13 Years Ago Today – The Day Greg Skomal Knew White Sharks off Cape Cod’s Beaches Was the New Normal

One of the questions I asked Greg Skomal as we were writing Chasing Shadows, our new book that published earlier this month, was when did he feel he knew that sharks in shallow water off the Cape’s beaches were not just an anomaly. When did he know that this was the new normal? Turns out that it was 13 years ago today on 30 July 2010. Here’s an excerpt from the chapter titled “The New Hotspot”:

By the end of July 2010, there was no doubt that white sharks were indeed patrolling the shallow water off Cape beaches, especially from Chatham out to Monomoy. The first sighting was by George Breen, who was flying his plane over Nauset Beach on July 11 when he saw a fifteen-foot white shark hunting seals less than one hundred feet off the beach. The media labeled the shark as “aggressive.” Was this the confirmation for which people had been waiting? Was this proof that 2009 was not an anomaly? Captain Billy Chaprales thought so. “I’ve been a commercial fisher for over forty years,” he said, “and I only saw three until last year.”

A picture of a white shark just off a Cape Cod beach taken by spotter pilot Wayne Davis and included in CHASING SHADOWS’ full color insert.

On July 30, George was again up in his plane, this time with a re- porter and a photographer who were covering the shark story. George spotted two sharks swimming parallel to South Beach a couple hundred yards apart. The larger of the two, George estimated, was fourteen feet; the smaller one was probably twelve feet. George continued along the coastline and spotted another fourteen-footer about one hundred yards off the beach. “They’ll even go closer than that,” he said over the inter- com to his passengers as he circled so they could get a good look. “They’ll hang out in the white water.” George leveled off and set a course to return to Falmouth, but before they left Monomoy’s beaches, he spotted three more sharks. One of them possibly was a shark he’d seen earlier, but he felt confident the other two were ones he had not observed earlier.

George radioed Chatham’s harbormaster to tell him what he’d seen, and the harbormaster, based on George’s report, made the decision to shut South Beach to swimming indefinitely. It was the first time that year that a beach had been shut to swimming. Harbor patrols made their way along the four-and-a-half-mile-long, unguarded South Beach and informed people of the swimming ban, but many people continued to enter the water anyway.

The Boston Globe
31 Jul 2010, Sat · Page B3

I’m not a sociologist, but it’s fascinating to me how people respond to swimming bans in the face of credible sightings near beaches. I’m certainly no alarmist, and I was glad it was not my job to tell people what they should and shouldn’t do—but what happened to common sense? If I was on South Beach with my family, and a patrol boat came by saying that a swimming ban was going into effect because of credible white shark sightings, I would certainly not swim. When George called me later, he told me that when they’d spotted the first sharks, they were not far from a large gathering on South Beach.

“Seaweed was arranged on the sand to spell out ‘Happy 30th,’” George said. “It was a birthday party. They were playing Frisbee and en- joying the day, oblivious to the large shark that swam less than a football field away.” Later, when the party was alerted to the fact that a swim- ming ban had gone into effect, many still chose to go in the water. “We’re careful,” said the birthday girl when questioned by a reporter later. “But I think I’m faster than a shark anyway.” It was a joke, but still.

“Listen,” said Katie McCully, a forty-four-year-old lifeguard at Nauset Beach, “we swim the length of our protected beach on a daily basis, and we feel safe.”

“We live in a fear-oriented society,” said a minister in his fifties, who was training for a triathlon and was undaunted by the shark sightings. “I try not to.”

Like me, George didn’t get it, either. He’d been flying in the area for more than three decades, and he’d only seen a handful of white sharks from the air before the summer of 2009. This summer, he’d made eight flights and seen white sharks on seven of them. “People say there hasn’t been a shark attack since 1936 in Massachusetts,” he said. “Well, I’ve been flying out here thirty years, and I’ve never seen sharks near the beach. If the sharks aren’t there, they’re not going to attack you. But now they are, so it’s a whole different story.”

I wanted to keep an open mind because I didn’t have the data to show anything conclusive yet. Yes, there were more shark sightings. It could be an anomaly, but my gut told me that was not the case. I was increasingly convinced this was the new normal, which is why I was gearing up for more tagging. Gretel had been a big wake-up call, but there were many other indicators. When I dove into the data of credible white shark sightings between 2001 and 2009, there was a clear upward trend. Some countered, saying that the number of white sharks wasn’t increasing; instead, the effort put into looking for them was increasing. In other words, more sightings didn’t necessarily mean more sharks. But the data told me a different story. Much of the data were based on interactions with commercial fisheries, especially the bluefin tuna fishery and the groundfish fishery that targeted cod, haddock, and yellowtail flounder. From 2001 to 2009, as white shark sightings in the region increased, those fisheries were declining by as much as half due to regulatory changes. Those data suggest there was less effort and more sightings.

