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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
About those shorts
>> Honolulu
Cruz MacKenzie's column based on his conversation with Delbert Pester, professor emeritus, continued:
"Another thing," Pester said, "is that tiger sharks are a near-shore species. That is their natural ecosystem. How do we know that? From what we find in their stomachs: squid, lobster, reef fish, smaller reef sharks, seals, the occasional goat or pig that washes down a stream during a storm, some turtles. But not that many. Tigers eat almost as many hubcaps as they do turtles."The other possibility, of course, was that someone had purposely carried the other half of Daren's shorts from Kona and dumped them off Maui. Cruz wished that he had looked at the fabric more carefully when he had the chance. But the chopper got there so quick and Pat Ohara was taking the fabric to the lab. In any case, those questions were beyond the scope of the Tester column. Cruz e-mailed the column to the city desk file and the phone rang.Pester quoted another study by Bruce Carlson of the Waikiki Aquarium, who caught a 12-foot tiger off Hermes Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and tagged it with an electronic beeper.
"The pattern of the beeper over the next several days was that it foraged the reef at night, very actively," he said. "Then it would swim out to deeper water for its restive period during the day. We caught almost all our tigers within a mile of the shore at night."
Pester was adamant on another point:
"Even if it could have been proved where that green fabric (alleged to be the matching half of the shorts missing fisherman Daren Guy wore on the night he was attacked) came from, it didn't get there in a shark (as was conjectured here in a previous column). There is no way in tarnation that a shark could carry anything from the southwest side of the Big Island to the northeast side of Maui, especially not in four or five days. That's nearly 100 miles. We did some tag-and-release and found most tigers, even the big grand-daddies, had a relatively small range. A Kailua tiger might be found in Waimanalo. We tagged one off Mokuleia and caught it a couple months later off Makaha. That's normal. But there's no evidence of tigers moving between islands."
Pester also discounted normal ocean currents for moving that piece of fabric such a great distance. The fabric is believed to have burned in the helicopter crash that killed Maui medical examiner Pat Ohara before it could be tested.
"Probably a coincidence," Tester concluded. "There's really a lot of junk in the ocean. After a while in the salt and sun, it all starts to look alike."
"About those shorts ... " Jonah Hancock said.
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
