I should never have looked at its teeth. For the past 15 minutes, this 6-ft. tiger shark has been hog-tied alongside our small flat-bottomed motorboat, tossing in choppy seas two miles off Waikiki Beach, in Honolulu. Carl Meyer, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii, has been busy the whole time--slipping a noose around the powerful tail, flipping the shark on its back to put it into a stupor, measuring it this way and that, then shouting the numbers to his colleagues on the larger boat that bobs in the waves nearby.
As he works, Meyer repeats under his breath, over and over, "No biting, no biting, no biting..." The object of his mantra gapes below us--a foot-wide crescent studded with hundreds of razor-sharp, serrated, half-inch-long triangular teeth. This fish is only half-grown--an adult tiger shark can surpass 14 ft. in length--but it could easily take off a hand or an arm, or a chunk of torso you wouldn't want to try and live without.
Meyer, luckily, is a pro. He has been working with sharks for years, and deftly avoids the open jaws. The last step before releasing the specimen is to tag it, a job Meyer assigns to me. I take a steak knife and stab an inch-long, inch-deep incision into the shark's back--no easy task, considering that its skin is as thick as a watermelon rind and as tough as leather. The shark doesn't even flinch. "That's nothing," Meyer reassures me, "compared with the wounds they inflict on each other during mating." I slip a barb-tipped wire with a white plastic tag into the incision and tug hard to anchor it in place.
"O.K., now you get in the water," orders Meyer. This is the scary part. The shark, having been manhandled and disoriented, may be too groggy to swim away, and unlike other fish, most species of sharks must swim constantly to keep oxygen-rich water flowing over their gills. Someone has to be ready in case it needs help getting restarted. And to my surprise and fear--the image of those teeth is still very clear in my mind--I have been elected. I slip over the side. Meyer unbinds the captive, and the huge fish and I are floating free in the crystalline blue water. This is the shark's element. What happens next is entirely up to him.
Biologists like to blame Peter Benchley's best-selling 1974 novel Jaws and the Steven Spielberg movie that followed for the shark's fearsome reputation as a mindless, relentless, consummate predator. The truth is that people have always been terrified by sharks, probably since humans first ventured into the sea. Who can blame them? As any survivor or witness well knows, a shark attack, especially by one of the larger species considered man-eaters--great whites, bull sharks, tiger sharks--is mind-numbing in its speed, violence, gore and devastation.
What most people don't realize is that it almost never happens. In a particularly bad year, as many as 100 people may be attacked by sharks. Of those attacks, a small minority--15% at most--prove fatal. Far more people are killed by bees, poisonous snakes and elephants, as well as bathtub falls and lightning strikes. It's much more dangerous to drive to the beach than to venture into the water once you get there.