Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [62]
Denied its usual diet, the great white would have turned to the lesser prey items it consumes as the need arises. Exactly what the great white eats in an emergency is a mystery ichthyologists solved by the late twentieth century after decades of investigation: whatever it wishes. The giant fish devours the living and the dead and the inanimate. Bottles, tin cans, cuckoo clocks, truck tires, a whole sheep, an intact Newfoundland dog with its collar on, have all been taken from the stomach of white. In the days when animal carcasses were thrown in the ocean, boars, pigs, the head of a horse, a whole horse, and the entire skin of a buffalo found their way into the stomachs of great white sharks. Almost anything is within the reach of a mouth that takes fifty pounds in a single bite. One white was found with five hundred pounds of bull elephant seal in its stomach, taken, no doubt, in a single battle—a grown bull elephant seal weighs fifteen hundred pounds. The white wears the mantle of the “natural undertaker.” Without sharks the ocean would be littered with decomposing carcasses.
The white shark's preference for pinnipeds, fish, and other sea creatures over human flesh is documented. Burgess's worldwide study of white attacks shows that in the majority of the 179 attacks—56.8 percent of the cases—human victims received only a single bite and were “spit out.” Some shark biologists believe humans resemble seals and, when proven to be imposters, are spit out; others insist humans are rejected as insufficiently fatty. Burgess disagrees. In a third of the attacks in the worldwide study, the great white bit its human victim repeatedly, clearly intending to feed. In such cases, “multiple bites occurred, including many instances in which victims were wholly consumed,” Burgess says, indicating that “humans are not uniformly unpalatable.”
Burgess interprets the shark's “bite and spit” behavior differently. The white shark's attacks on humans parallels its attacks on sea creatures—after the first strike it circles around, giving the prey time to bleed out.
According to George Burgess, the shark bit and spit not because its human victim was unplatable, but because it simply ceased its attack:
It wasn't given an opportunity for a second bite. We have enough deaths and consumptions in the Attack File to know a white shark will happily consume a human being if it wants to. But because of our brain and social structure, a person grabbed by a white shark has a very good chance of getting to a boat, getting on a surfboard, having a swimming buddy help him escape the water. The poor sea lion doesn't have those assets. If humans were unpalatable we wouldn't have bodies disappearing and consumed.
In gray light the tide came in, covering the sands, and the globes of the streetlamps ensnared the brightness of dawn. In the early hours of Friday, July 7, before the hotels began serving coffee and distributing the morning newspaper, gentlemen made briskly to the boardwalk for their constitutionals, gentlemen in boaters and blue blazers, chins set to the breeze, who would not permit themselves to be thrown off balance. Later, intrepid young men, fewer in number, declared it a fine beach day, too lovely to waste, with the rain coming Saturday, and as the sun heated the shallows and the roadsters started down the coast road, they went into the sea.
Yet, as the sun rounded over the ocean at Spring Lake, a small squadron of boats split the shallows, gunning loud motorboat engines and trailing diluted crimson pools of animal