Shark attacks are happening less often. That’s according
to George Burgess, curator of the International Shark Attack
File. He reports 59 unprovoked attacks by sharks last year,
lower than the 71 in 2007 and the all-time high of 79 in 2000.
Four of those were fatal. The majority of attacks were in North
American waters, 42 last year, with Florida accounting for 32
of them. Luckily, snorkelers and divers were the smallest group
affected, totaling only 8 percent of unprovoked attacks.
But that’s unprovoked, mind you. Burgess classifies “provoked
attacks” as a human initiating physical contact with a
shark, usually involving fishers, spearfishers and those feeding
sharks. The latter is often what affects divers most as more of
them go on shark dives, with boat crew chumming the waters to get sharks in front of the paying customers – and that can be an
accident waiting to happen. Burgess says 19 provoked attacks
happened last year.
One of them was Markus Groh, an Austrian diver who
died on a shark dive trip in the Bahamas with Jim Abernethy’s
Scuba Adventures. Groh, 49, was bitten by a bull shark, which
apparently mistook his calf for the baitbox that the dive operator
puts at the bottom to attract sharks. We did an extensive
report on Groh’s death in our April 2008 issue.
Comparing Sharks to Birds and Dogs
Abernethy wasn’t talking to the press then but now
that there is no threat of a lawsuit, he was willing to talk
to Undercurrent. He was cleared of wrongful doing by the Miami-Dade County police 24 hours after the event, and
Abernethy, based in Riviera Beach, FL, says he has no plans
to change anything about his shark trips, and he is backed
by big names in marine biology and underwater photography.
“I have a two-hour plus briefing on what needs to be
done when in the vicinity of large sharks, and I require the
same level of advanced diver or above to dive with us. What
happened was an accident that unfortunately happened on
my boat. The main reason why I haven’t changed anything
is because sharks don’t eat people. Sharks do not seek them
out, I’ve never seen a shark being aggressive toward people.
The accident with Groh, it was just not a shark attack.” The
Bahamas Diving Association, whose members offer openwater
dives with more sedate reef sharks, has been trying for
some time to get Abernethy to stop his openwater, non-caging
dives but he refuses. “[Cage diving] doesn’t follow the
way I interact with sharks.”
Critics of Abernethy’s interactions don’t like the idea of
turning sharks into trained animals used to humans in the
water and being fed. Abernethy replies that he looks at sharks as the Audubon Society looks at birds. “They’ve been selling
bird feeders for years and birdwatchers feed birds but every
now and then, a bird will bite a person as a mistake. However,
feeding the birds is an opportunity for people to get close to
these animals so they can see them.”
Then he tries another comparison: canines. “Sharks are
very much like dogs. There are the smaller, speedier ones, like
the little dogs that nip and yap. Then there are the big dogs,
walking tentatively into the living room trying not to break anything.
We see that mix on our Bahamas dives.”
“It’s the Humans’ Fault, Not the Sharks”
That comparison to household pets is what bothers Burgess,
who instead compares feeding sharks to feeding bears in
parks. “Encountering humans is an unusual event for sharks,
so there’s a natural distance,” he told Undercurrent. “Once that
natural behavior is modified, it’s lost and that’s where problems
begin. Dive operators want to keep a lot of sharks in one place
for predictability – and for paying customers. But divers are seeing
an underwater Disneyland rather than a natural world.
“If people want to go diving with sharks, that’s their
choice. To me, the biggest concern is what happens when you
attract sharks to the boat and how it affects their behavior,
the reef ecology and the long-term affects to the shark-human
relationship. If you’re going to put people and food in the
water to attract sharks, fine. But if something happens, it’s the
humans’ fault, not the shark’s.”
“If you want to dive, you go with a dive operator but if
you want to dive with sharks, you go and learn with a shark
expert.” That’s Erich Ritter, who calls himself the only
professional shark-human interaction specialist. He runs
SharkSchool.org, an organization that teaches one-week
courses in the Bahamas, Maldives and the Red Sea for divers
about how to interact with sharks. Two-hour classroom sessions
and homework are mixed with dives to show students
how to learn sharks’ body language and react correctly with
their own. “If you can understand why a shark of any species
comes closer, you are in the driver’s seat and in charge of the
situation. If you don’t understand, you get afraid. We put divers
in different scenarios and mentally push them to a point
where they must rationalize the situation they’re in.”
This seems rich coming from a man who is a pariah in
the dive industry. Ritter, who claims a Ph.D. in “behavioral
ecology” from the University of Zurich, says he can intuit
shark behavior and read their thoughts just by looking at
them. However, Ritter was bitten in the calf, just like Groh,
while being filmed for Discovery Channel’s Shark Week series
in Walker’s Cay back in 2002. Ritter was demonstrating how
he could, by controlling his heartbeat, interact safely with a
school of sharks, even when food was in the water. But when
there were more sharks than usual in the feeding area, dive
staffers tried to lure them away from Ritter by throwing a
piece of fish into the water 15 feet away from him. A bull
shark lunged for it and in doing so, bit directly into Ritter’s left calf. The shinbone was so damaged that Ritter’s left foot
must be permanently supported by a bar. Ritter blames the
spotter assigned to keep an eye on the sharks and steer them
away but says, “My bite was the best proof that I know what
I’m doing.”
