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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
Monday, November 17, 2003
Whacking sharks
>> Honolulu
Back in the office, Cruz MacKenzie ignored the message light flashing on his phone and sat down to write tomorrow's column:
There's a reason for more shark attacks in Hawaiian waters.
"It's simple, there's more sharks."
That's the opinion of Delbert Pester, professor emeritus. For 20 years as head of the University of Hawaii's marine biology department, Professor Pester hunted sharks with a grant from the state Legislature.
It amounted to a bounty.
"Hundreds and hundreds," Pester said yesterday when asked how many sharks he caught and killed. "From Hilo to Hanalei."
Pester's program began, he said, in the wake of the fatal attack on Billy Weaver in 1958. The scion of the Spencecliff restaurant chain, the teen-age Weaver was surfing off Lanikai when a large tiger shark bit off one leg. Weaver bled to death. Citizens and soon legislators called for a shark hunt.
Pester was the hired gun.
"See, there's only one way to do proper research on a shark -- when it's dead," said Pester, now 87.
His research was voluminous.
"We whacked the population down to almost nothing, statistically," he admitted. "It was the only way to get the numbers necessary for valid scientific research."
The results of his research help put recent attacks and the furor surrounding them into perspective.
"For starters, you can't blame turtles or seals. I've heard people say that the reason for more sharks is more turtles, that the sharks are 'attracted in to shore' because there are more turtles, and also because commercial fishing has depleted deep water fisheries, so the tigers have to come in to the reef. Deep water fish counts are down, that's true, but the rest is nonsense! If there are more turtles and seals, it could be because they flourished in the absence of their natural predator, tiger sharks." When Pester's research had the desired effect of nearly wiping out tiger sharks in Hawaii, the program was terminated.
"There at the end, we were only getting zero-point-five sharks per every hundred hooks set," he said. "Statistically insignificant.
"So it's taken this long for the population to rebound. Tigers don't reach reproductive age until 10 to 12 years. And the female gives birth to only 10 or so pups. We assume high predation from larger sharks. So it takes a long time to rebuild the population. What we're seeing here is a return of tiger sharks in numbers comparable to 1958. Unless we actively fish them, they'll continue to increase. They have no natural predator."
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek. His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin. He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com
