Born Predators - Chapter 3, Part 1

A book about sharks and people by Anthony Palumbi and Steve Palumbi

A Thin Scent of Mammal

Along the coast of marshes and shallow bays, deep in the night, Hennessey tiptoed toward a rare possibility, feeling the blubbery tang of cold-ocean prey mixed in the warm coastal current she was following. She was about 20 feet deep with 80 feet below her, feeling and smelling and tasting little pockets of low salinity water, clumps of marsh grass, cold pockets of deeper ocean water, and all the tactile and sensory cues of being nearby a warm shallow bay. She turned towards this unusual combination, her steady loping tailbeat pushing her toward a vague mammalian scent.

She stopped and drank in the sensations. Her pupils flared large in the dim light. All her senses were talking. Floating motionless, she let the ocean speak.

Amid the layered confusing sensations came a potential payoff. A large object, big enough to be prey, moved through water. A thin scent of mammal. Not the usual species. Whatever this creature might be, whether prey or not, her senses did not immediately know it. The senses that exquisitely detected the world at a distance failed to deliver any answer. There was scent but no electrical signal. She had only one other tool at her disposal to find out more.

Prey or not prey? To really know what this was, she had to taste it.

Chapter 3, Part 1

“No! No! No!”

The research boat lurched left as an unexpected wave lifted the bow, throwing Kinney to the side. The shark had been almost within range, a 13-foot plank of grey and white nibbling at the bait chunks that Kinney’s crew had thrown to her. The deep waters of Monterey Bay showed twisted strands of floating kelp, and rhythmic swells from the cold Pacific Ocean that closed over the powerful jaws and rows of teeth of the White Shark they’d been stalking. Where it had been was now just another long unremarkable stretch of the empty endless sea.

Kinney twisted back toward the edge of the boat, still gripping the long white pole that caused her to lose her balance. She swung the tip around toward where the shark had been, protecting the precious cargo dangling from the pole tip. She was on the very front of the boat, in a half cage of aluminum that stuck out from the bow, so she had a little room to maneuver. But the boat had swung too far away. The shark was getting away!

Kinney yelled out to the boat skipper, “Annie! Hard to port and full reverse! Now!”

Annie looked down from the small wheelhouse, “Kinda rough on the transmission…”

“Now! Annie! Now!” Kinney rolled right, pointing at the direction she wanted Annie to go, hauling the pole around with all her strength. Annie spun the wheel and threw the engine into reverse with a loud ‘Thunk’. The bow swung back, leaning left then rocking right. Kinney got her balance, re-orienting herself toward where she was sure the shark would re-appear, still exploring the bait. And there it was! Oblivious to the boat’s drama. And in a sharp motion, Kinny swung the pole down perfectly and smacked the tip of the pole on the shark’s flank, attaching the heart monitor it held. The shark did not seem to notice. But it was on. The small, electrical tag had adhered correctly to the shark. For now.

Kinney stayed put on the bow for a moment making sure the device was secure, and then balanced her way back toward the boat’s midsection as the shark swam languidly away. Kinney placed the tagging pole gently in its slot, compensating perfectly for the erratic motion of the waves.

Annie watched her doing what she always did: walk the heaving deck like it was not moving at all. Kinney’s barely 5’8” frame held a dexterity and determination that made up for the reach of taller people, mostly men. That, plus a deep talent for detailed science made her the leader of a whole young team of field and lab biologists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

“Thanks for the reverse maneuver, Annie!”

“You heard that ‘Thunk’? That was a very unhappy transmission!”

“Worth it!” Kinney yelled back as she made her way to the small stern cabin where her chief IT technician Maria Alvarez stared at a screen.

“Getting heart data?” Kinney asked.

“Starting. She’s still on the surface, so there is a little interference.”

“Ok folks, you’ve got maybe 30 minutes till that tag comes off. We planned this, so fire up the hydrophone and start broadcasting.”

The three other crew, all summer interns under Kinney’s direction, crowded up with files ready – seal sounds, plus orca and dolphin and some humpback whales.

“We practiced every step! Broadcast those files one at a time and monitor the shark’s heart rate reactions. Go!” Kinney launched them eagerly towards Maria’s console. Kinney was good at this. Field work in impossible situations, with people she respected.

But then they were all caught up short by a harsh, insistent ringing.

Everyone stopped to look at the satellite phone case, labelled in red - Emergency Use Only!

“Go! Go!!” Kinney waved them ahead. She reached tentatively for the phone. It had never rung before.

“Hey, Dr. Austin! Good morning!”

Adrianna, Kinney’s summer office assistant at the Aquarium, famously radiated excitement like a petite, fresh-faced nugget of plutonium.

“Adie, what’s going on? We’re out tagging.”

“Everyone’s been trying your phone. About the shark attack.”

“Adie, tell me what you are you talking about. I’ve been out all night.”

“A shark attack in New York. Some famous guy. I guess he’s dead?”

“Adie, how does this matter right now? I’ve got a boat full of equipment and people here.”