There was another possibility as well. The sharks might be exhibiting a dietary shift. Instead of feeding offshore in the Atlantic, the population was adapting to the growing number of seals and moving inshore to hunt. In other words, there were not more sharks; the sharks were simply concentrating in an area where people were seeing them more. This was an interesting hypothesis, and it made a lot of sense to me. After all, Frank Carey had theorized way back in 1979, when they’d observed those sharks foraging on the dead whale, that white sharks in the northwest Atlantic relied more on whale carcasses and offshore feeding than white sharks in other parts of the world where pinnipeds were in ample supply. When the pinnipeds return, as they’d done in the Farallon Islands, so too did the white sharks.

Whether there were categorically more white sharks or whether the white sharks were simply shifting their dietary habits from offshore feeding to inshore feeding was an interesting question, but each was not mutually exclusive. It was a question I wanted to pursue, but from a pub- lic safety standpoint, it didn’t really matter why there were more white sharks showing up in shallow water off Cape beaches. If they were there, they were there. And they were there—making me increasingly confident that I was looking at the next chapter in the white shark story rather than just glancing at a footnote.

Chasing Shadows is available now wherever you get your books, or come to one of our talks or signing events and we’d be happy to personalize your book. Here are my book-related events as of right now:

The Most Important Shark Attack

This is the fifth in a series of blog entries leading up to the release of my new book, Chasing Shadows, written with shark biologist Greg Skomal. Click here to see all the blog entries in this series.

When it comes to shark attacks, the string of incidents in 1916 along the coast of New Jersey looms large (read Michael Capuzzo’s Close to Shore and Amy Hill Hearth’s Silent Came the Monster), as does the aftermath of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis about which I wrote yesterday (remember the scene in Jaws?). But a 1960 unprovoked attack on John Brodeur off Sea Girt, New Jersey, is generally unknown to a modern audience. As I was researching Chasing Shadows, which comes out on July 11th, I learned about the incident with Brodeur and have subsequently come to believe that shark attack was the most important event insofar as shark science in the western North Atlantic is concerned.

We give a fill account of the shark bite incident in the chapter titled “The Real Matt Hooper,” and then we make the case for its importance insofar as science is concerned in the next chapter titled “Unlikely Partnerships.” Not long before that fateful day off Sea Girt, the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife (a precursor to NOAA) had established a laboratory at Sandy Hook, New Jersey, and Jack Casey, later to become a pioneer in shark research and Greg’s mentor, applied for and got a job at the lab. Here’s an excerpt from the section named “The Cooperative Shark Tagging Program is Born”:

By late 1960, and largely because of what one paper called the “full-blown shark scare—real or imagined” that was put into motion by the attack on John Brodeur, Jack Casey and the other scientists at Sandy Hook Marine Laboratory were now very much engaged in the “shark issue.” The public seemed to think the Sandy Hook Lab could, as one reporter put it, “reduce the odds of a possible recurrence of shark attacks,” although it was unclear how they’d accomplish that. From a government standpoint, sharks were a threat to shipwrecked sailors and airmen, an economic liability to coastal communities, and a public safety concern. Sharks had no positive economic value, and they were a detriment to fishermen and fishing . . . or were they? The Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife was charged with maintaining and increasing public opportunities for recreational use of fish and wildlife resources, and the recreational use of sharks had not been part of the equation—but should it be?

Should the bureau promote recreational shark fishing?

The next summer, Jack, along with other staff from the Sandy Hook Lab, conducted their first set of longline surveys from Jones Inlet, New York, to Cape Henlopen, Delaware. The surveys, which were conducted aboard a commercial trawler donated by a local fishing company, yielded more than three hundred sharks, including two considered a “public safety concern”—the tiger shark and the white shark. What wasn’t immediately revealed to the public was the number of white sharks caught. “In order to avoid panic amongst tourists,” recalled Al Ristori, a sportswriter who became good friends with Jack and a big supporter of his shark research, “Casey asked outdoor writers not to publicize his catch of ten young great white sharks on a half-mile, thirty-two-hook longline set a quarter mile off a bathing beach in False Hook Channel.” Those were not the only white sharks caught in the survey. “Casey also caught juvenile white sharks within a mile or so of beaches at Rockaway and Coney Island, New York, but again kept that information quiet as it appeared the New York Bight might be a pupping ground for whites, and adult females were a much greater threat than their offspring.”

