Jeff Klinkenberg - The Shark Attack Files: Investigating the Worlds Most Feared Predator

GATORBYTES

THE SHARK ATTACK FILES

INVESTIGATING THE WORLDS MOST FEARED PREDATOR

Jeff Klinkenberg

T ugging on my goggles, I splash my way into the murky Gulf of Mexico. Im a slow swimmer who plows ahead like a rusty scow. For me, a gray-haired guy with a paunch, swimming is a way of keeping the grim reaper at bay. Speaking of the grim reaper, perhaps I should block the unpleasant thought of a hungry shark.

My old friend George Burgess tells me not to fret about becoming a meal. Instead, Im supposed to put my worry into perspective. As the longtime director of the University of Floridas celebrated shark research lab, he points out that sharks have far more to fear from humans than humans have to fear from sharks. After all, he tells me, fishermen catch about 100 million sharks a year.

Just to keep his life interesting, though, he also curates the notorious International Shark Attack File. Nobody knows more about gape-jawed sharks and those unpleasant spreading scarlet billows. When the worst happens, reports from all over the world flow like a full-moon tide across his desk. The Sherlock Holmes of the shark world can pore through five centuries of records as he tries to figure out what happened and why.

But, he says, Were safer swimming at the beach than driving to the beach. We are 33 times more likely to be killed by a dog than by a shark. We are 75 more times more likely to be fried by lightning. We are about 490,000 more likely to be hurt while sawing, hammering, drilling, or falling off a ladder. There were only six shark-attack fatalities in 2015. And only 98 attacks, which is the all-time record. Ninety-eight attacks all over the world. Your chances of becoming an unhappy statistic? About one in 11 million.

When I spend time with George, I understand why my bowels shouldnt be in an uproar about hungry fish. Still, stuff happens. In Gainesville, his phone rings. His computer beeps with a new e-mail. The fax machine starts singing. A shark tried to eat somebody either accidentally or on purpose.

He and his assistant, Lindsay French, begin investigating by telephone, interviewing lifeguards and emergency-room doctors and perhaps somebody being fitted with a new prosthesis. More terrible are the times he has to attend an autopsy and peek beneath the sheet. I looked at her face and I thought about how young she was, how she was someones daughter, and how her whole life was ahead of her. Once, when I visited George at his office, I discovered him examining a gory photograph of a mauled victim. Blowing up the photo on his computer, he found what he was looking for, a tooth imprint on an exposed humerus, revealing the attacker as a Bull Shark.

During shark-attack seasonsummer in the northern hemispherehis phone never seems to stop ringing. Hes on a first-name basis with countless reporters who want comment and context. His two on-air interviews with the Fox Newss prickly star, Bill OReilly, did not go swimminglyOReilly was looking for a what good are sharks? story, and George disagreed that shark-killing frenzies make the world a safer place. Playboy magazine once told the story of Georges greatest shark investigationmore about that laterin an issue that also included photographs of Mick Jaggers naked daughter posed between the sheets. Not sure anyone read about me, George laments.

Georges modus operandi, in case you havent figured it out, is to talk candidly about shark attacks. But once hes got your attention, he uses the opportunity to advocate for shark conservation. A spectacular and misunderstood creature, a critical link in the marine food chain, the shark is in trouble. Why? Populations take a long time to reach sexual maturity. They are often caught before reproducing even once. Their meat ends up on supper plates. The final destination for their fins is often a bowl of soup somewhere in Asia.

George H. Burgess values sharks, skates, and raysall 1,300 known speciesfrom harmless 40-foot Whale Sharks to the Dwarf Lantern Shark that could fit on a hoagie roll. He is a fan of the dreaded White Shark that gives nightmares to bathers. The peculiar Sawfish, a relic of the dinosaur age with its spike-studded snout, is a particular favorite. When he looks out his office window at the Homo sapiens passing through the garden, his view is framed by the jaws of a Tiger Shark that looms over his cluttered desk.

George values sharks enough to capitalize their names in his books. In his thinking, a lemon shark is a Lemon Shark. An oceanic white tip is an Oceanic White Tip. Out of respect for George, and out of respect for his sharks, Ill do the same.

Ill be honest though. When Im swimming in the Gulf of Mexico in murky water, about an hour before dusk, and the lifeguard has gone home, and seaweed has brushed against my foot and for an instant scared me to death, Im not thinking about shark conservation or capital letters. I find myself worrying about the notorious Carcharhinus leucas, which in my neighborhood we call the Bull Shark.

Yes, I know the odds. I also know George has interviewed his share of folks missing a limb.

When you wade into the ocean, he says, youre wading into the wilderness. In the wilderness, anything can happen.

* * *

Wilderness beaches lack parking meters. They feature windswept sand dunes, ghost crabs, driftwood, the sound of waves crashing on the shore. You probably will see no other human on a wild beach. A wild beach, with its endless mocking horizon, might make you feel pitifully smallbecause in the natural scheme of things you and I are no more or less important than other sentient creatures.

Most of us, if were honest, prefer our beaches at least a tad civilized. We want our cell phones to work just in case. We want a place to lie on a blanket, scrunch toes in the sand, watch the pretty whimbrels hunting minnows in the backwash. Under the beach umbrella we might read Melville with complete awe but more likely it will be the latest Carl Hiaasen while munching Cheez Doodles.

On the radio, Adele just hit the note that always raises goose bumps. An airplane sputters over the beach towing a banner that advertises the fish-sandwich joint down the way.

Civilized people live in civilized places. A civilized city cannot scare a shark from its wharves, Thoreau once wrote.

July 21, 2009. St. Pete Beach, Florida

She was 19, home from college, and had decided to swim off the seawall behind the family luxury home. Since childhood Jenna James and her sister Laura had been water girls. That day was like so many others. They jumped into Boca Ciega Bay from the dock, clung to a toy raft, laughed and kicked. Shark Week was playing in all its gory cable television glory that month, but nothing could possibly happen to them. Jenna and Laura were young and immortal.

As she clung to the raft, Jenna suddenly felt something powerfuland unseenclamp down on her leg. Not something insignificant like the pinch from a blue crab, but something large and lethal. She screamed with pain and fright. Something was trying to eat her.

Whatever had her by the leg let go. Her sister Laura breast-stroked over, grabbed Jenna, and splashed toward the dock. Afraid something terrible might be coming up behind, both women scrambled up the ladder.

Laura wrapped her sisters mauled leg in a towel. Next she called paramedics on her cell. The leg below Jennas right knee, bleeding and shredded, was a frightful sight. In the operating room, the surgeon repaired damage to flesh, muscle, and nerves. Once home, Jenna focused on her physical recovery. Recovering emotionally was going to be just as challenging. How could this have happened to her? In her own backyard? In a civilized St. Pete Beach neighborhood? In the twenty-first century. Young college women with their lives ahead of them arent supposed to be devoured by wild beasts.