SHARKS ARE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE

by Nancy Sefton

The shark talk by the UW’s Dr. Galluci on October 30, for Beach Naturalists in Kitsap County, reminded me of the many dives I’ve made where sharks were present. Moreover, it reminded me of how often the gullible public is hoodwinked by Hollywood into believing that sharks pose more threat to man than processed food, other drivers, or your friendly IRS agent.

Shark movies may be great escapist fun, but I suspect they buoy up people’s mistrust of real-life large animals that inhabit our real-life oceans.

All during my diving years, I fielded the same question. “Aren’t you afraid of sharks?” I finally developed an answer that gave me some delicious satisfaction: “No, what I’m afraid of is returning to the unpredictable, often dangerous world of homo sapiens.”

My rather weird goal, when diving, was to pet a shark. But usually, sightings were just within my range of visibility, the animals appearing like ghosts against the distant blue.

But one lucky day I happened on a sleeping nurse shark about 7 feet long, on a shallow Caribbean reef. Perfect. Nurse sharks feed on very small organisms. Nurse sharks take naps. This one looked positively comatose as it dozed on the soft white sand next to a coral head.

I reached out my ungloved hand and touched the shark’s skin. It felt like sandpaper. In fact, shark scales under a microscope show up a tiny hook on each, and this is why the skin of a shark seems to “grab”. It’s anything but slimy.



A foot-long remora, or shark sucker fish, slithered nervously over its host like a vigilant bodyguard. The shark itself was very still. Its gill covers opened and closed rhythmically, keeping the water flowing in order to capture dissolved oxygen. The shark never awakened.

A few years later, in 1988, I found myself sitting in a deep submersible hunting the elusive Caribbean six-gill shark, a species found in Puget Sound. After waiting 30 minutes at 1,000 feet, the external bait bucket full of tasty barracuda brought in our prey. What a magnificent animal! I felt its power as the 10-foot shark closed its jaws around the bait bucket and shook it, rocking the sub on its mounts. It lasted only a few seconds but that fleeting vision of a true “monster of the deep” is fixed firmly in my memory.

This close encounter and others made me consider sharks as something more than mindless predators out to get us. Personally, I think of sharks as magnificent masters, not monsters, of the sea; they are sleek, perfectly formed and equipped for their important role in the oceanic community: that of sanitary engineers. (This is a concept that Peter Benchley, author of “Jaws”, didn’t find worthy of pursuing because after all, he wanted to sell books and movie rights.)

Sharks are scavengers, consuming what is dead or dying, sick or weak. When a human is attacked by mistake, all sharks become “man eaters.” Today, many species are overfished and seriously threatened. Certainly, sharks have more to fear from us than vice versa. Once we learn to value all life forms for their roles in earth’s ecosystems, perhaps we’ll put more effort into preserving them.