Even with some of the specifics pertaining to white sharks kept quiet, many anglers were excited by the survey results and the bureau’s newfound interest in possibly promoting recreational shark fishing. The idea of pursuing sharks as big game was starting to go mainstream. Jack was excited as well. Already they’d learned so much, and that was just from one season of longlining. “The more I learned about them,” Jack said of the sharks, “the more I wanted to know.” Shark fishing in the New York Bight, Jack believed, could be a “welcome addition to sport- fishing,” while at the same time providing invaluable data about these little-understood animals that had piqued his intellectual curiosity as a scientist. Over the next year, more than seventy-five anglers and angling clubs partnered with Jack and the Sandy Hook Lab, agreeing to collect data and provide sharks for dissection and study.

Jack Casey (second from right), with ten juvenile white sharks sampled off New Jersey. This discovery of a shark nursery just off the coast was highly significant for shark research in the region. This photo appears in the photo insert in CHASING SHADOWS.

That collaboration between recreational anglers and scientists led to new understandings of many species of sharks, and the data gleaned became the underpinning of the first conservation measures employed to protect sharks in the 1990s. Had it not been for the Sandy Hook Lab, a young scientist named Jack Casey and 1960 unprovoked attack, who knows where we’d be today in terms of shark science.

If we’ve piqued your interest with this or any of the other blog entries about our book Chasing Shadows, we encourage you to read the whole book, which will be out on July 11th.

World War II and Shark-related Psychosis

This is the fourth in a series of blog entries leading up to the release of my new book, Chasing Shadows, written with shark biologist Greg Skomal. Click here to see all the blog entries in this series.

In the famous scene in Jaws Quint states, “Eleven hundred men went into the water,
316 men came out and the sharks took the rest.

The last two entries in my ten-day countdown to the release of my new book CHASING SHADOWS, written with shark biologist Greg Skomal, focused on Jaws and the so-called “Jaws effect.” There is no doubt that the movie Jaws influenced Greg’s interest in the species, and as we point out in the book, the movie had a lasting effect on many individuals, but we want to be really clear that it was not just Benchley’s novel and the ensuing Spielberg film that shaped the public’s perception of the white shark. In the chapter titled “Going to Sea,” we talk a bit about World War II and the influence the war had on our collective perception of white sharks. Here’s an excerpt:

Jaws, and in turn the white shark, get much of the credit for creating the deeply rooted societal fear of sharks, but the reality is that the seeds for a ubiquitous shark-related psychosis are more firmly rooted in wartime, when shipwrecked sailors and downed airmen found themselves in what were commonly described in news reports as “shark-infested” waters. There was surely some gruesome irony to the fact that a young man would survive his ship being torpedoed or his plane being shot down only to face the threat of shark attack in the water. As atrocious as warfare was, the notion that there was something even more ghastly and primal lurking just beneath the surface was enough to traumatize a generation. Capitalizing on these deep-seated terrors, “shark-infested” waters became a speculative (at best) set piece of many newspaper stories, drumming up a crescendo of irrational fear of sharks. It wasn’t, however, all hyperbole. As Jaws pays homage during Quint’s penultimate scene, perhaps the worst disaster of World War II for US servicemen was the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, where many sailors were indeed killed and some eaten by sharks.

USS Indianapolis

As we point out in the chapter “Unlikely Partnerships,” the wartime “shark-related psychosis,” was the major impetus for shark science, and that science was largely funded by the military:

[M]ost of the shark research in the middle of the twentieth century was firmly focused on how to keep people safe from shark attacks. Nearly all the pioneering shark researchers were associated with that work, and most—including Eugenie Clark, Albert Tester, Richard Backus, and Perry Gilbert—were present at a 1958 conference titled “Basic Research Approaches to the Development of Shark Repellents,” which was funded by the US Navy’s Office of Naval Research.

It wasn’t until Jack Casey’s interest was piqued after the 1960 unprovoked attack on John Brodeur and the subsequent scientific work in the New York Bight that shark science in the western North Atlantic took a dramatic turn.

But more on that tomorrow…

If we’ve piqued your interest, you can learn a whole lot more by reading our book Chasing Shadows, which will be out on July 11th.

“Something Truly Deserving of Every Ounce of Our Fear”?

This is the third in a series of blog entries leading up to the release of my new book, Chasing Shadows, written with shark biologist Greg Skomal. Click here to see all the blog entries in this series.

