BUT THEY'LL STILL BLAME THE SHARK

 

A number of years ago, I was hunting mule deer in Wyoming’s Shoshone National Forest.  It was the last day of my hunt.  Over the past few days, I had passed up a number of small bucks that would have been fine for meat, but as fond as I am of venison, I didn’t travel all the way to Wyoming just to pick up a little food; I was hoping to also find a deer with a classic, wide set of antlers that I’d want to hang on the wall.

Time was getting short.

My guide and I found ourselves overlooking a big mountain meadow, about 9,000 feet above sea level.  Golden, frost-killed grass nodded in the breeze.  Toward one end of the meadow, a long clump of pines offered a fine place for deer to bed down during the day.  I was going to set up about 100 yards downwind of the trees, while my guide looped around, letting his scent flow through the pines before he entered the trees and hopefully pushed any deer in my direction.

Things didn’t work out that way.

Half a dozen ravens popped out above the trees, circling and calling, before settling back into the topmost branches.  We couldn’t know what caused the commotion, but given where we were, there was a fair chance that a bear might have chased the ravens off something—maybe the gut pile from a previous hunter’s kill, maybe some other sort of carrion, maybe a deer or elk that the bear killed on its own—and it’s always a very bad idea to give such a bear any reason to think that you were planning to steal its lunch.

We went looking for deer somewhere else, and I went home without taking a shot.

But that’s just the way things go in grizzly country.

Before we even began hunting the high timber that the big bears called home, my guide warned me that if I did shoot a deer, we had to gut it and pack it out fast.  The bears had learned that a shot meant food.  They learned that if, instead of running away from a gunshot, they followed the noise to its source, they’d be rewarded with a fresh, tasty pile of offal that the hunter left behind.

Then some enterprising bears figured out that if they ran towards the shot fast enough, they wouldn’t have to settle for some second-hand guts; the whole deer or elk could be theirs. 

That didn’t make hunters too happy, but this was, after all, grizzly country, and the bears set the rules.  Hunters who didn’t follow those rules could end up in potentially fatal contests, where casualties, and fatalities, might fall on either side of the human/bear line.

But you don’t need to be in the Wyoming wilds to see quadrupeds setting the rules.  When I was a boy, our family included a fox terrier that used to follow me around.  Like any child, I’d give the dog biscuits and sneak him bits of meat from my dinner plate, and like any child, I’d sometimes offer food that, at the last minute, I’d snatch away.

When my parents saw me engaging in such behavior, they’d tell me pretty quickly, “Stop teasing the dog; he’s going to bite you,” their delivery making it abundantly clear that if I got bitten, it wouldn't be the fox terrier’s fault.

All that makes sense, and probably ought to apply across the range of human relations with other species.  Yet one doesn’t have to read much of the latest news on sharks and shark behavior, which see people invading the shark’s territory and doing dumb things, to realize that in such cases, the shark is inevitably blamed for the outcome.

One of the more outrageous examples began with a headline that read

“Shark Bites Man’s Hand In Florida, Tries To Drag Him Away.”

The article goes on to explain that

“A fisherman, who was washing his hands off the side of a boat in Florida’s Everglades National Park, was bitten by a shark.  After the incident, the man reported the shark attack to the officials of the National Park Service…

“After releasing a snook [the angler] washed his hands in the water and was immediately bit [sic] by a large bull shark.  There was no chum or blood in the water, and the sharks were unprovoked…”

The headline, combined with the rest of the article and accompanying video, provides the distinct impression that an innocent angler was attacked by a predator that viewed him—species Homo sapiens—as a likely meal.

But when you read a little further, and try to look at things from the shark’s perspective, a very different picture emerges.

Up until the time of the bite, the angler and his companions were having a good day of fishing.  They were catching and releasing quite a few fish, and the commotion that the fish made while being fought by anglers naturally attracted sharks which, like any predator, seek injured or otherwise struggling prey that is relatively easy to chase down and kill.

One article noted that the angler and his companion already lost a few struggling fish to sharks earlier in the outing.

So the scene is set.  Struggling, splashing fish have attracted sharks to the angler’s boat.  He has just released a snook, and decides to wash his hands in the water, presumably to rid them of slime and some of the fishy stink.  One of his companions warns him to keep his hands in the boat, but the angler responds

“Ah, two seconds won’t do anything,”

and, as the video shows, begins vigorously splash them in the stained water of the bay.

