Shark Trouble by Peter Benchley Page B

leisurely around our stern, as if showing off its formidable size. The top of its head was as big around as a manhole cover, and the long, slender striped body seemed to take forever to pass by the stern. It was a chilling sight, reminiscent of the crocodile in
Peter Pan
that waits for Captain Hook to fall overboard. To me, the message from this giant said,
Take your time, no rush, I’m in no hurry, but sometime, someday, one of you will make a mistake and enter my realm, and then you’ll be mine.
    Suddenly, though, the shark must have received a signal that real potential prey was nearby, for it sped away and, a few seconds later, exploded through the surface fifteen or twenty feet behind the boat, clutching in its jaws an adult sea turtle. The turtle was too big to swallow, its shell too tough to crack; its head and legs had withdrawn into the safety of the carapace. The shark shook the turtle violently from side to side and then, mysteriously, let it go and slipped silently beneath the surface.
    For several moments we watched the turtle bobbing on the surface, head and legs still invisible, and we guessed that the shark had abandoned the effort and departed in search of easier prey. The turtle must have come to the same conclusion, for slowly its legs protruded from the shell, then came the head, and then …
    Bammo!
Like a rocket, the shark blasted up from below, clamped its jaws on one of the turtle’s hind legs, and worried it with its teeth until, at last, the leg came off. The remaining three legs and the head snapped back inside the shell; again the shark slid away under water; again the turtle bobbed on the surface.
    For the next half hour or so, we saw the assault repeated again and again, though without further success. Once wounded, the turtle appeared to be prepared to hunker down inside its shell forever, if necessary. As much as we rooted for the turtle—we knew it could live a successful life with three functioning legs—there was no way we could interfere; nor did we want to, for this was normal, natural predation in the sea.
    Bull Sharks
    The third shark that poses a true threat to man in the sea is the bull shark, which comes in several varieties, including the Zambezi shark, the Lake Nicaragua shark, and several of the so-called whalers of Australia. As the first two names imply, bull sharks are even more wide-ranging than tigers; they have been found in—and have killed people in—lakes and rivers. Most sharks can’t survive, not to mention hunt and feed, in even brackish water, but bull sharks are equipped with some biological quirk that permits them to function normally in salt, brackish, and
fresh
water.
    Bull sharks also frequent shallow water and murky water, like that off the Gulf Coast of Florida. It was a bull shark that attacked young Jesse Arbogast in July 2001, triggering the media frenzy that lasted all summer, and Bahamians asserted that bull sharks were probably the culprits in the two nonfatal attacks a month later in the shallow waters off Grand Bahama Island. Bull sharks have such a bad reputation for being aggressive, fearless, and territorial that they undoubtedly are blamed for more attacks than they’re responsible for. Still, there are so many bull sharks in so many waters in which so many people choose to swim that they must be classified as extremely dangerous.
    Oceanic Whitetips
    Then there’s the oceanic whitetip, whose Latin name so aptly describes the creature that I’ll burden you with it:
C. longimanus,
or “long-hands.” This shark’s pectoral fins are extraordinarily long and graceful, resembling the wings of a modern fighter jet.
Longimanus
tends to stay in the deep ocean, and nobody on earth has the vaguest notion about total numbers of long-hand attacks because the people they do attack are either adrift, alone, or survivors of shipwrecks, who don’t much care
what
species of shark it is that’s harassing