“Dive Operators Should Get Educated”
Despite his reputation and claims of intuiting shark behavior,
Ritter does have some good tips for improving the safety of
shark dives. “So we must educate the operators and have them
use solid techniques. Don’t have a floating milk crate for sharks
to push around, attach it to the bottom and don’t let divers get
too close to these sharks. And always have a second dive guide
who is capable of observing sharks’ swim patterns. If they get
excited, they’ll change their swim pattern. For example, if one
does a wide-angle approach, it may be a little nervous but not
aggressive. If it does a frontal approach, it wants to check you
out and get a reaction from you. Dive operators are generally
novices and have no clue to the actual behavior of these animals.
They should get educated and the standards should be
changed. You can’t take the dive shop owner’s livelihood away
but he can indeed change what he can’t control.”
Their feeding methods are debatable but shark dive operators
know what their livelihood is and are stepping up their
efforts to protect it, especially now that finning for shark-fin
soup is dropping shark numbers precipitously. Beqa Adventure
Divers, a notable shark dive operator in Fiji, has been blogging
about its efforts to get Discovery Channel to get the Jaws references out of its upcoming Shark Week series this summer.
Andrew Cumming, Beqa’s operations manager, wrote on the
shop’s blog (http://fijisharkdiving.blogspot.com) about the shady
efforts of one of the network’s film teams to hire Beqa to take
them to dive sites but then do their own thing. “We were told
the group would come with their own safety divers, need a
chumsicle and require no further service other than unlimited
access to our site.” Cumming believed the team leader was
going to descend in a specially-designed clear shark cage and
conduct experiments like flailing about, floating lifelessly and
holding freshly-killed fish to elicit an attack response from the
sharks. “After years of trying to establish a safe and mellow
routine and to keep the sharks away from the surface, having
[them] come and thrash our dive site! We of course declined
to enable the shoot.” He said another dive shop down the road
agreed to take the film crew out. “Money apparently talks
much louder than one’s professed love of sharks and fake ecobranding.
But in the end, it’s not our country, not our operation
and hopefully, not our reputation, either, that will lose out.
Although we’ll have to share the negative repercussions, as will
Fiji tourism. In the end, the real losers will be the sharks.”
Abernethy is also stating his pro-shark stance to the public,
becoming active in government actions on coral reefs and shark
management. He recently protested a June shark tournament
in Fort Myers, helping to get it turned into a no-kill event. On
his Web site, he blogged about a seven-foot lemon shark with a
rope tied around its neck cutting deep into its skin and gills. It swam off before Abernethy could free it. In April, he saw the
shark again while taking a charter of photographers and videographers.
They all agreed to rescue the shark, tail roping and
pulling it aboard. Abernethy restrained the shark while a crew
member cut the rope. In just over one minute, the shark was
back in the water. “The thought of this beautiful creature dying
a slow painful death because of trash discarded in the ocean
was too much for me,” he wrote. “Many people would think
that it’s just a shark and not to bother, but I love these creatures
and will do anything within my power to save them.” Of course,
when he saw the lemon shark the next day, Abernethy fed it
lots of fish to keep it coming back.
- - Vanessa Richardson
P.S. The latest shark fatality of 2008 happened to a French
woman on June 2, when an oceanic whitetip shark attacked
her while snorkeling along Egypt’s Red Sea shoreline, south
of Marsa Alam. The woman, in her 50s, was part of a group
aboard the liveaboard Le Nautile. About 20 snorkelers were at
the dive site Habili Al on the St. John’s reef area observing the
shark when the woman moved away from the group and duckdived
toward it. According to Egypt’s Chamber of Diving and
Watersports (CWDS), the woman was bitten on the leg when she surfaced, and the shark was still biting her as she was pulled
onto the boat. She lost consciousness and died soon after.
It was Egypt’s first fatal shark attack in five years; the previous
one was another snorkeler near the busy Sinai resort of
Sharm el-Sheikh in 2004. While such attacks are extremely rare
in the Red Sea, this one most likely happened because two safari
boats had been feeding sharks in the same area that day. Both
the National Park and CDWS are conducting an investigation
into the recent incident, CDWS spokeswoman Mary Gleeson
told Undercurrent. “Shark feeding is illegal here in the Red Sea. It
is looking likely that they will face a serious fine and suspension from operating for a period of time, probably three months.”
Ritter, who teaches some of his SharkSchool courses in the
Red Sea, says dive boats there routinely flout the no-feeding
rules. “The galley staff dump leftovers after the cooking is done,
and divers take fish with them after lunch and start feeding
sharks. Every boat does this because divers want to push the
envelope, so they’re forced to increase the thrill. They’re competing
for the few sharks left but they don’t know how to handle
an antsy, full-grown oceanic whitetip.”
- -Vanessa Richardson