How do you move a shark? Very carefully
NEW YORK — In the open ocean, the sand tiger shark has been known to migrate more than 1,500 miles.
Moving a shark 100 yards across a construction site at the New York Aquarium to its gleaming new home is a different kind of undertaking altogether: an elaborately choreographed production requiring cranes, trucks, canvas slings and people in wet suits willing to grapple with animals with big scary teeth.
For protection, the movers had only postersize rectangles of red plastic called breaker boards.
Two men took their boards and set out across the mostly drained indoor tank, which had been the sharks’ temporary home for three years as the aquarium rebuilds from the damage of Hurricane Sandy. They got on either side of a sand tiger named Otis: gray-brown and sleek, 8 feet 5 inches long, 200 pounds, with a mouth full of curved daggers.
Using their boards to guide him, the movers walked Otis toward the waiting crew. He turned around and swam away. They corralled him again. Otis thrashed and flailed. His tail whacked a mover on the rear.
Across the pool, six crew members held what looked like an oversize military field stretcher. Someone put a hand on Otis’ tail to steer him into the stretcher. He bucked, crashed, escaped but was finally caught. The movers zipped him up in the stretcher and hooked it to a hoist. A crane raised the stretcher into the air.
Down below was a truck with a shark-size box of water on the back. In went the stretcher. The crew undid the straps and zippers. The aquarium’s shark supervisor, Hans Walters, gave the order: “Pull the stretcher out now!” Voilà: shark in a box.
Up ahead, past workers pouring concrete and replacing pipes damaged by Hurricane Sandy, lay the destination: a long, sweeping, somewhat shark-shaped new building that houses a permanent exhibit called “Ocean Wonders: Sharks!”
More than a decade and $146 million in the making, “Ocean Wonders: Sharks!” will open to the public June 30. It contains 57,500 square feet of galleries and more than 100 species, including big, flapping cownose rays; loggerhead sea turtles; and dozens of sharks.
The show’s centerpiece is a 350,000-gallon recreation of the Hudson Canyon, a mile-wide undersea wonder off the coast of New York and New Jersey. “Hudson Canyon’s Edge: Another New York neighborhood teeming with life,” the sign reads. This would be Otis’ new home.
Upstairs at Ocean Wonders, a crane lifted the shark box to the second floor and set it down on a sunken platform called the medical pool. It was time for Otis’ checkup.