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
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