Discovery Channel: Expedition Shark

Silvertips, Tigers and Hammerheads, Oh My!

So there is Sanjayan, underwater, holding a whitetip shark on a rope; while JR has taken the other two to the boat. They’ve just finished the shark rodeo and we’re heading to the surface. Sanjayan holds a joint appointment as lead scientist for The Nature Conservancy and a research faculty member at the University of Montana. Coming into the show as a terrestrial ecologist, he presents fresh insight into what it’s like to experience some of these things for the first time.

“I’ve spent a lot of time around carnivores. I’ve been with polar bears and grizzlies and mountain lions and leopards and lions and wolves. I know how they behave and I know how to put myself in a situation where I’m never taking incompetent risks,” says Sanjayan. “But the moment I go in the water, I feel incompetent because I’m surrounded by animals that are more comfortable in their environment than me, and I can’t read them. Their body language is new to me.”

The sharks must be having a tough time reading us too. Seeing sharks dangling by their tails is a pretty funny sight. But all that lassoing gets the job done.

“When Richard first told me what he wanted to do, that he wanted to catch a shark by its tail, and transfer the lasso from your hand to its tail, I thought it was a crazy idea,” Mike said in a video diary he recorded for the show last night. “But that’s what we’ve been doing. And it works like a charm.”

The shark rodeo takes place at North Horn, at the relatively shallow depth of 55 feet. The plan had been to capture the same three whitetips that they’d placed the temperature loggers on, but catching the third whitetip they placed temp loggers on has proven a bit tricky. The outside capsule fell off her tail fin, so she’s not quite as easy to identify, but Richard can tell her by the fresh sutures on her belly.

After bringing the sharks they captured to the boat, Richard carries them one at a time to the kiddie pool to wait while they work on the third. Richard gives the new whitetip a pinger ID, and removes the temp loggers from the other two.

We watch the shark rodeo again the following day, catching one new whitetip, but the one they really want eludes us yet again. She’s turning out to be a slippery shark. So Richard tries a new capture technique for grey reef sharks. He opens the bait box, which gets them hyped. With fish in the water, the greys started circling and grabbing aggressively at the fish —very different behavior from their regular cruising mode. Once the greys get in a frenzy, Richard tries to hook their tails with a “claw” he invented —a metal hook that works like a handcuff.

We watch for another 20 minutes or so, but it’s not working so Richard makes the call to head up. “The claw just seems to not work around their tail. It just slips out,” Richard says. But the good news: “We’ve now tagged 50 sharks at Osprey Reef.”

Out here on the Undersea Explorer, there are two simultaneous agendas—conduct scientific research and film a documentary. Some days they do both at the same time. Other days, no cameras are around and they just capture sharks. Sometimes they film scenes on board the boat or in the water while no research is happening. Sometimes they just play around, like when Sanjayan, Richard and Mike lay in the kiddie pool with a small whitetip shark.

Sometimes different things are happening at the same time. Various divers are setting and retrieving receivers, fishing for sharks or setting out reef cams. When Undersea Explorer biologist Gabriel Vianna was retrieving one of the receivers at North Horn, several silvertip reef sharks “buzzed” him. Instead of keeping at a distance, the silvertips were checking him out, just slightly more aggressive than their normal cruising mode.

Since the silvertips were in the area, why not try to catch some? Silvertips forage differently than grey reef sharks, so researchers have to capture them differently too. While you can catch grey reef sharks by fishing off the back of a moored boat, silvertips tend to swim in deeper water and go after moving bait.  So with engines idling and winds behind us, the crew cast a 400-pound fishing line with bait, and let the line drift with the boat away from the reef. When the boat gets too far out, skipper Sean would reposition the boat closer to the reef, and then let it drift some more.

I watched the fishing from the back deck and saw several silvertips swimming in the water just off the duckboard. Despite heavy winds during our trip reducing water visibility, the ocean is still incredibly clear blue, and sharks can be seen with clarity under the water’s surface. After an hour and a half, several to try to take the bait, but not aggressively. Once again the sharks just weren’t biting.

Yesterday morning we were traveling from Admiralty Anchor to North Horn to try our hand at shark rodeo again. I was standing at the duckboard when crew started running past and talking about a tiger shark. Mike spotted something at the front of the boat and so we all went out there to check it out. It comes really close to the surface and Richard makes the call, “definitely a tiger.” I can see the tiger-like marking on its flanks. “It’s a small one.” It is probably about 10 to 12 feet long—larger than any of the other sharks we’ve seen so far, but small for a tiger.

