A SHADOW IN THE WATER
Cape Town’s Shark Spotters project turns 10 this year. Oliver Roberts joined the spotters at work above False Bay, and wondered why the prospect of being eaten by a fish — a perfectly natural event — is so hard for us to swallow
YOU have a much greater chance of being injured by a toilet than of being bitten by a shark. This is according to statistics released by National Geographic. But it seems that human beings can’t stay away from toilets or the sea.
The latter compulsion is particularly intriguing because of all the warnings issued to mankind over the centuries.
From tales told by ancient mariners about mammoth grey savages that swallowed bearded men whole, to the movie Jaws, to those sporadic but much retweeted news reports featuring a photograph of a blond surfer dozily displaying his ragged wounds from a hospital bed, or emergency workers squatting next to a figure on a beach.
The horror of being attacked by a shark does not tally with modern life. It’s unsettling to read about a fellow human being killed or maimed this way, because it seems such an absurd fate.
Car accidents are different. They happen all the time, and there is something in the materiality of cars that leads us to more easily accept that they can kill us. A car or a gun or an aircraft, these are things we have invented. They are fashioned from steel and rivets, and have computers and intricate working mechanisms. A faulty parachute is at least a human contraption.
But to be eaten by an animal while we’re enjoying ourselves in the sea, wearing goggles and slathered in sun block, egg sandwiches waiting for us on the shore — this natural act we cannot accept.
Bitten and poisoned by snakes and spiders, yes, okay. But to be consumed, to have all or part of us taken in by another creature’s oral cavity and broken up into nutrients by their digestive juices — this goes against everything we feel entitled to as contemporary Homo sapiens.
We’ve sent robots to Mars and we’ve got iPhones with colourful touch screens. We expect to be immune from the Neanderthal fate of being some beast’s meal.
And yet it keeps happening, and will always happen, as long as we’re drawn into the ocean, enticed by the waves and the buoyancy and, perhaps, the risk.
“In South Africa, the minute you put your feet in the water, you must expect to encounter a shark.” This is Monwa Sikweyiya, field manager for Shark Spotters in Cape Town. The programme, which positions spotters at several stations along the Cape coast, and uses a flag and siren system to warn bathers of an imminent shark threat, marks its 10th anniversary this year. It is the only scheme of its kind in the world. It receives funding from the City of Cape Town, the Save Our Seas Foundation, Wavescape SA and other local businesses.
Like all the other members of the spotting team, Sikweyiya wears polarised, killer black shades, courtesy of a local sunglasses company that sponsors the programme. On the dashboard of his 4x4 double cab is a grinning, fist-sized shark made of plastic, also clad in sunglasses. When I ask if it’s some kind of mascot, Sikweyiya just laughs.
“The scary part is that a shark eats you alive,” he says. “A lion will kill you first. Most predators kill you first.”
The programme employs 26 spotters, each on a five-hour shift: from 8am to 1pm, 1pm to 6pm. Beaches under permanent watch are Muizenberg, St James, Fish Hoek, The Hoek in Noordhoek, and Caves in Kogel Bay. Beaches which are added to the watch list in the peak months from October to April are Clovelly, Glencairn and Monwabisi.
The magnificent great white, that apex of predators, the “we’re gonna need a bigger boat” of all our fears, is the shark responsible for almost all attacks in Cape waters. This is because — efficient killing organism that it is — the great white is able to raise its core body temperature by as much as 15°C, thus allowing it to hunt in colder waters.
You wonder whether a decade of the existence of Shark Spotters has seen any behavioural changes in the humans who get into the water. Do they feel safer now, knowing that, up on the mountain, there’s a person with cool sunglasses and a pair of binoculars, scanning the waters? Or are they filled with dread knowing that there are enough sharks in the waters to warrant such measures?
“In 2004, if there was a shark sighting, people got out of the water, jumped into their cars and in 10 minutes the whole beach was empty,” says Sikweyiya.
“What’s happening now is people will stand right at the edge of the water and wait for the all clear, and within five minutes you have 200 people back in the water.”
This is undoubtedly a compliment to the programme’s effectiveness, but the assurance from on high that they are being watched over has created a false sense of security for some swimmers.
Members of our own species stay in the water even after a siren has been sounded. There have been only two attacks since Shark Spotters has been in operation, one fatal. The victims, in both cases, had failed to heed the warnings.
“Some people are overconfident,” Sikweyiya says. “But I think that 90% of the people that use these waters know what’s going on. If the beach has been closed for a long time, people drive up and sit with the spotters to see what we’re seeing.” We’re standing at Muizenberg station. It’s a windy day and the waves are sweeping in to shore in gentle white layers. It’s a popular surfing beach and, today, there are loads of surfers in the water, all bobbing about on their boards, limbs a-dangle.
“Have you seen any sharks?” It’s an elderly British woman, a tourist, asking the spotter.
“We last saw yesterday,” says the spotter, still peering through her binoculars. “What?” “We last saw yesterday.” “Yesterday. How close?” “Just there, by the rocks.” “And today, nothing?” “Yes. Today nothing.” During peak season — from September to April — the probability of sighting a great white during a shift in False Bay is quite high, but not all of them warrant an alarm and an emptying of the water. It all depends on the proximity of the predators.