A new voice popped on the line: “Kinney, get back here right away. Tell Annie to push the speed.” This was Kinney’s boss, the Aquarium’s head of Conservation.

“We just started the heart monitor study. Tagged the perfect shark…”

“An hour, or faster even.”

“Bad on the engine, Monica…” Kinney began and looked up at Annie. “And the transmission too. It’ll need a rebuild.”

“Whatever. Just get back” Monica hung up.

Kinney rolled her eyes, flipped Annie a ‘thumbs up’ and yelled, “Update! You all have ten minutes!” Which was met by enough groans and sudden questions that she had to add: “Which is about 10 times as long as the boss wants. Let’s get it done guys.”

***

“This is going very badly, Ernie. Tourists are already leaving in droves.”

In Hampton Bay, Tim Leach had been haranguing the Mayor all morning. They were holed up in the Ernie DiStepano’s cluttered office, a large untidy, wood paneled mix of old furniture and faded posters of summer festivals in the beach towns of Long Island. These were posters of the best times in Hampton Bay, fueled by beach going families and summer-time transplants from Manhattan. They looked down on Mayor Ernie, accusing him of ruining everything.

DiStepano ran thick fingers through his long silver hair, kept long because he thought it was very Mayoral, trying to think his way out of this mess. His normal Italian-made suit was a rumpled disaster: he’d been in his office since 4 in the morning.

“Whaddam I supposed to do, sweet talk them back to the beaches?” he said, barely suppressing his Long Island brogue. “Right where a giant goddamned shark could be? You want me to walk into the water like that shark movie?”

Leach had not been up all night and so retained his well-groomed style, in a smooth sleek sport coat and elegant brown leather shoes. As the town’s biggest developer, he usually could outthink DiStepano. But DiStepano had a sense of the way people reacted emotionally, and Leach often needed that. Between them, DiStepano had a grip on emotions and Leach understood resources… A perfect team for making money.

“What do you want to do, Ernie?”

“Lie low and let it pass,” DiStepano suggested hopefully.

“No. We need to be proactive. Get out there. Identify the threat and eliminate it. Great PR—that’s what keeps us in this. Maybe even benefiting from this…tragedy.”

“And how do we do that? We’d need somebody who knows about sharks and can do stuff and reassure everyone,” DiStepano asserted. He thought a second, the roster of town notables running through his head. “Maybe like that shark girl, grew up here. Daughter of … Mary Austin.”

“A scientist? Hard to control. How about just a shark hunt? I’ll call some guys.”

“Bloody mess, Leach. And those guys are outsiders. But the Austin kid is perfect. Local. Or was,” DiStepano decided, and then yelled to the next room. “Gail! Find the number of that shark girl!”

“No idea who you mean, Mr. Mayor!” came back the sweet reply from Gail’s office in the next room.

“Kinney. Kinney Austin,” Leach said. “Somewhere in Monterey.”

***

The Monterey Bay Aquarium was an irregular hulk of grey concrete, sloping roofs and sleeping smokestacks. It was also, for Kinney, the most spectacular building in all of North America. What started as a sardine cannery—a factory of marine death—had been literally and figuratively reborn. Slat-board floors had been originally spaced an inch apart to let sardine guts drop into the Bay. But now there was dark carpet over continuous concrete that was meticulously vacuumed every night. The former ovens, that reduced sardines to fertilizer, were now touch tanks and board rooms, and the back deck wrapped around a cove that lent shelter to mothering otters who used its calm deep pools to roll over and over, grooming their pups. Kinney had decided long ago never to work anywhere that didn’t have baby sea otters.

Kinney had been picked at the Monterey wharf, by the Director’s car no less, and delivered to the business entrance of the aquarium. She was wet, cold and tired, and had had very little sleep. But the summons back to the office worried her enough to shake off the fatigue. As soon as she’d entered cell range, her phone lit up with 100s of notifications.

She sprinted up the three flights of stairs to her office. She was dressed in Helly Hansen rain pants, a red long-sleeve surfing rash guard, and a baseball cap. Her personal adornment consisted of three left ear earrings, short black hair, and a wrist tattoo that said Carcharias. All together, she made a lot of wet noise racing up the steps.

Kinney’s office was centered in an open space ringed by dive photos of Hawaii, Samoa, the Philippines, and Palmyra Atoll. Spectacular as they were, they all paled against the genuine view of Monterey Bay outside her broad window. The green waves rippled strongly across the top of the chocolate brown kelp forest, and beyond she could see the white whale-watching boats crowded with tourists churning toward the mouth of the bay. The daily summer fog rolled around offshore, uncertain about when it should climb ashore and ruin the sunshine.

Usually, Kinney savored every minute of that view. But now the calm of the view was utterly overturned by the crowd waiting for her. They filled the open space around Kinney’s desk. Almost everybody from the shark team, and absolutely everybody from the community outreach team, was there. Adie stood back a little, and smiled and waved unobtrusively when Kinney appeared.

