About book The Devil's Teeth: A True Story Of Obsession And Survival Among America's Great White Sharks (2006)
The jaws of a megaladon could open so wide that a modern quarter-horse could stand upright in them and not nick his head on teeth that were estimated to have been over 7 inches long. The ancestor of the great white shark, they survived at least four mass extinctions and evolved into a perfect predator.Great whites have “an aura of gentleness” when they are not feeding. That’s not an assertion I would personally like to test out. Then again, perhaps our genes have an innate fear of dark things that inhabit alien environments, and perhaps our genetic remembrance is a remnant of our ancestors flight from the seas and the megaladon. There are many hundreds of shark species, yet only four have been known to ingest humans: the Bull shark, White Tip, Tiger, and Great White. Not indiscriminate foragers, contrary to popular lore, great white eyes discriminate and studies have shown they will ignore shapes that don’t resemble one of their favorite meal: seals. A surfboard resembles a seal. Great White congregate around the Farallon Islands and it’s there that Casey went over a period of years to investigate the scientists studying the sharks, seals and birds who congregate in great numbers on these remote and forbidding islands located just west of San Francisco. The researchers came to recognize many of the sharks as individuals with different personality traits: some were clowns, some peevish, others consistently aggressive. They did not engage in the distinctive “feeding frenzy” long associated with sharks, rather they formed a sort of buffet line with the females having the right-away.Humans have long had a love-hate relationship with sharks. Some civilizations venerated them; others damned them. While working on Pearl Harbor workers discovered large pens that archaeologists determined had been used for gladiatorial-like combat between sharks and local natives. (“ Pearl Harbor was the home of the shark goddess Ka'ahupahau and her brother (or son) Kahiʻuka who lived in caves at the entrance to the harbor, rich in pearl oysters, and who guarded the entrance against sharks. The construction of a Navy dry dock starting in 1919 enraged the local populace who believed the gods’ caves were being destroyed.) I decided to do a little fact-checking and found this entry in a book entitled Maneaters: Hawaiian kings threw living people into specially built enclosures containing sharks, and gladiatorial contests were staged between people and sharks that had been starved. The enclosure was a semi-circle of lava stones enclosing an area of a bout 4 acres at the edge of the sea. There was an opening to the sea where sharks could be lured in. During a contest the entrance was closed off. The gladiator was equipped with nothing more than a shark-tooth knife - a stick with a shark’s tooth at the end. When the shark rushed in for the attack, the gladiator had to swim quickly below and try to slice open the shark’s stomach with the single tooth.Casey was granted a week-long permission on the island, ostensibly to study the mating habits of the hundreds of thousands of bird who reside there, some of whom were so eager to peck the back of one’s head that helmets were mandatory. This was at the time of massive interest in sharks, so everyone wanted to go to the Farallon’s and those researchers on the islands were under a great deal of pressure as they were seen as taking away the right of hordes of tourists who wanted their chance to see a great white disembowel some other creature. Her disingenuousness and mendacity about the real purpose for the trip lead to consequences for the shark research project.Getting to the Farallons, home to numerous wrecks and lost ships, was hardly a walk in the park as the 27 miles from the Golden Gate, tended to be often nasty and even the most experienced captains had stories to tell of close calls. Everyone assumed there was nothing to it so they didn’t bring the bare necessities and the weather could change rapidly.The Farallons is all about death, animals killing each other constantly and that can have a weird effect on those who work there. It drives many away almost immediately. Food supplies are not always delivered regularly, relationships develop, others break up, sometimes one is the cause of the other. And there is the constant noise of the birds, bird shit all over everything and scientists have to wear flea collars on their ankles to keep the bird vermin off them. Forget wearing any clothes you wish to keep.Nicknamed the “Devil’s Teeth” because of the way they look, the Farallon Islands have an interesting pedigree. They were pretty much left alone until the early 1800’s when Russian fur traders discovered the thousands of seals who resided there and virtually wiped the seals out. The slaughter was so bad that the population dwindled from an annual kill of 40,000 to just 54 by the 1830’s. It wasn’t just seals who lived there but millions of sea going birds, in particular gulls and Murres. For whatever reason, California had no chickens in the mid-19th century, so when someone discovered that Murre eggs, an egg the size of a softball, could be used in place of chicken eggs in baking, there was a stampede to collect eggs and sell them in San Francisco. (The eggs were not any good for omelets or plain as they had a distinctly fishy taste.) Collecting the eggs was not easy on the slippery, guano-covered mountain sides and scalp wounds from gull attacks were common as was death from slipping off the side of the mountains. The Farallons were the site of the first lighthouse (1853) along the California coast, and desperately needed as shipping traffic increased for the Gold Rush. The lighthouse had to be built twice. The first time they discovered the architect had measured wrongly and the Fresnel lens did not fit, so the building had to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch, not an easy task since bricks had to be hauled up the mountain manually. Manning the lighthouse was a lonely business: the weather was usually terrible and the conditions miserable, not to mention antagonism from the Farallon Egg Company which insisted it had claim to the island, a claim not recognized by the government.One could argue that Casey does not pursue with enough vigor the relationship between the animals and the scientists who study them. She does spend a lot of the book examining the relationships between the scientists themselves. Many reviewers have complained about her infatuation and overemphasis on the people. I like books about people’s idiosyncrasies (and Casey, herself, has many, writing of them self-deprecatingly) and this book has a nice balance of scientific information, geography, and characters.SPOILER: The last third of the book has engendered considerable criticism. The tone changes and the focus is more on Casey herself than the animals. I quote at length from a review in ScienceBlogs: "It made me wonder if the untold obsession was on the part of the "shark guys" since they inexplicably risked their careers to invite a silly, superstitious drama queen into their midst on the islands -- illegally. Curiously, Casey does such a poor job developing the scientists' personalities beyond describing their perfect muscle tone and passion for surfing that Pyle and Anderson were sadly interchangeable throughout the entire account -- like furniture, actually." Perhaps a bit harsh, but Casey is unsparing of herself, too. (Ref: http://scienceblogs.com/bookclub/2009... )More info at: http://www.calacademy.org/webcams/far...
