Word: sharked
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Halfway across the Pacific, marine biologist A. Peter Klimley of the University of California at Davis has for decades been getting his own incredible insights into shark behavior, frequently by taking risks others would call insane. While a graduate student in the 1970s, Klimley became the first scientist ever to swim directly into schools of adult hammerhead sharks. He dived as deep as 70 ft. without scuba gear so his air bubbles wouldn't disturb the skittish fish...
This idea hasn't yet been confirmed by other shark researchers, but they don't dismiss it either. They know that sharks are extremely sensitive to electromagnetic signals; a "sixth sense" lets them home in on faint electricity generated by another fish's movement, gill action or even heartbeat. Indeed, Holland's team in Hawaii routinely tricks baby hammerheads at Coconut Island into striking at electrodes dangling in the water. Adult sharks, apparently drawn by the same process, have been known to bite through undersea cables. Holland is planning to investigate what sorts of electric signal might repel rather than...
While any shark 6 ft. long or more is potentially dangerous to humans, some species are more aggressive than others. None is considered deadlier than the great white. This huge fish, which can exceed 20 ft. in length and 2 tons in weight, is relatively rare among sharks but is responsible for more recorded attacks than any other species. Most of those have occurred off California, in the so-called Red Triangle, which extends from Monterey Bay to San Francisco to the Farallon Islands, 30 miles offshore...
...here, in the early 1980s, that Klimley first saw an attack by a great white, on a 400-lb. elephant seal. The shark rose almost entirely out of the water, with the massive seal in its jaws. "It was stunning," he recalls. "The shark ambushed the seal, then came back several times to take three or four bites out of it. I had never seen anything like it." Since then Klimley has analyzed more than 130 videotaped white-shark attacks. All seem to follow a pattern. The powerful first bite usually takes place underwater, and the first sign...
Where Jaws went astray was in portraying great whites as mindless eating machines. Ken Goldman, a shark researcher from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, in Gloucester Point, has been studying great whites in the Farallons for the past seven years. Says he: "Their attacks are very controlled, as is their feeding behavior." Klimley agrees: "The white shark is a skillful and stealthy predator that eats with both ritual and purpose...