It wouldn’t be summer in New England without sharks in the headlines;
July 3, 2010 article in Boston Globe withe headline “A Word to the Wary: Sharks”

Front Page of the Boston Globe Tuesday, June 29, 2010

In the chapter of Chasing Shadows called “The New Hotspot,” it’s a few days before the 4th of July 2010, the year after Greg tagged the first five white white sharks off Cape Cod. He wasn’t sure whether the sharks that showed up during the late summer of 2009 were an anomaly or not. Some had expressed concern that white sharks showing up along the Cape’s beaches would hurt tourism. Greg heard those concerns loud and clear, and he also knew that if they did return, there would be an opportunity to study them.

Herein lies the central tension in the second half of our book–the relationship between public safety and research. Were the two mutually exclusive, or could research help mitigate the risk? Or put another way, could the risk ever be managed if scientists like Greg didn’t understand these animals? The Cape, with its often turbid water (we refer to it in the book as “not tropical Caribbean gin-clear blue, but more of a North Atlantic, hazy-IPA crystal”) and shallows crisscrossed by a maze of bars and sloughs, required the sharks to employ different hunting strategies than in many other hotspots. It also required public safety officials to utilize different approaches. Without understanding how the sharks were hunting a rebounding seal population, how could public safety officials reduce the risk to ocean users?

…but I’m getting ahead of myself. As the 4th of July holiday approaches in 2010, it’s unclear if the white sharks that seemed to suddenly appear in the late summer of 2009 will return at all. Nobody is calling Cape Cod a white shark hotspot at this point. Nonetheless, the media is drumming up some hype, and both Greg, on behalf of the state agency for which he works, and local beach managers have issued warnings and offered advice regarding sharks in advance of the holiday. I’ll pick-up the story with the following excerpt from Chasing Shadows:

McGrory’s Column from Boston Globe
June 30, 2010

Perfect weather was forecast for the Fourth of July holiday on Cape Cod. Despite the media coverage of the white sharks, not to mention the direct warnings and advisories, the beaches were packed. Those who worried that tourism would suffer because of the sharks seemed to have worried for nothing. “No one’s asking about it,” said Wendy Northcross, the chief executive of the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce. “If anything, it might be a curiosity that draws people here.”

It appeared that people were committed to their holiday weekend plans, which was fine by me. I felt good about our messaging—yes, there were white sharks off Cape Cod, but if people used common sense, the risk remained low. I was eager to get on with our research, but I would also have been content if there were no shark sightings over the Fourth. Even just the one white shark caught offshore so far that season had created more work for me than I felt I had time for—speaking to the press, updating my bosses, offering advice. After the previous September, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I believed that however it played out, we were ready— ready not only to manage the risk but also to advance the science.

Apparently not everyone felt the same way, and I heard about it in a particularly scathing op-ed published in the Boston Globe on the last day of June 2010. In a piece titled “State’s Little White Lie,” Globe columnist Brian McGrory likened Ian Bowles, the state’s Secretary of Environmental Affairs, and me to Leslie Nielsen’s character in one of the Naked Gun movies. In the film, Lieutenant Frank Drebin is keeping people from gawking at a crime scene, saying, “Nothing to see here. Keep it moving. Nothing to see.” McGrory goes on to write, “Behind him, there are gunshots, explosions, bodies hitting the pavement. This is what came immediately to mind as Ian Bowles and Gregory Skomal told the people of Massachusetts this week that there’s nothing to fear from the great white sharks that have taken up residence along our shores.”

Later in the piece, McGrory played the Jaws card. “Amity being an awful lot like Edgartown,” he wrote, “Jaws providing a prelude to what could be happening in real life.” McGrory recalled that the mayor of Amity said there was no reason not to swim, but after several people were killed by the shark, that changed. In McGrory’s assessment, the residents and tourists on Cape Cod’s beaches had “dodged fate” in 2009.

“[H]ow long can our good fortune go on?” McGrory asked.

Of course, I bristled at McGrory’s hyperbolic ramblings. I was becoming accustomed to the press’s desperate need to sell papers during the summer, and his column advanced that particular cause while garnering him much-needed attention. It was relatively easy to dismiss it as little more than theater. However, if I was honest—really honest—I knew there was a nugget of truth in McGrory’s rant. It was something that had been eating at me ever since I spent time with Gretel in the salt pond. How long can our good fortune go on? I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t agree with McGrory’s assessment that white sharks in Cape waters were “something truly deserving of every ounce of our fear,” but as a shark scientist, I knew that if the white sharks were back inshore in any significant numbers, inevitably the odds would catch up.