At front of this welcoming committee was Kinney’s immediate boss, Director of Conservation Monica Gonzalez, holding a single-sheet print-out of an Associated Press story: “Tech’s best ‘AI tamer’ killed in shark attack.”

“No Goddamned way,” was Kinney’s immediate reaction as she took the page and scanned it. Shark attacks of any kind were rare, fatal ones vanishingly so. Monica just watched, leaning against the office doorway.

“A party on a New York yacht, some carousing gone wrong, Sparkistry’s Jamie Brinson got in the water and now he’s gone.” Monica knew the tech world’s most notable personalities, since they were close by in Silicon Valley, and on the whole, they had genuine interest in the ocean.

“No way.” Kinney repeated, reading quickly. Her normal demeanor – challenge everybody – immediately took over. “They haven’t found the body. Is he really dead? Maybe the guy just snuck away. Could’ve been anything, right? Statistically, logically, it’s got to be anything but a shark.” She held the title of Research Scientist, a generalized term that allowed her to be the engine behind all the Aquarium’s high visibility shark projects. So, she often found herself fielding frantic queries from media outlets, explaining time and again why these creatures were fabulous and beautiful and dangerous, but that they were not terrifying monsters.

But interfacing with the public was not her best talent. She was utterly impatient with an audience that didn’t leap to intuitive conclusions like she did… She just literally could not understand that they didn’t see the obvious connections she saw in patterns and data and measurements. And she couldn’t read the cues from people for how they expected her to behave.

Monica shook her head. “It’s all over the web already—shark, shark, shark. Someone must have seen one.”

“Then just hand it off to the Cape Cod people”.

“It’s up to us,” came Monica’s calm reply, waiting for the upcoming explosion.

And it happened. “No way! You just want us to be in the middle of this massive publicity swarm! Huge internet coverage…massive attention! And you need me to do it. Again! Well, I won’t! I am busy.” Kinney used the word busy like it meant The Pope.

Monica let the storm pass. “Location, Kinney.” The gentle sway in her voice, snagged Kinney’s attention.

Kinney looked. Her heart stopped, rebooted itself as she re-scanned the story. Hampton Bay. Shit. The loop closed.

Her hometown. Whatever little was left of her childhood and upbringing was there. No family: Mom lived in Florida. All that was left was a lot of history. A lot of drama, a lot of pain, she thought she’d left behind.

“I have to return these calls, don’t I?”

“Yes. Mayor of Hampton Bay. Now, please.”

“OK….Hold on…” Kinney scanned the story. Her science brain began working, hauling her panicked publicity brain out of its downward spiral. “It says Triton showed a shark in Hampton Bay.”

“You are stalling. Who’s Triton?” Monica asked.

“A new startup for tracking marine animals. Commercial app. They have their own tags on sharks along the east coast.”

“What kind of tags?”

Only ten people in the world would have been able to answer Monica’s question. Kinney didn’t hesitate.

“They're a knock-off of our best telemetry tags. Thin wire across the body to gather data. Transmitter on the dorsal. Only broadcasts when the shark is at the surface. Full physiology scan every minute. Data set is stored and then uploaded to a satellite when the shark fin is above water.”

Kinney was madly entering data into her computer while she provided this explanation. “Problem is, big White sharks are ocean creatures. Hampton Bay is way too shallow, less than 60 feet deep. Probably they have the ID wrong.”

She pulled up a spreadsheet of data, and pivoted the screen so Monica could see. Behind Monica, the crowd had crept up.

“It’s a white shark. Named….” Kinney began, peering at the screen and opening a few links. “Hennessey. Sixteen feet long. I know that bay, and this shark is way too big. Very unlikely that this is right.”

“Everyone there seemed sure…”

Kinney stared at the screen. “OK, there’s one possibility ….” she mused. She slammed a series of commands into her keyboard, and switched servers. “OK, here is the full file on Hennessey.” From a new site, she pulled up a different set of data, more complex, more detailed. Monica stayed quiet. Kinney scanned the results. Everyone waited.

“Look,” she said to the gathering audience, squinting into the screen. “Hennessey was tagged as a juvenile female years ago. Now’s she’s fully mature…” She scanned the data set, plotted a graph. She looked around. Twenty people were silent.

“And that means…?” Monica filled in.

Kinney rolled her eyes, “Oh, it’s obvious! She’s big enough now. She might be pregnant.”

“Why does it matter if the shark is pregnant?” asked a staffer from the Member’s Desk.

“Baby white sharks need warm water at birth. She may be looking for a birth cove.”

Adie had stuck her head through the crowd, “Why warm water, Kinney?”

“White sharks are warm blooded, Adie. And their pups are especially warm in the core of Mom’s body while they grow. A mother can’t just squirt them out into freezing water. Too big a shock.”

“So, maybe Hennessey did attack this fellow?” Monica asked.

“Don’t know, but Hampton Bay is nice and warm,” Kinney peered at the geographic trace of Hennessey’s tag. “And It looks like Hennessey was at the scene of the crime.”

Photo by Gerald Schömbs on Unsplash