“Ask me how many tigers I’ve seen out here at Osprey, including that one,” Richard says to Sanjayan. “How many have you seen?” Sanjayan asks.

“One,” Richard replies.

JR grabs some fish bait to see if they can hook it, so they can see whether it’s one they tagged at Raine Island earlier in the year, also part of the Expedition Shark film. Tiger sharks lurk in great numbers off of Raine, a green sea turtle nesting beach. The crew got in the water to film, tag and release them. Is it possible that one of those tiger sharks made its way out here, over 100 miles away? No one knows.

They try to hook the tiger shark for about 20 minutes but unfortunately, it didn’t take the bait. She swam close to the surface a few times, dove deep, surfaced again and then swam away— a typical day of shark research.

“First a thresher and now a tiger shark. What’s next?” I say. What a rare, privileged sighting! “Maybe a hammerhead? We’re going to see a hammerhead!” I say. I’m half joking, because that would be extraordinary and unusual to say the least to see all three of these species here within a few days.

But I’ll be darned if we don’t see just that — a great hammerhead — the very same afternoon. Topside cameraman Athol Foster was snorkeling off the reef at North Horn when he saw a hammerhead swimming below him. “It came up within couple meters of the surface and it circled around. It showed a lot of interest in me.” he says. “Had I been on my own and had no researchers telling me about sharks for the last several days, I probably would have been scared. I was sort of caught between both worlds, where you think, shoot, it could be really scary but I wished it would come closer.”

Soundman Cam McGrath was the only one already in Scuba gear, so he jumped in with a underwater camera and got about 20 to 30 seconds of good footage. As more people got in the water, the hammerhead seemed to get a lot more agitated. They kept most people out of the water so they could get some footage and by the time I was able to jump in with my snorkel and mask, it was gone.  Athol said it left by heading from the deeper water into the shallower Osprey reef shelf. But what an amazing stroke of luck we’ve had!

Images: Richard and grey reef; Pinger ID tag; Bait box frenzy; Sanjayan, Richard and Mike in kiddie pool with whitetip shark.

Photos: Cat Gennaro/DCL/Courtesy Wendee Holtcamp

Shake, Rattle and … Shark?

Mike stands on the duckboard at the back of the Undersea Explorer shaking a coconut rattle — a bamboo stick with a bunch of coconuts on the end that rattle together. “This has been used to attract sharks throughout Polynesia and Micronesia for millennia,” he says. “Well, actually I just made this one.”

Sanjayan, Richard and JR throw some small dead fish into the water to attract sharks toward the boat, and once they approach, they shake the rattle at the sea surface to lure them even closer. Scientists once discounted this as folklore, but turns out the age-old practice actually works.

“When we shake the rattle, the sharks tend to swim faster and come to the surface,” explains Mark. “It gets them into a frenzy.” Apparently it’s the vibrations from the rattle that interests the sharks and it’s probably because it mimics the thrashing around of a dying fish. They use the rattle in addition to the fish because they often can’t tell grey reef sharks from similarly sized silvertips unless they come close enough to see the fin markings and body shapes.

Richard sticks his head completely under the water. I’m wondering if he’s out of his fool mind. He’s apparently looking around to see what the sharks are doing underwater, with his Scuba mask on so he can see. “There are three greys out there,” he says to everyone, pointing. During these shark catching experiences, nearly everyone hangs out near the duckboard. There’s several crew filming, soundman Cam McGrath recording sound with his mop-looking microphone, scientists baiting or handling sharks and others just watching.

I look out into the water and can make out three fusiform grey bodies, twice as big as whitetips, swimming gracefully around just off the boat. They have slightly darker markings on their tail fins, and white bellies that become visible as they turn directions underwater. I’m not seeing their infamous dorsal fin sticking out above the water, the classic image that comes to mind of a shark swimming near the surface. Enter JAWS music in my head….dun dun…dun dun...

Richard sticks his head back in the water, looking around, wondering why they’re not coming closer. In an instant he jumps back out of the water and screams. Sanjayan jumps back and shouts in reaction. Richard starts to laugh—just one of the many practical jokes that have been played since we’ve been out at sea.

Several different species may come to the bait, but each day the crew has a plan of action and know which species they need to capture. Today it’s gray reefs. As the sharks draw in closer, Richard and JR take turns throwing out a giant tuna head on a rope, slapping it down hard on the water. He’s hoping one will take a bite so he can pull the shark back on board. But unfortunately they’re just not biting. After an hour or so of trying to attract them, we abort the mission.