Safety Tips published in the Boston Globe before the 4th of July Holiday 2010

A lot has transpired since 2010. Cape Cod has established itself as an indisputable white shark hotspot. Greg and his team have tagged more than 300 individual white sharks, and they have identified over 600 individuals. We know a lot more about white sharks than we did 13 years ago, but it’s remarkable how many questions remain. One thing that is certain, however, is that whether it’s Jaws or real life, there’s going to be a lot of talk about sharks when those big summer holidays come around in New England…and someone is always going to say: “I think we need a bigger boat.”

If we’ve piqued your interest, you can learn a whole lot more by reading our book Chasing Shadows, which will be out on July 11th.

“Summer is almost upon us, and that means great white sharks have returned to the waters off Cape Cod. Concerningly shallow waters.”

The Jaws Effect

“You yell barracuda, everybody says, “Huh? What?” You yell shark, we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July. “

Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, and it’s also a couple days into National Geographic’s SharkFest. CHASING SHADOWS, my new book written with shark biologist Greg Skomal, publishes in just nine days…so, of course, I’m thinking sharks and Jaws and what we refer to in the book as the “Jaws effect.” I knew from hearing Greg speak before we starting working together on CHASING SHADOWS in the spring of 2020 that Jaws had been important to him and his career choice, but that all became so much clearer to me after we got to know each other. For today’s blog entry celebrating day nine of the 10-day countdown to the official launch of our book, I want to share with you a excerpt from the book where I think we captured the conundrum of the “Jaws effect” particularly well. It’s from the chapter “Living in the Key of G.” Like the book as a whole, it’s written in the first person from Greg’s perspective.

There was a powerful narrative that aligned this messy, bloody work with the archetype who inspired my own quest to become a marine scientist: Matt Hooper. During the summer of 1983, I thought a lot about the scene in the original Jaws movie, where Police Chief Brody, absentmindedly fidgeting with the foil on the neck of a bottle of Beaujolais, says to Hooper, “Why don’t we have one more drink and then go down and cut that shark open?”

In the movie, Brody and Hooper had watched a posse of local fishermen triumphantly land a large shark at the town dock earlier in the day. The fishermen are intent on slaying the man-eater that killed a young boy. The mayor, resolute in his decree to keep the beaches open and the tourist dollars flowing through the summer holiday, proclaims as fact the story sweeping the dock. This is the shark that killed the boy! It’s safe to go back in the water! A reporter and photographer are in the process of consecrating the narrative in what they hope will be a nationwide media blitz, because the shark attacks on Amity, like most shark attacks, will be national news. But Hooper remains rationally unconvinced. While other characters are motivated by political pressure, ego, and fear, Hooper, the scientist, focuses on objective truths—what he can observe, measure, and, ultimately, dissect.

The scene in the movie is rowdy. The crowd alternates between jeers and cheers—celebratory bedlam as the animal is hoisted aloft. It’s a mob wielding fishing rods and harpoons instead of pitchforks. One man has a rifle. Salty fishermen speculate on what species the shark is, as they peer into the blood-slathered, toothy mouth of a monster. Two arrows dangle from its flank. A large hook pierces its snout, causing the mouth to gape. It’s a lynching—a hasty conviction at the gallows without due process. A witch at the pillory. No evidence. No data. Yet at this point in the movie, most every person in the theater is rooting with the crowd on the dock. They are hoping this is the man-eater (even though they know their optimism will be short-lived—such is Spielberg’s magic). The audience is caught up in the frenzy of the hunt. The revenge kill. The vindication. Man triumphing over the monster and making the wilderness safe again.

It’s primal.

But that’s not the way I saw it sitting in the movie theater in Fairfield, Connecticut. I saw something entirely different—something that would ultimately change my life and lead to me dissecting sharks alongside Jack and Wes up and down the New England coast in the summer of 1983. I saw Matt Hooper approach the shark steadfast and determined. He’s unemotional against a backdrop of hysteria. He observes the animal as a scientist. He’s rational. Thoughtful. Deliberate. Objective. Blocking out the noise, he acts methodically. He measures the shark’s mouth. He calmly identifies it and uses terms like bite radius as he makes mental notes of the animal’s measurements. He does not think this is the shark that killed the boy, but nobody wants to hear his opinion, however well informed it may be. The desire to slay the beast is so strong that even Brody buys into it . . . until the awkward scene with the Beaujolais and the ensuing dockside dissection by flashlight, which proves this is not the man-eater.

