot of time stalking prey--a week, two weeks, maybe three weeks or a month. Then after a meal they leave the island area, maybe for the season.”

There was Phoebis, a 12-foot male--originally named Phoebe because it was first thought to be a female. Phoebis was tracked for seven days over a 10-day period.

“Phoebis went everywhere,” Goldman said. “He didn’t have a favorite spot. It was like giving a child a crayon and letting him scribble on wall. He was all over the place, 360 degrees around the island.”

Goldman said that through his work he has come to view the great white not as a savage beast but as an animal, like any other, striving merely to survive.

Scientists have already proved that they are not the cold-blooded killers people take them for.

Unlike most fish, whose bodies are not much warmer than the water they swim in, great whites are considered warm-blooded or warm-bodied, maintaining a fairly constant body-core temperature of nearly 80 degrees.

Said Anderson: “I like to think of the great white shark as a mammal-like fish that feeds on fish-like mammals.”

The general public, however, might never share that opinion.