We try this method the next day also, and the same thing happens. Sharks come in to check out the scent and sound, but they just aren’t that into the giant tuna head on a rope.  We’re at North Horn now, and Richard makes the call to try this plan at night back at Admiralty Anchor where we moor at night.

In the meantime, Cat and I take a dive in the lagoon with JR to install one of the four additional receivers that they need to get their total number to 32 around Osprey. On this trip, the plan is to install four new receivers inside the giant shallow (80 foot deep) lagoon that makes up the center of the 150-square mile Osprey Reef to complement the receiving stations placed all around the reef exterior.

“The main thing we’re trying to figure out is how far they move around the reef,” explains Richard. “Another thing we want to figure out is whether the grey reef sharks move in and out between the lagoon and the outside of the reef.” These receivers record whenever any shark with a pinger swims by. Not only that, JR later tells me the same receiving stations can record IDs of any individual of any species with a pinger. On Osprey, they’ve put the pinger ID tags inside of several giant potato cod and chambered nautilus, but eventually plan to also put them on Maori wrasse, coral trout, and Queensland grouper. “This is amazing, honestly,” says JR. “Now we can collect data on the biology of all these species that no one knows anything about. And that will help with management.” A similar grid system exists within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and JR says that they will be able to compare data from here to there to see whether the species behave differently on this seamount reef. (The Osprey reef map shows the location of each of these receivers as red dots).

It only takes about 15 minutes to complete the whole dive. We drop down and JR wraps the rope around a coral island, and the receiver – which looks like a large plastic bottle painted grey – is tethered to buoy which drifts above. While down there, we see a giant moray eel hiding in a coral crevice.

We ascend, take our gear off, and have a shower. We have dinner and after dark, the guys are out on the back deck fishing for grey reef sharks again. Because no filming is going on, fewer people are out there, and I didn’t even realize what was going on until they had already caught and tagged two. They catch a third – using the same coconut rattle and tuna head technique as during daytime but it’s working like a charm now, probably because they generally feed more at night. I watch as Richard hauls one on the duckboard and lays her upside down. These grey reef sharks’ skin looks thicker and quite different from the whitetips, which have flattened bodies from hanging out mostly on the ocean floor. But grey reefs have a rounder, more classic shark shape and nostrum. They’re just beautiful animals. I feel incredibly blessed to be here.

Images: Mike with coconut rattle; Osprey Reef map, featuring pinger stations.

Photos: Cat Gennaro/DCL

Shark Surgery

After hours of waiting, waiting, waiting things can happen fast around here. One minute Sanjayan’s playing in the kiddie pool, cracking jokes. Fifteen minutes later, he’s got a whitetip reef shark by its pectoral fins, pinned on its back on the duckboard with two whitetips are lounging in the pool. They’ve never used the kiddie pool as a holding tank for sharks before, but it works brilliantly.

Richard, Mike and Dean dove down below with a box full of fish, which attracts the sharks. Sometimes up to 40 sharks will swim in a flurry around the bait box, and then it’s time for shark rodeo! Richard goes in with a rope and lassoes the tail. If I’m lucky, I’ll get to go down with the crew while they lasso sharks in the next few days.

Richard is something of a shark superstar around Australia. He’s been in four documentaries and worked on 20, and he has a sixth sense about sharks. I’ve seen him stick his head right in the water with two or three grey reef sharks circling near. I know I wouldn’t be that bold. 

“I’ve worked with sharks every day for 6 years at the Manly Aquarium (in Sydney, Australia),” he says. “So, I know when to stop. I know when they’re about to get crazy or dangerous.”

But today, I’m staying topside, and about to take on my new role as “shark nurse,” handing Richard surgical equipment.  Richard will be testing a new hypothesis about whitetip diving behavior and we’ll even be able to look at that data before the end of the trip, after they catch these same three sharks again and retrieve the devices.

“We think they’re using their diving behavior to thermoregulate,” explains Richard. Data they’ve collected on Osprey Reef whitetips over the past two to three years shows that during the night-time, they spend most of their time at shallower depths, but then do quick swims down deep. On top of that, as the night goes on, the sharks start going deeper and deeper.

Richard’s hypothesis is that the body temperatures of these “cold-blooded” animals start to heat up as the night progresses because they’re feeding constantly, and then they cool off by diving to the cooler, deeper waters below. “We have to prove that there’s a temperature differential between inside the shark and outside.” That will suggest that the deep dives can indeed cool them down. They’ll do a rough test by comparing internal body temperature to external temperature on these three sharks. We’ll find out in a few days.