Brody holds the flashlight. Hooper wields the knife. I was on the edge of my seat. It was so cool.

CHASING SHADOWS publishes on the 11th of July, but you can pre-order now here or through the Karen Talbot Art Gallery if you’d like an original illustration by Karen, who did the illustrations in the book, on the title page.

Naming Sharks

In Chasing Shadows, which comes out in just 10 days, my co-author, Greg Skomal, and I talk about the practice of naming the sharks he is studying. Greg is a shark biologist, and he’s identified many sharks off the coast of Cape Cod, and almost all of them now have names. As a science writer, I’m familiar with this practice from previously writing about whales, wolves and other animals that are the subjects of longterm studies, but I must admit that it has always troubled me a bit. I’ve always worried that by ascribing a name to an animal, the researcher will lose some of his or her objectivity and that it will potentially bias the way the public views that animal.

Early on in the process of researching the book, I asked Greg about it, and he said that he was—or at least had been—conflicted. In the following excerpt from the book, which takes place in 2010 as Greg is filming a show for Shark Week called Jaws Comes Home, the director wants him to name the sharks he’s tagging.

We tagged four sharks during the filming of Jaws Comes Home and, unlike the sharks I tagged in the fall of 2009, we gave each one a name. As I would come to learn, the television shows always insisted on the sharks being named—something about which both I and my bosses at the Division of Marine Fisheries remained somewhat uneasy…. I was a biologist, after all, and these animals were first and foremost study animals. As a scientist I thought a lot about the issues associated with naming study animals, and it was something that still bothered me about whale research. Did naming imply or even promote bias? And what if that animal were to subsequently be involved in an attack? Would the agency be accused of humanizing these animals instead of protecting the public, which funded its work, from a deadly monster? Would I be accused of treating a wild animal, an apex predator, as something akin to a pet?

It wasn’t until June of 2016 that Greg turned the corner on naming sharks. Greg’s good friend Luke Gurney had just died in a fishing accident, and Greg named the first shark he tagged that season after Luke. Here’s another excerpt from the book:

I told Luke’s family and friends all about [White Shark Luke], and as I did, I realized that what had started as a name to honor my friend morphed into more than that. White Shark Luke not only reminded me of my friend, but also was an individual I was getting to know better and better each year. With hindsight, I think that’s when naming sharks took on more meaning for me. I was still somewhat concerned with assigning names to fish that could potentially hurt people, but I also saw the merit in doing so…. I’d noticed that people tended to embrace named animals, like pets, and I felt that was better than people being fearful of them. The [Atlantic White Shark Conservancy] also learned that naming sharks could help with fundraising—for a $2,500 donation to the conservancy, individuals could name a tagged shark. Names were also practical. They helped with keeping track of sharks day-to-day and in talking about them—it’s easier to talk about “White Shark Luke” instead of “tag number 20905.”

As a science writer, I love collaborating with scientists like Greg. I like better understanding the scientist’s perspective on something like the naming of the animals being studied and then sharing that with the reader. I still have my reservations, but I do understand both the inclination and the utility of naming white sharks. More importantly, I appreciate the deeper understanding of both the animal and those who study the animal. I hope you will come to also appreciate that when reading our book.

Countdown to CHASING SHADOWS Launch Day – Daily Blog Entries with Excerpts from the Book

Chasing Shadows is a book about the resurgence in the white shark population in the western North Atlantic seen through the eyes of shark biologist Greg Skomal, who quite unexpectedly, found himself in the middle of it all. Written with Ret Talbot, the book is a collaboration between a scientist and a science writer who see the restoration of an apex predator to an ecosystem as a remarkable conservation success story, albeit with challenges for New England’s heavily populated and utilized coast.

In the countdown to the book’s launch, co-author Ret Talbot is writing 10 short blog entries that highlight parts of the book that he found particularly interesting or enlightening while researching and writing. Hopefully these pieces will whet your appetite for the book, which can be pre-ordered here.

If you would like to have scientific illustrator Karen Talbot, who did the illustrations for the book, add an original illustration to the title page of your book, you can pre-order in her gallery in Rockland, Maine or via her online sore here.

T-minus 10 – (2 July) “Naming Sharks”

T-minus 9 – (3 July) “The Jaws Effect”

T-minus 8 (4 July) – “Something Truly Deserving of Every Ounce of Our Fear?”

T-minus 7 (5 July) – “World War II and Shark-related Psychosis“

T-minus 6 (6 July) – “The Most Important Shark Attack”

T-minis 5 (7 July) –

T-minus 4 (8 July) –

T-minus 3 (9 July) –

T-minus 2 (10 July) –

T-minus 1 (11 July) – Launch Day!

