Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [22]
The shark was designed hydrodynamically, and with its new bulk it moved with the majesty of a Boeing 747, master of the seas. After eight years, the shark had nearly doubled in size—to almost eight feet, and more than three hundred pounds. It remained years away from sexual maturity, less than half grown. It was a shadow of the nearly twenty-foot goliath that would bite big sea turtles cleanly in two, shell and all—it was merely a juvenile. Yet already it was as close to invincible as a living thing can be.
The shark knew, instinctively, not to fear the behemoth shadows of the blue whale—the largest creature in the sea—who had somehow bypassed the laws of scale of predation and grazed on plankton and plantlike krill. There was nothing to fear, either, from fifteen-foot tiger sharks, formidable man-eaters that attacked almost everything else. Already the shark was larger or more powerful than almost anything else in the sea; it was, according to Harvard naturalist E. O. Wilson, “with the saltwater crocodile and Sundarbans tiger the last expert predator of man still living free . . . by all odds the most frightening animal on Earth, swift, relentless, mysterious and unpredictable.”
Only two creatures in the sea, scientists believe, would be emboldened to attack a seven- or eight-foot great white aside from another, much larger, great white. The first is speculative, but ichthyologists believe the huge sperm whale, armed with impressive teeth and already documented as an attacker of the giant megamouth shark, must also seize great whites from time to time. The second attacker of great whites does so rarely, it is believed, but an attack is documented. In October 1997, veteran biologist Peter Pyle was riding his seventeen-foot shark research whaler near California's Farallon Islands when he witnessed “a very amazing sight . . . [an] orca with a ten-foot white shark in its mouth.” Two female killer whales—the smallest one twelve to fifteen feet long—had been seen killing and eating a sea lion when apparently the white shark investigated and was not welcome. An hour later, the orca was seen pushing the shark along as it writhed in its mouth. But the orca did not consume the white. Instead the whale eventually dropped the eviscerated shark and it sank, while gulls began a “feeding frenzy on the liver and other bits of the shark floating to the surface.”
Yet the juvenile shark cruising in the subtropics knew no natural enemies and felt no fear. Perhaps it felt something resembling curiosity, or excitement, as it searched ceaselessly for appropriate prey, but not fear. The great white sliced through the cool, shallow waters of southeastern Florida with princely arrogance that winter. Amberjacks, dolphins, other sharks, and small whales fled its approach or died swiftly for their mistake.
In the late spring the shark was swimming slowly several miles off the coast of southeast Florida, somewhere between the Keys and West Palm Beach, when it was seized by a current much warmer than its liking. The shark resisted, but the current was unimaginably powerful, a mighty river that swept the shark away from the shallow, familiar coast. The force of billions and billions of gallons of water tumbling with trillions upon trillions of tons of plankton and algae and uncountable fish—wahoo, tunas, dolphins, sailfish, blue marlins, and flyingfishes—bore the shark away from shore. The current was miles wide and rich with prey, but the water was uncomfortably warm and deeper than it liked, and in this new environment the juvenile began to struggle. The young shark coursed through the rushing water, stalking yet somehow