It is perhaps an indication of the trauma and sense of injustice a shark attack arouses that made it so difficult for victims to tell their story. I contacted several and was met either with terse replies or a kind of brooding silence. Even one man who makes money using his attack as part of a motivational talk didn’t get back to me.
But the internet is awash with reports of shark attacks, always written in the same portentous tones, always using the same lingo — “lucky to be alive”, “close call”, “deadly attack”, etc. Witnesses and survivors inevitably recall seeing a “dark shape” before feeling a “swirl of water”.
“It all happened so quickly. One minute we were paddling out, the next Kevin said he thought he had been bitten,” said one.
“I screamed to Rhomeez: ‘There is a shark in the water!’ It swam about an arm’s length past me and I just knew something was about to happen,” said another.
“I heard him scream before he was dragged down.”
One story was about 39-year-old Fundile Nogumla, who literally boxed his attacker while the thing tore the flesh from his arms before letting him go. Describing his encounter he said: “I jumped up and as I came down I saw death — a shark with its mouth wide open.”
Sikweyiya reckons that the best thing to do when you see a shark is to stay still. You can be sure this almost never happens, because it defies instinct. But Sikweyiya once witnessed a paddle boarder paddling alongside a shark for 200m without being attacked.
“Fleeing will give the shark ideas,” he says. “Don’t paddle away, don’t make noise, slowly move your feet onto the board and look at the shark and there’s a chance it will just go away.”
Sikweyiya used to be a surfer but has not ridden the waves since he started working for Shark Spotters.
Apart from protecting the public from attack, the data collected by the spotters is providing ground-breaking information about shark behaviour for shark scientists such as Alison Kock. Since 2008, she has worked full time as a research manager for Shark Spotters, and is affiliated with the biological sciences department at the University of Cape Town.
“The data is incredibly valuable,” she says. “There are no such data sets around anywhere else in the world, in terms of being able to collect observational data on the sharks as well as the water users on a daily basis and throughout the year.”
Clear trends have emerged when comparing the data of the behaviour of sharks close to shore and those at Seal Island, which is in False Bay, 6km from the nearest shore. Kock says they have drawn emphatic correlations between ambient water temperature and great white shark activity — it peaks at 18°C or more.
Research also shows patterns related to lunar phases: sightings increase when there’s a new moon.
What Kock says next, though, is the most eerie of all findings. That she reveals it so insouciantly, so academically, belies its terror. It is the kind of raw statistic, collected and calculated on a graph, that nobody wants to hear. An XY axis that confirms our most dire assumptions and takes chunks out of our hope that shark attacks on humans are mistakes, random acts of mistaken identity.
“What we’ve found,” says Kock, “is that there is a very high spatial overlap between the presence of great white sharks and the presence of recreational water users.”
In other words, the more humans in the water, the greater the presence of great whites.
“This emphasises the need for this kind of programme, and to improve the programme where we possibly can,” she says.
Kill the sharks. Kill them. But use the term “cull” to make it seem more benevolent and less about human beings making everywhere their territory. It’s happening in Australia now, and there have been numerous similar calls all over the world.
But getting angry with sharks makes as much sense as showing outrage if someone decides to play golf in the Kruger National Park — and is savaged by a lion. If you put your feet in the water, you must expect to encounter a shark. That’s what Sikweyiya says.
According to Kock: “Cape Town has been a pioneer in this field. We’re showing that we can use nonlethal alternatives (such as the spotters and the exclusion nets recently put up in Fish Hoek) to make beaches safer.
“People are quite used to getting rid of a species that poses a problem. With sharks it’s quite difficult because people don’t really understand them, they don’t have a lot of information on them, and any information they do have is often skewed towards sensational reporting on shark attacks. I think it’s really important that people understand the risk, and then make informed decisions according to that.
“But I do think it’s equally important to try and make the ocean safer, otherwise what you end up doing is placing sharks on one side and people on the other. An us-versus-them approach is not sustainable. We need to find solutions that address both the needs of people and those of sharks, and perhaps one day we can get to the stage where people who don’t like sharks can recognise their ecological importance and maybe even accept them.”
What we really want to know, despite the aforementioned “high spatial overlap” data, is whether sharks actually mean to eat us. We need this information because our neurotic, over-evolved egos demand it. We don’t like the idea of being such available quarries, of being as easily duped as seal pups going into the water for the first time. Reading about a shark attack, or being the victim of one, makes us feel embarrassed about our conceited naivety.
“I think people often try to overanalyse the situation,” says Kock. “If a lion ate a person in the Kruger National Park because [the tourist] stepped out of their car, people wouldn’t ask any questions because they know a lion is an apex predator and the person got out of their car.
“What amazes me is that we have so few attacks. There are thousands of people using the water and a large aggregation of sharks here. There are so many times when sharks are close to people and they don’t bite, and for me that is the really interesting question: Why don’t they see people as easy prey?”
I HEARD HIM SCREAM BEFORE HE WAS DRAGGED DOWN
AN US-VERSUS-THEM APPROACH IS NOT SUSTAINABLE