Three divers arrive back at the boat with three lassoed sharks and hand the ropes to Sanjayan.  Scuba gear comes off, then Richard and Mike pull one shark at a time out of the water. Richard grabs the 5-foot-long shark, which wriggles at first, then calms down as he carries it nonchalantly up the stairs into the kiddie pool. They repeat this for the next shark, but the third shark they place upside down onto a mattress – the “surgery table.” The mattress has an orange-sized rip in it where another whitetip had taken a bite. “They’ve got a mouth full of tiny razor blades,” says Richard. I ask if he’s ever been bitten by a whitetip, and he shows me several tiny bite mark scars on his leg.

I sit near the shark’s tail, which Mike holds in place. Sanjayan holds down the shark’s pectoral fins which is hard work. JR places a hose so that saltwater runs constantly through the shark’s mouth and hence over its gills. Since sharks are fish, they breathe by getting oxygen through water pumping past their gills.

The first order of business is to find out whether the team has captured this shark before. If so, it will already have a PIT —or passive integrated transponder—ID tag inserted by needle beneath the dorsal fin. Before he even swipes the PIT tag reader, Richard says “We’ve caught her before.” He can tell some sharks apart by their spots! Sure enough, after swiping the PIT tag reader, he confirms she’s “Twin Peaks” — so named after two spots on her flank. “Twin Peaks” has probably told us more about whitetips than any other shark. And with this new data, she’ll show us even more.

Richard squirts the shark’s abdomen with antiseptic. I hand him the scalpel and he cuts an inch-long incision through skin and top muscle layer.

“Females have tougher skin than males because it protects them during mating,” Richard explains. “They can get a bit rough.” They can also tell she’s a “girl” because she doesn’t have claspers, two sausage-like projections.

During the incision she flinches a couple of times and Sanjayan yells, “Watch out!” since he can feel her squirm before the rest. They quickly pin her back down, making sure no one has any fingers close by those razor-sharp teeth.

After Richard completes the incision, I hand him a 2 ½ inch long black capsule — a “pinger” which gives the shark a unique ID. Unlike the PIT tag ID, which they can only scan when they capture the shark, the pinger ID gets recorded any time it swims within 900 feet of one of 29 receiving stations (aka data loggers) the researchers have set up around Osprey Reef. They will be installing three more on this trip and I will dive underwater tomorrow to watch one being set up.

Data collected from these pingers will give a great geographical perspective on where the sharks spend their time on the reef. Combined with the time-depth-recorder, which gives a vertical perspective of how deep they dive, they’ll end up with an amazing three-dimensional view of how sharks use their habitat.

I hand Richard the internal temperature recorder, a 1-inch long white capsule. Next, a needle threaded with catgut with which he expertly sews up the incision, twisting it in place with clamps and cutting with scissors.

The next order of business is to attach another temperature capsule to the caudal peduncle — the base of the tail fin — with a cable tie. Last, he takes measurements of the shark’s total body length from head to tail. Then she’s ready to go back in the water.

After we finish all three whitetips, they switch to a new project— luring in grey reef sharks by pitching in fish and a tuna head on a rope just off the duckboard. If we can lure them in, we’ll also implant pingers and collect data on these guys. Mike shakes a coconut rattle —used for millennia by ancient cultures — to attract them. Within minutes, I see one in the water just off the boat. They’re about twice the bulk and size of the whitetips. Magnificent!

Images: Sanjayan holds whitetip for tag retrieval; Richard and Mike with lassoed whitetip; Wendee (bottom right) with team performing "surgery;" Richard sews up incision.

Photos: Cat Gennaro/DCL

Osprey Reef: Sharks in 3-D

One little bit of advice to seafarers: If you say “I never get seasick,” you’re doomed. I survived 20 hours cruising out to Osprey Reef with my stomach turning, and I’m about to take my first dive. We left Port Douglas around 5 p.m. Saturday, and after 20 hours of steaming through 20-25 knot winds and 6-foot seas, we arrived at Osprey Reef in the Coral Sea. We’re so far from land that there’s nothing but ocean in every direction — 100 nautical miles from the coast of Australia and nearly halfway between Australia and Papua New Guinea.  “Get in the water right away,” Cat tells me, “You’ll feel so much better.”