30 Years of Coastal Shark Protection in the Atlantic

This April marks the 30th anniversary of US federal protection for sharks in the Atlantic Ocean. It was a long time coming, but these regulations, in combination with the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act and the 1997 ban on killing white sharks in federal water, set the stage for the conservation success story that is at the heart of Chasing Shadows. Here is an excerpt from chapter six of the book in a section we titled “A Sea Change: Protections for Sharks”:

It wasn’t until April 1993 that the Fishery Management Plan for Sharks of the Atlantic Ocean was finally implemented. The final plan regulated thirty-nine frequently caught species of Atlantic sharks and divided them into three groups: large coastal sharks, small coastal sharks, and pelagic sharks. It established a commercial permitting system, commercial quotas, and a framework for adjusting quotas. For recreational anglers, it put in place a trip limit of four sharks per vessel for large coastal sharks and pelagic sharks and a daily bag limit of five sharks per person for small coastal sharks. It also prohibited finning and the sale by recreational fishermen of sharks or shark products. While it was a long time in the making, sharks in the northwest Atlantic enjoyed widespread protections for the first time ever.

Like any federal management plan, the Fishery Management Plan for Sharks of the Atlantic Ocean that was implemented in 1993 was not perfect. Both commercial anglers and recreational anglers criticized the plan (for different reasons, of course), but it was a start.

Article from Press of Atlantic City, Atlantic City, New Jersey · Tuesday, April 27, 1993

If you’d like to read Chasing Shadows, you can preorder it now on Amazon wherever books are sold. We are also launching a Galley Giveaway next week on Goodreads if you’re interested in a chance to get an advance copy.

Happy Birthday, Stan!

Today is Stan Waterman’s 100th birthday!

For those who don’t know, Stan Waterman is a five time Emmy winning cinematographer and a pioneering giant in the world of shark diving. We mention Stan a couple times in Chasing Shadows because 1) he is a pioneering giant in the world of shark diving (as previously stated) and 2) because he was a big influence on my co-author Greg’s life and career.

When I was first getting to know Greg, he mentioned the movie “Blue Water, White Death” on several occasions. I was familiar with the movie because of Peter Matthiessen’s 1971 Blue Meridian: The Search for the Great White Shark about the making of the film (I wrote about that a bit in this blog post), but I had not seen the film in years. It is extraordinary on many levels, and we talk about the “feeding frenzy” scene in the book. Stan Waterman was both a producer and photographer on the film.

Stan enters Chasing Shadows in chapter three. It’s 1979, and Jack Casey (Greg’s mentor and the author of Chasing Shadows‘ forward) had mobilized a team that included Frank Carey of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to try and study white sharks in the western Atlantic. The work was mostly funded by ABC television, and the network sent a film crew that included Stan Waterman. It was a win-win, where the scientists got some of their research funded and the network got some great footage shot by Stan for their popular American Sportsman show.

Fast forward to chapter nine of Chasing Shadows. It’s now 2010 and Greg is preparing to dive with a white shark feeding on a whale carcass off Cape Cod. When I was interviewing Greg about that day, he told me Stan Waterman was very much front of mind as he prepared to enter the water with the 18-foot shark. We write:

“Nobody had filmed white sharks underwater in the Atlantic since Stan Waterman filmed the segment for ABC’s American Sportsman in 1979. It was something for which I’d been waiting my entire life, and I happened to have one of the best underwater cameramen in the world [Nick Caloyianis] at my side.”

What happens next was both one of the most exciting and terrifying moments in Greg’s life, but you’ll have to read the book to get the whole story. We also include a couple pictures of the incident in the book’s 16-page photo insert, but here’s a bonus picture Greg snapped of the shark he and Nick would name Curly.

These connections with our mentors and heroes across time are so humbling and rewarding. Happy Birthday, Stan!

P.S. As many of you know, I live on the coast of Maine, and Stan Waterman was the first resident of Maine to purchase an aqualung following World War II. How cool is that?!

Beloved Invaders – Perceptions of Non-native Species

This episode of the Beyond Data Podcast (Season 1, episode 3) was originally released in August 2018.

The non-native brown trout, which the data show places a burden on imperiled native fishes, is revered in the United States, while other non-natives are demonized. In this episode of the Beyond Data Podcast, we take a deep dive into the interplay between non-native and native fishes–especially salmonids. We’ll look at how our perceptions toward introduced species are shaped, and we’ll ask the question of whether or not there is a place for non-native species in ecosystems we consider healthy. 

