Shark Trouble by Peter Benchley

Author:Peter Benchley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781588362070
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2002-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

11

You Say You Want to Dive with Sharks?

Well, you’d better be an experienced scuba diver.

And you’d better be guided by a veteran dive master who knows the local waters and its inhabitants very well indeed, because the sharks of one area may behave completely differently from sharks of the same exact species that inhabit another locale.

And you’d better be prepared to expect the unexpected and act accordingly.

And you’d better be able to suppress your habits and instincts and to react counterintuitively and instantaneously.

And you’d better be extremely lucky, because except in areas where feeding stations have been established and the resident sharks are accustomed to having humans in the water with them and have come to associate humans with (not as) food, sharks have no interest at all in hanging out with humans and, as a result, go out of their way to avoid them.

Especially scuba divers, who appear to a shark to be large, strange (they resemble no other animal it knows), alien (they emit blasts of bubbles), noisy (those bubbles are loud), possibly threatening, and definitely unappetizing.

More and more these days, at dive sites, hotels, and resorts around the world, divers want to see, be in the presence of, and photograph sharks. They’re prepared to travel vast distances and pay big money to dive with sharks of all kinds, from great whites to whale sharks, blue sharks, hammerheads, duskies, and silkies.

Crusaders for the conservation of sharks, who work in opposition to international commercial interests that kill millions of sharks every year for their fins, have labored to come up with a statistic proving that a live shark is worth much more to a community, any community, than a dead one. The statistic is no more reliable than any other, but it makes the point.

Every shark killed for its fins brings a fisherman and his community somewhere between five and fifty dollars, whereas every shark that is left alive to become an attraction for diving tourists generates fifty thousand dollars a year in income for the community.

While that statistic isn’t provable, there is an underlying truth to it, similar to the old adage, Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. The truth here is, tourism is the fastest-growing industry in the world; tourism can transform and save ailing, inefficient economies; diving is an important element in tourism; divers want to see sharks.

Conclusion: preserve your local sharks, and you’ll attract tourist dollars, which ripple out into the rest of the island (or seaside or port or coastline) economy and support restaurants, hotels, car-rental franchises, shops, video-rental stores, and so on, ad infinitum.

For the most part, intentional diving with sharks is reasonably safe, because it is chaperoned and supervised by experts. Even the many shark-feeding enterprises that are springing up all over the world (especially in the Bahamas) are, as a rule, conducted so that the paying customers are kept out of jeopardy.

Shark feeding is, however, increasingly controversial.

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