After sleeping on the deck in the seabreeze overnight, and being one breath away from hurling every time I step below deck, I can hardly focus on the safety briefing let alone wonder how my first dive around sharks will go. I’m trying to listen to dive instructor Chris Witty through my nausea, but my brain wakes up when he says, “You really don’t want to go missing out here. You may not last long enough to die from exposure.”

He’s referring to the sharks…

But sharks aren’t the only safety concern here. Because of tomorrow’s new moon, we’ll see a 9 foot difference between low and high tide over the next few days. This adds oomph to an already swiftly moving current. Chris implores us to follow every safety precaution, “We’re too far away for any other boats to aid in a rescue. We’re too far for helicopters to reach us. If you get sidetracked by manta rays and swim away from the reef, basically you’re lost. It’s nearly impossible to see you in the waves unless you wave your safety sausage.” It sounds cute and funny to me in his Australian accent – heck, maybe it sounds funny in any accent -  but I sure as heck don’t want to be out there having to wave around any safety sausages, hoping the sharks don’t nibble the dangly bits below the surface.

Osprey is a reef that formed around a seamount that rises 6,000 feet in the middle of the Coral Sea.  And it’s a hotspot for whitetip reef sharks, grey reef (whaler) sharks, and silvertip sharks. The occasional tiger shark and hammerhead also pass through. Osprey lies some 80 miles outside the Great Barrier Reef system, which is the largest interconnected living organism in the world. We came here to film the final scenes for Expedition Shark, where shark wrangler —  aka biologist and filmmaker —   Richard Fitzpatrick and his crew are observing previously undiscovered behaviors for whitetip, grey and silvertip sharks.

Richard grew up in Rockhampton at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef. “Me and my best mate used to collect on the reef,” he tells me. “I started snorkeling at 6, and diving at 15.” He collected all kinds of things, but particularly the dangerous things —  stonefish, sea snakes, blue ring octopus, cone shells. And his fascination with sharks started when he collected some epaulette sharks for his marine aquarium.  He went on to get a degree from James Cook University and is now working on a Ph.D. there, but has spent the last 20 years working in marine biology, most notably with sharks.

During the past months, Richard and crew placed devices on these sharks that reveal where they travel and how deep they go. Over the next few days they will catch the sharks to retrieve the tags, from which they will be able to see where and when and how the sharks use their reef and offshore habitat. They’ll also film other wonders of the Coral Sea, including the chambered nautilus —  an ancient relative of squid and octopus —  and glowing flashlight fish on a night dive.

Last night during dinner, I sat with Mike deGruy, a veteran filmmaker who both helps catch sharks and shoot video footage for this documentary. I notice the jagged marks on his right forearm and joked that it must have been a shark attack. Turns out, I’m right. I’ll save the story for a future blog, but suffice it to say it didn’t calm my nerves when I further asked what species and he laughed and said, “You probably don’t want to hear —  it was a grey reef shark.”

As I suit up and get ready to test out my “sea feet” I feel a bit like a seal out of water in my flippers and gear, but all the nausea, the mild anxiety, the talk of shark attacks falls away when I take a “giant stride” entry off the boat into the ocean below.  I look around, and see coral reefs on two sides of me, with clown fish, parrotfish, damselfish, and butterfly fish flitting around and two other divers right near me. We sink lower into the ocean and about 50 feet down my dive buddy, boat skipper Sean Ryan, puts his hand on top of his head —  the underwater signal for shark —  and points to the sandy ocean floor. There before my very eyes is the creature that terrifies so many.  Words can’t describe that moment when I see it. I literally feel like I’m swimming through a 3-D IMAX shark film. I am in absolute awe. I wanted to jump up and down, which is kind of difficult to do underwater. I want to say “That is so freaking cool!” but I can’t speak underwater.

We continue our dive through a cave that we’ll return to at night, and back out through a gully where the current is so strong I can barely swim upstream. We arrive in a more open area where it feels like a gigantic swimming pool. I twist around like a dexterous seal. We spot two more whitetip reef sharks on our dive. The last one I swim so close to that I can almost touch it. It’s time to ascend, and I’m waving goodbye to it, watching it become smaller and smaller as I near the boat.

Tomorrow, Richard and crew plan to retrieve the first of the radio tags, and we’ll possibly do a night dive we had to abort tonight because of too-strong currents. One thing is for sure around here – plans change every 15 minutes.

Blog Extra: Listen to Wendee's audio interview with Earth Live.

Images: Wendee and Cat aboard the Undersea Explorer; Richard Fitzpatrick; Fish in the Coral Sea; Whitetip reef shark.

Photos: Cat Gennaro/DCL|Courtesy John Rumney