Guests

(in order of appearance)

Dr. Julie Lockwood, Professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources at Rutgers University

Dr. David West, Science Advisor, Freshwater at New Zealand Department of Conservation

Kirk Deeter, Vice President of Trout Media at Trout Unlimited

Kim Todd, Sparrow Author of Tinkering with Eden and Sparrow

Dr. Nathaniel Hitt, Research Fish Biologist at USGS Leetown Science Center

Michael Steinberg, Author of Forthcoming A Brook Trout Pilgrimage and Associate Professor at The University of Alabama

Francis Brautigam, Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife 

Catherine Schmitt, Author of The President’s Salmon and Communications Director at Maine Sea Grant

Derek Young, Professional Fly Fishing Guide, Owner of Emerging Rivers Guide Services and Founder of Headwaters Matter

Links

PART I [00:00] Non-Native Cover Fish

Trout Unlimited’s Trout Magazine 

PART II [4:00] Nuanced Definition

Dr. Julie Lockwood’s Invasion Ecology, 2nd Edition

“Conserving Honey Bees Does Not Help Wildlife” in Science, January 2018

“How Invasive Feral Pigs Impact the Hawaiian Islands” from Island Conservation

“Why are lionfish a growing problem in the Atlantic Ocean?” from NOAA Ocean Facts

PART III [7:50] Earth’s Virgin Utopia

Silver Pine Lodge 

New Zealand Department of Conservation

“Rotenone treatment has a short-term effect on New Zealand stream macroinvertebrate communities” in New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research

“Reintroduction of a native galaxiid (galaxias fasciatus) following piscicide treatment in two streams: response and recovery of the fish population” from Ecology of Freshwater Fish

Zealandia Sanctuary

Galaxiid Conservation Status

“Silently Spreading Death” from Fish & Game New Zealand is linked as a PDF

PART IV [21:55] The Brown Trout Comes to America

“Tinkering with Eden” by Kim Todd

PART V [27:00] What the Data Show

“USGS Study Reveals Interactive Effects of Climate Change, Invasive Species on Native Fish” 

“Brook trout use of thermal refugia and foraging habitat influenced by brown trout” in Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences

Fausch’s “Competition Between Brook Trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) and Brown Trout (Salmo trutta) for Positions in a Michigan Stream” in Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences

“Temperature‐dependent shifts in phenology contribute to the success of exotic species with climate change” in the American Journal of Botany

“How Climate Change is Helping Invasive Species Take Over” in Smithsonian Magazine

PART VI [31:50] Maine’s Embattled Coldwater Fishes

Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife

IFW Angler Survey

PART VII [42:45] Immigrant Fish & Dark Rhetoric

“Why Do I Love Brown Trout So Much?” by Kirk Deeter 

David Theodoropoulos on Invasion Biology at the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference 

“What is the Brown Tree Snake” from USGS FAQs

“Conserving Honey Bees Does Not Help Wildlife” in Science, January 2018

“Why are lionfish a growing problem in the Atlantic Ocean?” from NOAA Ocean Facts

PART VIII [50:05] Angler Evolution & A Conservation Ethic

The President’s Salmon

Penobscot River Restoration Project

Trout Unlimited

Native Fish Coalition 

Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture

Western Native Trout Initiative

American Sportfishing Association

Headwaters Matter

Thanks 

In addition to my guests today, special thanks to Loren McClenachan of Colby College and Molly Payne Wynne from The Nature Conservancy. Music by Andy Cohen and Fabrika Music at HookSounds. Sound effects by acclivity at freesound.org. A big shout out to Jess from the Murder Road Trip Podcast for New Zealand voice talent. Cheers to Clay Gloves at the Fish Nerds Podcast for doing all you do.

Beyond Data is reported, narrated and produced by me, Ret Talbot, in Rockland, Maine.

Thanks!

About the Beyond Data Podcast

For the past decade Beyond Data Podcast host Ret Talbot has been a freelance journalist and science writer reporting on fisheries at the intersection of science and sustainability. He frequently uses the hashtag #datamatter because, well, they do. But what happens when the data simply don’t exist, are insufficient or unavailable? What happens when so-called alternative facts are considered just facts and people operate under the impression that the plural of anecdote is indeed data? How do we reach consensus when everyone espouses his or her own data—his or her own facts? In the Beyond Data Podcast, Talbot and his guests go where he’s often been unwilling to go in his reporting–beyond data.