A shark—which, in the video, looks more like a lemon than a bull, and was not really all that large—that has already been attracted to the struggles of the now-released snook notices the commotion next to the boat.  Although the angler’s companion claimed that “There was no chum or blood in the water, and the sharks were unprovoked,” nothing could be further from the truth.  No less an authority on shark fishing than the late Capt. Frank Mundus, who pioneered the sport off the New York coast, hailed the “vertical chum line,” which is what he called the struggles of small fish intentionally caught by shark-seeking anglers, because they attracted sharks to the boat.

The struggles of the recently-caught snook proved to be all the chum that the shark in question needed, and certainly provoked the much-ballyhooed bite.  The shark sensed more splashing, noted something flashing amid the splashing water, and took a nip, expecting to get a mouthful of fish.  Feeling resistance, it pulled away, and suddenly something that probably weighed more than the shark did crashed down on top of it.  Instead of continuing its efforts to feed, the shark then tood off, sensing that it had truly bitten off more than it could chew.

The papers called it a “shark attack,” but given the facts surronding the event, it was more like what sometimes happens when someone teases a dog.

Yet news outlets halfway across the world reported on the “attack,” sensationalizing what, in the end, was merely the consequence of the angler’s poor judgment.

And then there are spearfishermen, who find themselves occasionally getting bitten when returning to the surface with a fish.  While sharks usually focus on the fish itself, and a spearfisherman willing to sacrifice their catch to a superior predator usually won’t be further molested (at least on that dive), sometimes the shark bites the swimmer, particularly if that swimmer tries to keep the speared fish for themselves. 

Here, we’re dealing with the bear/hunter analogy.  The spearfisherman enters the shark’s territory, tries to make away with some of the shark’s usual prey, and sometimes gets chewed for their trouble.  Once again, it’s not that the shark is doing anything wrong—it’s merely playing its role, removing injured fish from the ecosystem—but the folks with the spears don’t see things that way.

Once more, the shark is cast as a villain.

That sort of thinking may have reached its peak in the current fuss about “shark depredation,” in which the finned predators feed on what, to them, are injured, weakened, and struggling fish moving through the water column.  The problem is that those fish are attached to anglers’ lines, and those anglers get upset when a shark helps itself to what would otherwise be the fishermen’s catch.

You end up with people who invade the sharks’ habitat, remove fish that the sharks eat, and then complain when the sharks insist on eating the fish struggling at the ends of those folks’ lines, because those fish  acting distressed and are easy to catch.

Like any angler, I’ve lost fish to sharks, and admit that it can be annoying.  At the same time, it was a shark that opened my eyes to the world of offshore fishing back when I was just 13 years old, fishing on a party boat for cod maybe 20 miles southeast of Pt. Judith, Rhode Island, when a big blue shark—at least it looked very big to me then—surged along the transom of the boat, body half out of the water, to snatch the head half of a big, already depredated cod off an anglers’ line and, snapping that line like cheap string, disappeared into the depths of the sea.

The wild beauty and feral strength of that fish burned an image into my mind and set me on a path that, more than half a century later, I still follow with unabated passion.  To damn the shark for being itself seems, to me, inconceivable.

However, a lot of fishermen don’t agree, viewing sharks as nuisances that steal fish that, such fishermen somehow believe, already “belong” to the anglers.  Thus, not long ago, Congressman Rob Wittman (R-VA) has introduced something that he calls the “Supporting the Health of Aquatic systems through Research, Knowledge and Enhanced Dialogue Act.”  The so-called “SHARKED Act,” which has so far been cosponsored by representatives Darren Soto (D-FL), Garret Graves (R-LA), and Marc Veasey (D-TX), supposedly will

“start to address the increasing challenge of shark depredation, which occurs when a shark eats or damages a hooked fish before an angler can reel in his catch,”

and

“would establish a task force comprised of fishery managers and shark experts responsible for improving coordination and communication across the fisheries management community on shark depredation and identifying research priorities and funding opportunities.”