Ostensibly, this book is about the White Sharks of the Farallon islands, though Casey touches on many subjects: Farallon history, the shark and bird researchers allowed to live on the island and even some folklore and supernatural (ghostly) phenomena. For this reason, the book is interesting, but also somewhat lacking in focus. It would be more accurate to say that it's really author Susan Casey's diary of her visits to and around the islands. The author conveys her wonder and feelings about the islands and their yearly shark visitors fairly effectively, but I felt that she was holding back in her descriptions of and interactions with the biologists and interns that she spent much time with. Perhaps it was just poor writing. Basically she describes every male researcher on the island in some one dimensional permutation of 'ruggedly handsome' and I couldn't help but think that her blonde hair and cute smile were the only reason Scot and Peter decided to to even talk to her (to their own chagrin later). Additionally, I could've done with less of her self imposed suffering on the 'Just Imagine' at the end.At it's best, the book effectively portrays exactly how and why life on the Farallones is at once wondrous and other-worldly, yet incredibly unforgiving and dangerous. Yet in the end, the author herself turns out to be more detrimental to the shark research than any of the cage divers or whale boat gawkers who she disdainfully describes throughout the book.
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I both loved and hated this book! The Farallones are an a set of craggy, treacherous islands thirty-five miles away from San Francisco. While they're inhospitable to humans, the islands are home to an amazingly diverse array of sea birds, seals, sea lions, whales, jelly fish, and, at the right time of year, great white sharks. Throughout the first half of the book, my mind was blown as often by the sharks and the fascinating research being done on them as it was by the human history (egg wars, nuclear waste, and lots of money-making schemes ending in death) surrounding the islands. I'm not a big reader of science or nonfiction, but I found the first part fascinating.The second part of the book ticked me off. Throughout the book, Casey looked down on the tourists who would attempt to visit the islands (and be thwarted by the rocks, the sea, and pretty much everything) in hopes of seeing great whites; she was not so different from them. The author, Susan Casey, visited the Farallones three times. In her last visit, she manages to lose two boats and, as a result, get the shark researcher, who went out of his way to help her see the island, the sharks, etc., fired. She would often laud the researchers' "competence," but she never really clued into the fact that being in a severe place like that requires competence, which she didn't seem to put too much effort into acquiring. Tourism is experience without effort (or something, I can't remember who told me that) and that sounds like what Casey really wanted (though she wanted a more extreme, elite version of it). She expresses some regret, but her experience gave her the opportunity to give a first hand account of what it means to eff-up big time, and how you deal with the fallout, which she totally passed up. She could have used her obvious clout (she's a well-established journalist) to try and help the shark research. Instead of doing something for the greater good, she did something that was essentially for herself, and ended up bringing the whole operation down.
—Nicole
My own shark obsession aside, this is easily one of the best books I've ever read. Casey writes with a sense of humor and weaves together a true story so masterfully that it rivals even the best fiction. It has all the elements of a great tale: tempests, lonely islands in the middle of shark-infested waters, hauntings, adventure, shipwrecks (and biologists that give new meaning to the term 'bad-ass'.) Only, it's even better, because it's all true. And, man oh man, the sharks! It was like reading an episode of Discovery Channel's Shark Week. The shark encounters were often the stuff of nightmares but, ultimately, the reader gets a glimpse into a side of white sharks not previously seen. They are not stupid, killing machines but rather magnificent, primal beings that I ended up rooting for wholeheartedly. I'm just hoping that I'll be lucky enough to see one someday (just, please, from a boat!)
—Jeanette
I am really torn about this book. On the one hand, I really enjoyed being introduced to the incredible history, both natural and otherwise, of the Farallon islands. I also really enjoyed hearing all the anecdotes about shark behavior and the unique group of animals that spend fall at the Farallons. I would have liked to hear more about the results of the tracking project that is mentioned briefly towards the end of the book. On the other hand, I really could not understand the arrogance and fool hardiness that dominates the last part of this book. Being a wildlife biologist I was extremely irritated by the choices that led to a non-scientist, who knows little to nothing about boats, and whose only qualification is that she thinks sharks are neat, getting a (unofficial) place on a highly exclusive research team and being put in charge of a 70 ft yacht anchored in the very roughest of seas.Oh and the seas? Also infested with some of the largest sharks in the world. How was that supposed to end? It is not shocking that it ended poorly and while I understood the initial motivations of both parties involved (the author and one of the researchers), when it became clear that things were not going well, they should have cut their losses. And really Susan needed to admit defeat, realize that she was nothing more than a liability and go home. To her credit she admits as much and it probably took something to lay the whole scenario out there. But I definitely enjoyed the first part of the book a good deal more than the last.
—Stephanie
