In the murky
predawn light, our speedboat hurdles across Cape Town, South
Africa's False Bay. A fierce wind whips the seas, pitching our
26-foot craft and sending an eerie scream across the white-tipped
waves. We are hoping to come face to face with one of the earth's
most feared predators: the great white shark. Alison Kock, a marine
biologist, has made this journey more than 500 times since 1999,
striving to unlock the shark's many mysteries.
We approach a flat,
rocky island a quarter-mile long and crowded with about 60,000 Cape
fur seals. "They want to go to sea to feed, but they're afraid of
the white sharks," Kock says. The hungry seals dive into the water
in a desperate swim for their feeding grounds 40 miles out in the
bay. They must run a gantlet of great whites waiting for them just
off Seal Island.
The attacks begin a
few minutes later. A 3,000-pound great white explodes out of the
water. In midair the shark lunges at a seal and flips back into the
water with a mighty splash. Moments later another shark breaches
and bites a seal. We speed to the spot, in time to see a pool of
blood. Scores of gulls hover above, screeching in excitement, then
swoop down to gobble up any leftovers.
During an hour and
a half, we witness ten great white sharks hurtling out of the water
to grab seals. As the rising sun brightens the sky, the attacks
stop.
"That's it for
today," Kock says. "The great whites only attack in the hour after
dawn. We think it's because once there's enough sunlight, the seal
can see the shark coming at it from below and escape."
Despite this
awesome display of predator power, Kock and other researchers claim
that the shark has been defamed: its reputation as a ruthless,
mindless man-eater is undeserved. In the past decade, Kock and
other shark experts have come to realize that sharks rarely hunt
humans—and that the beasts are sociable and curious. Unlike most
fish," Kock says, "white sharks are intelligent, highly inquisitive
creatures."
Perhaps the largest
great white shark ever caught was off Malta, in the Mediterranean
Sea, in 1987. It was reported to be 23 feet long and weigh 5,000
pounds. (Many scientists are skeptical and put the maximum length
for a great white at closer to 21 feet.) A sea turtle, a blue shark
and a dolphin, and a bag full of garbage were found in the giant's
innards.
The great white shark is a top predator throughout the world's
temperate and subtropical waters. It's found most commonly off
South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and the United States, where
most sightings occur in the waters off California and the
mid-Atlantic coast. With its torpedo shape and heavily muscled
tail, a great white can swim 15 miles per hour or faster when
attacking. It has about 240 serrated teeth in up to five rows.
No one has seen
great white sharks mate. Males are distinguished by a pair of
sperm-delivery organs called claspers that extend from the pelvic
fins. After mating, eggs hatch inside the female's uterus.
Gestation takes at least a year, then 2 to 12 babies are born. In
some shark species, the strongest fetuses eat their weaker brothers
and sisters in the womb; no one knows whether great whites do
so.
Sailors have feared
great white sharks for centuries. In 1862, Jonathan Couch wrote in
his History of the Fishes of the British Isles that in the
West Indies, the great white "is the dread of sailors who are in
constant fear of becoming its prey when they bathe or fall into the
sea." In 1812 the British zoologist Thomas Pennant wrote that "in
the belly of one was found a human corpse entire, which is far from
incredible considering their vast greediness after human
flesh."
But the great white
shark entered the landlubbers' pantheon of most terrifying
creatures only in 1971, when a great white approached a dive cage
in a documentary called Blue Water, White Death. The film
inspired American novelist Peter Benchley to write the book
Jaws, about a great white terrorizing a New Jersey seaside
community. Heart-thumping fear spread around the world in 1975 when
a then little-known director, Steven Spielberg, directed a movie
based on the novel. Jaws was the first film to earn $100
million at the box office, and it launched the era of the summer
blockbuster.
Leonard Compagno,
one of the foremost experts on sharks, helped design the mechanical
great white used in the movie. "When they made it a huge male with
its characteristic claspers, I told them they'd got it wrong
because the biggest great whites were females. The art director
told Spielberg, who brushed aside my objection. He wanted it to be
an enormous male great white, and that was that." Compagno knew the
movie was a "monster gig," but he did not anticipate how seriously
people would take it. "The movie great white scared the hell out of
people, and made the shark much feared," he says. In reality, great
whites "rarely bother people, and even more rarely attack
them."