In an attempt to justify his bill, Rep. Witmann said,

“As a lifelong fisherman, I’ve experienced firsthand the impacts of shark depredation and have witnessed its effect on our marine ecosystem.  I introduced the SHARKED Act to improve the environment of our marine life and sportfishing conditions for anglers while protecting sharks from unsafe conditions and food sources.  The SHARKED Act will also serve as the first major step in addressing shark depredation nationwide.  I’m proud to have my colleagues on both sides of the aisle join me in this important effort and lead the way for restoring our marine ecosystem and improving fishing experiences for anglers.”

Let’s take a look at that comment, sentence by sentence, and understand why—and I apologize for being crude—it is such a pile of unalloyed bullshit.

OK, Rep. Witmann is a fisherman, and has had sharks steal some of his fish; as I noted above, that’s pretty much a shared experience for all of us, so that much is true.  But when he talks about shark depredation and “its effect on our marine ecosystem,” he’s talking complete nonsense.  Sharks eat fish, and they have certain nutritional needs that they must meet in order to successfully reproduce and perform the other acts necessary for survival.  Every fish eaten by a shark is removed from the ecosystem, and contributes to satisfying that shark’s nutritional needs.  Whether that fish is swimming free just before it was eaten, or was struggling on an angler’s line, the “effect on our marine ecosystem” is exactly the same. 

Rep. Witmann then claims that his bill will, at the same time, “improve the environment for our marine life and sportfishing conditions for anglers while protecting sharks from unsafe conditions and food sources.”  It’s hard to even begin to understand what such doubletalk means.  

After all, sharks are “marine life,” and have been for something like the last 420 years.  In the days before the primordial swamps rotted and were eventually transformed into the oil that’s refined into the gasoline that powers the two or three or maybe four oversized outboard engines hanging on the back of fishermen’s center consoles, there were already dsharks swimming in ancient seas.  So if Rep. Witmann is honest about wanting to improve the environment for marine life, that means he must improve the environment for sharks, too.

But then he talks about “improving sportfishing conditions for anglers,” which in the context of a shark depredation bill, can only mean fewer sharks in places where anglers fish, and it’s hard to imagine accomplishing that without reducing the number of sharks in the sea—something that seems contrary to that “improve the environment” talk—unless Rep. Witmann is planning to exclude sharks from his definition of “marine life,” and “improve the environment” for everything else by reducing shark numbers, something like the way wildlife managers tried to “improve the environment” for mule deer on the Kaibab Plateau back in the early 20^th Century by removing the predators there.  And we all know how that didn’t work out.

The language about “protecting sharks from unsafe conditions and food sources” just adds to the contradictions inherent in Rep. Witmann’s comment.  While one might argue that all three of the stated goals—improving the marine environment, improving sportfishing conditions, and protecting sharks—might be achieved by requiring anglers to cease fishing and move some minimum distance after experiencing a depredation event, somehow I don’t think that’s what the Congressman has in mind.

Yet the apparent dichotomy of “restoring our marine ecosystem and improving fishing experiences for anglers” appears in the last sentence as well.  

Sharks are an inherent part of marine ecosystems and, as noted above, have been for over 400 million years.  Yet some shark species reportedly responsible for depredation remain overfished, including dusky and sandbar sharks, along with the scalloped hammerhead.  In order to “restore our marine ecosystem,” the populations of such species must be rebuilt, although doing so would necessarily increase shark numbers, and thus increase the rate of shark depredation, something that would hardly “improve fishing experiences for anglers.”

Once again, it appears that Rep. Witmann is talking out of both sides of his mouth, and seeking irreconcilable goals.

Nonetheless, shark depredation is real.  The problem is that policymakers seem insistent on blaming the sharks for doing what hundreds of millions of years of evolution have designed them to do—chase down and eat injured or clearly distressed fish, which today are often on anglers lines—while not addressing the actions of anglers who, by fishing the same spots, perhaps chumming the same waters, and continuing to fish once sharks appear on the scene, are training the sharks to associate boats with food, just as Wyoming’s bears are learning to associate gunshots with venison.

But while bears generally get a pass, and hunters must yield unless lives are threatened, sharks are held to a different, and much harsher standard.  Logically, it makes little sense.

Perhaps it’s all about fur and brown eyes.