Date:20/12/2004 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2004/12/20/stories/2004122003052000.htm

International

Return of the great killer shark

By Mark Townsend

LONDON, DEC.19. There was no warning, no trace of the menacing score that accompanied the mythic monster of jaws. Teenager Nick Peterson could surely not have known what struck him as he stretched on his surfboard last week. The shark's first bite severed his torso, onlookers howled as the blue-green sea off Adelaide turned red with his blood.

Yet it was what happened during the next frenzied moments that had stunned the world's leading shark experts and sparked speculation that nature's sleekest predator, the great white shark, has never been more fearsome.

Scientists say that typically a great white shark spits out chunks of human flesh after the first bite. Yet just after 4 p.m. on Thursday last, 300 miles off the West Beach in Adelaide, the natural order was abandoned. Rather than leave Peterson half-dead in the waters, the creature stepped up its attack.

Peterson's body was savaged. On Saturday, despite exhaustive searches, no part of him had been recovered. Experts are struggling to explain why the 16 ft creature targeted the powerful swimmer with such savagery. And attention has swung to a remarkably similar sequence of events that occurred a month ago, 7,000 miles away off Cape Town.

Those who watched Tyna Webb during her final morning swim off the beach near Fish Hoek recall a large dark form circling the 77-year-old. As with Peterson, the attack was unprovoked. Again, her body has never been found. Witnesses in a helicopter described the shape of a great white shark, bigger than the machine they peered from, swimming from the scene apparently with a body in its jaws.

Questions raised

Two attacks of such ferocity have never occurred so closely together and both events have raised questions about whether it is possible that after 400 million years the great shark has entered a new stage of development.

Alexia Morvan of the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History, who is considered the world's most authoritative source of data, believes it is too early to tell. `I don't know whether there is a change in behaviour, but we have never seen two such violent attacks in such a short period ever before. Normally we see a single bite, but these were more like a deliberate kill.'

Concerns that the world's most-feared creature has become even more terrifying were amplified by the fact that Peterson's death came just five days after a shark mauled 38-year-old Mark Thompson to death on the Great Barrier Reef. Thompson died before onlookers could pull him to safety, although, according to Morvan, the fact he was spearfishing means his death cannot be categorised as unprovoked.

Yet just why have the attacks become so ferocious? Among the theories expounded over the recent high casualty list is the fact that more people spend time in the ocean than ever before. `There are more leisure users, more surfers, more swimmers, more guys out fishing than ever,' said Richard Pierce, chairman of the Plymouth, England-based Shark Trust. —