The majestic great white shark drawing visitors to the Monterey Bay
Aquarium is the front woman for an ambitious project -- a mixture of
grand fishing expedition and privately funded conservation research.
It took three years and $1.2 million to capture the white shark now
famously on display in the Outer Bay exhibit. The classic fish story
features "the one that got away" and an almost mischievous animal that
appeared only as time was running out.
John O'Sullivan, the aquarium's curator of field operations, leads the project.
From the beginning, the Monterey aquarium was determined not to
repeat the "snatch-and-grab" of historical efforts, O'Sullivan said.
His motto was "slow, methodical and systematic." He believed the
more than two dozen earlier attempts had overstressed the animals, none
of whom fed in captivity.
O'Sullivan set up camp in Southern California. Juvenile white sharks
are often seen there in summer, although little is known for certain
about the young animals' behavior.
He spent the month of May waiting with Stanford University graduate
student Kevin Weng and two aquarium employees in a rented beach house
in Ventura. The sharks showed up in July and August.
The following year, O'Sullivan set aside the month of July. Murphy's
Law kicked in: That year, sharks were seen in May and not for months
afterward.
Finally, just days before the team was scheduled to head home,
fishermen near Oxnard pulled up a baby white shark. O'Sullivan
transferred the animal to a huge, netted ocean pen rented from
commercial tuna fishermen. Anchored a mile and a half off the coast, it
would act as a shelter to let the animal recover from the stress of
capture before moving to the aquarium. In early August 2003, the baby
shark was feeding and appeared to be doing well.
But time was running out. The pen had to go back to the fleet for
the beginning of the multimillion-dollar bluefin tuna fishing season.
Unwilling to transport the shark after only five days' rest, O'Sullivan tagged the animal and let it swim away.
"When we released that white shark that was feeding, people were
hitting us over the head with pots and pans," is how O'Sullivan
describes the wider aquarium community's response. But he didn't want
to rush things.
In the third and final year, O'Sullivan designed and built his own
ocean holding pen. He also doubled the length of the Southern
California vigil to two months. It wasn't easy.
"Waiting, in any profession, is sometimes the hardest part," he said.
O'Sullivan relied on a close partnership with commercial halibut
fishermen. Their wide nets, hundreds of feet long with walls just 6 to
8 feet off the seafloor, sometimes pull up juvenile white sharks.
O'Sullivan said he sought fishermen who supported the conservation
goals of the project and were adept at identifying great whites.
O'Sullivan and his team were "fire-engine ready" to respond within two hours of a reported netting.
On Aug. 20, just two weeks before the scheduled end date for the
project, the long-awaited call came from a halibut fisherman off
Huntington Beach.
"We had to extend contracts on slip space, rentals, with commercial
fishermen," said O'Sullivan. "Seeing the shark in the pen is the tip of
the iceberg of the logistical support needed for this project."
The organization is formidable. The day of the drive to Monterey
three weeks later, there were more than 20 people on hand. Two purse
seiner boats pulled up the net as the shark was edged into one section
of the pen. Three scuba divers watched the animal underwater to make
sure it didn't get caught, while three more waited on stand-by, ready
to suit up. A veterinarian, photographers and aquarium husbandry staff
were there to oversee the operation.
Eventually the shark was successfully loaded onto a marine
life-support truck headed for Monterey, where she would make
animal-husbandry history.
The research branch of the project, meanwhile, was placing
electronic satellite tags on baby sharks to measure how deep they dive,
the temperature of the water they swim in, and roughly where they go.
The first clues that the species might actually survive in the Outer
Bay exhibit came from data that showed juvenile sharks prefer shallower
depths and warmer water, similar to that at the aquarium.
Members of the Shark Lab at California State University-Long Beach
formed a year-round "rapid-response team" to answer calls from fishing
boats.
A call last summer sent Lyall Bellquist, a graduate student in the
Shark Lab at CSU-Long Beach, racing to the docks. Three or four people
cradled the shark and held its mouth closed while someone measured it,
took a tiny piece of fin for DNA analysis and attached a satellite tag
to its dorsal fin, he said. The animal was then released.
"I'd never dealt with a great white before so it was very, very exciting," Bellquist said.
The tags are usually programmed to pop off after 60 days. This one
surfaced in Baja, beamed most of its information back by satellite and
eventually washed up on shore.
So far, five tags have reported back. They show that the juveniles
range down the coast to Baja. The animals spend much of their time in
shallow water but occasionally dive to depths of 1,000 feet and seem to
tolerate a wide range of temperatures.
Last week a tag popped up off Long Beach, not far from where the
animal was first caught. Another tag is due to surface the first week
of February.
The aquarium's quest to put a white shark on display has sometimes ventured into controversial waters.
"It's a tough project," O'Sullivan said. "It's in the public's eye."
When he gives talks, he's always ready for someone to claim the
institution did it for the money.
Some critics were skeptical the plan would ever work and were
concerned an animal might be harmed in the process. Early attempts to
transport killer whales, for example, sometimes proved fatal.
Sean Van Sommeran, director of the independent Pelagic Shark
Research Foundation in Santa Cruz, said his organization opposes the
display of white sharks. But "it is a marvelous specimen and they have
done a good job at both transporting and displaying it," he said.
The aquarium sees the program as an opportunity to educate the
public about great white sharks and to raise awareness of the species'
threatened status.
The phenomenal success of the shark program has extended the research for one more year.
This summer the team hopes to tag 2-year-old great whites,
O'Sullivan said. They may observe animals in the ocean pen to compare
behavior with the animal now on display.
Aquarium staff said the shark on exhibit is faring well on a diet of
salmon and mackerel and looks to be about 15 pounds heavier and 3
inches longer than when she arrived. They have no immediate plans to
replace her, although she will eventually be released into the wild.
"We are going to sort of play the cards as they're dealt," said aquarium spokesman Randy Kochevar.
Attendance has been up by a third since September and exit surveys
show visitors are leaving with a conservation message, he said.
For O'Sullivan, having an animal on display doesn't signal the end
of the project. He said he's drawn equally by the husbandry challenge
and the opportunity to learn more about the species.
"Three years ago, you could put in a sewing thimble what you knew about white sharks," O'Sullivan said.
"Now," he said, "we know about three thimble-fuls."
hhickey@montereyherald.com.
Monterey Bay Aquarium's white shark live Web cam: www.mbayaq.org
Migration routes for sharks and other open-ocean animals: www.toppcensus.org
Go to: montereyherald.com for more on the aquarium and shark migration.
Great white by the numbers 138 Days the great white has been on
exhibit at the aquarium. 16 Previous record number of days for a great
white in captivity 62 Weight in pounds when the great white arrived at
the aquarium when she was 3 or 4 months old 77 Weight in pounds of the
shark today, at 8 months old
Hannah Hickey can be reached at 646-4436 or
