Shark Tracker by Fitzpatrick Richard

Author:Fitzpatrick, Richard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New South Wales Press
Published: 2016-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

Moray eels

The impact of tourism on animal behaviour isn’t limited to sharks. It’s especially evident wherever tour operators lure the animals with food or hand-feed them, which is a widespread practice in the industry.

It’s one of the attractions of the famous Cod Hole dive site on the Ribbon Reefs north of Cairns, where divers have been hand-feeding the potato cod and Maori wrasse for some thirty years. These fish are enormous, weighing over 60 kilograms and even up to 150 kilograms, and over time they’ve grown accus-tomed to divers, swimming in close to see what’s going on.

These days, only licensed operators are allowed to feed the fish, and some species are excluded from feeding for good reason — like the moray eel.

Now morays are often depicted as mean fish because of their tendency to lurk in dark crevices and show off their large, sharp, backward-pointing teeth. This isn’t a display of aggression; it’s how they breathe, opening and closing their mouths to keep water flowing across their gills. They also generally keep hidden during daylight hours.

But when disturbed, morays strike with lightning speed. The prey — fish, crustaceans or an unfortunate diver’s hand — can try to get away, but that only impales it further. And then the moray’s second set of teeth, attached to its pharyngeal jaws, move up the throat towards its mouth to grab the prey. They clamp down on whatever they can reach and pull the prey down the moray’s throat towards its stomach, cutting it up along the way. So divers generally try to avoid disturbing the burrows.

Morays have a keen sense of smell but terrible eyesight. So if a diver tries to hand-feed a moray, it’s just as likely to strike the hand as the fish. That’s exactly what happened to nineteen-year-old New Zealand diver Jillian Liesel Watts, a volunteer hostie on the dive boat Nimrod Explorer at Cod Hole in 1996.

A few different versions of the story exist and I was only called in after the event to deal with the morays. But rumour has it the crew members used to sneak pilchards into each other’s pockets as a prank before each dive. With a vest full of bait fish, Jillian would have been an attractive and confusing target for the moray, who latched onto her arm and effectively ring-barked it. According to the legend, a US paramedic on board saved her life, but she lost one arm and the other hand was compromised.

I was working as a consultant with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority at the time, and they called me in from Osprey Reef to ‘deal with’ the moray problem at Cod Hole. By that they meant I should kill the six big eels in the area, but as far as I was concerned the eels weren’t the problem. So I planned to catch them during our overnight trip and to relocate them to a less popular spot, where they’d be unlikely to encounter divers.

I’d never had to catch

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