Great White Hope
 Last
night, I attended a meeting of a local dive club,
where a veteran lifeguard spoke about rip tides,
beach diving and the local seal-human
controversy at La Jolla's Children's Pool. In
the course of the discussion, a club member
mentioned the recent sighting of a great white
shark attack just off the beach in La Jolla. Though
the victim was one of La Jolla's hundreds of
resident seals, not a human, the attack (which
reportedly lasted for 30 minutes) was just the
latest in a string of great white sightings in the
area by local surfers and fishermen. Anecdotal
evidence suggests there could be as many as 30
great white sharks hunting the waters off San Diego
county. With over 200 pinnipeds now calling the
Children's Pool home, it's not hard to figure out
why this might be true. Such a huge biomass is like
a smorgasbord for great whites, whose primary prey
is the seal.
While the aforementioned estimates are highly
unscientific, they certainly raise at least a
guarded concern. Great white sharks do not have a
taste for human flesh, and usually abandon a human
victim after the first bite reveals that it's not a
seal. However, as one observer noted last night,
one bite from such a highly evolved apex predator
as a great white shark can be fatal.
I repeat this information not to raise the alarm
amongst swimmers and surfers in La Jolla—shark
hysteria is already much higher than it should
be—but instead to report what I feel is an
exciting natural phenomenon. Great whites are seen
fairly often in northern California, but are less
common down here. Lightning strikes and plane
crashes are more common ways to die than shark
attacks, so I don't feel these great whites (if
the local numbers have indeed increased) pose any
greater threat than they did before seals claimed
the Children's Pool. Rather, I relish the
possibility of encountering
a great white in the wild as I get more
involved in the local diving community and start to
explore with a scuba tank the waters I have come to
know so well with mask and snorkel.
Certainly, I hope to be on the bottom looking
up, instead of vice versa, if I happen to catch a
glimpse of the reclusive great white. And, if the
shark is especially hungry that day, hopefully my
dive buddy will appear more appetizing than me. But
any firsthand encounter with such a feared
predator, especially outside the protection of a
shark cage, would be unforgettable. It would be one
of those experiences that scares you shitless while
it happens, but provides you with the tale of a
lifetime (assuming your life lasts longer than the
encounter).
Photo by J.
Stafford-Deitsch
Development note: I've
noticed that this site doesn't look like it should
in Netscape Navigator. Rather than waste time
jury-rigging it to look right in a
soon-to-be-obsolete browser, I'll just add the
cliché "This site best viewed with Internet
Explorer."
©2003 Michael
Strickland ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED
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