“I guess you wouldn’t call me a shark hugger,” Greg Skomal says from Cape Cod. “I’m a classically trained fisheries biologist. I believe that if you have sustainable fisheries, you should allow people to fish. Fishermen have helped me so much, and taught me so much. I don’t paint them as bad people. I try to show all sides.”
Skomal, 61, is a senior fisheries biologist with the Massachusetts division of marine fisheries, an adjunct professor at the University of Massachusetts, and director of the Massachusetts shark research program.
In his new book, Chasing Shadows: My Life Tracking the Great White Shark, he does indeed try to show all sides. Over 300-plus pages, the “leading white shark expert in America”, a TV face familiar to millions of Shark Week addicts, tells the story of Atlantic shark research, and his life in it; considers the history, development and decline of shark fishing; describes the resurgence of great whites off the US north-east, and the occasional attacks, some deadly, that result; discusses how sharks have been demonised in popular culture (Steven Spielberg’s Jaws features heavily, naturally); and even presents chapters told from the point of view of the sharks.
“I really didn’t want to talk about the biology of the shark,” he says. “We wanted the shark to demonstrate its biology itself.”
Skomal penned the book alongside co-author and science writer Ret Talbot, the two having “bounced ideas and drafts back and forth” though Talbot “did a lot of the heavy lifting”, Skomal says with a laugh.
“I’ve written a lot of scientific papers and the truth is not a lot of people read them, except scientists. We felt that if we jumped into the body of the shark, and talked to the reader about what it did, it would be a lot more informative, a lot more fun. And I think it worked well,” he says.
“We have chapters for a male shark and chapters for a female shark, and we kind of go from birth to maturity for each one, through the eyes of the shark. It kind of goes along well with naming sharks and those aspects of the work which personalise the shark to some extent.”
Skomal and other researchers aim to popularise their work. In TEDx Talks, available online, Skomal shows footage of sharks named Curly, Catherine and Large Marge. Some think humanity too obsessed with such charismatic megafauna, to the cost of conservation efforts for less immediately spectacular animals. Skomal accepts such concerns, but says of his beloved great whites: “They’re really cool beasts. Kids love them. And some kids don’t outgrow it when they get to be adults.”
As a kid in Connecticut, near the Long Island Sound, Skomal wore a red bobble hat in tribute to Jacques Cousteau, his undersea TV hero. Later, “my mother bought me another cap that looked like Quint’s”, the shark hunter played by Robert Shaw in Jaws. He also talks of another who sailed from the US east coast, Herman Melville, and the literature of the sea in general.
“I read Moby-Dick as a teenager,” he explained. “And then I read all the supporting literature. I used to go to Nantucket a bit because it was part of my job. And there was a really small little bookstore on Main Street there, and I used to buy up books about whaling. I love Moby-Dick. I love books about adventures on the ocean. And I hope there are elements of that in my book.”
There are. Chasing Shadows isn’t meant to be a purely literary work but in the tradition (or shadow) of Moby-Dick, it does contain history, biography, science, drama, horror, profundity and mundanity. The drudgery of shark research, the swells and the seasickness, the moments of fear and exhilaration and the days of hard work that produce them. To say the white shark became Skomal’s white whale would be to go too far. But Chasing Shadows does describe how obsession draws him on.
“I think in the book you can see some of my successes but I also try to bring out my failures, where I got it wrong, where I tried too hard, where I messed up,” he says. “That’s part of life. I want to inspire children in this book and others. I want to inspire people to chase their dreams.”
For as long as he can remember, certainly after seeing Jaws and realising he wanted to be Matt Hooper, the marine biologist played by Richard Dreyfuss, Skomal’s dreams have been haunted by sharks.
“You know, all these charismatic megafauna are keystone species in their ecosystems. I’m hoping that comes out in the book,” he says. “We need our white sharks. We need our sharks. And that’s a strong conservation message, I hope.”
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Chasing Shadows describes how Skomal’s career has coincided with public perceptions shifting, shark fishing declining, shark populations rebounding in tandem with the protection and thus return of the seals great whites eat. Skomal expects that recovery to continue.
“We’re seeing white sharks not only off Cape Cod, the hotspot, but we get reports throughout the year when they’re wintering off Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and then in the summer Canada has had more and more sightings,” he says.
“When you start to see a species at the northern extent of its range in greater numbers, that means the population is coming back. Now we’re seeing basically white sharks from the Gulf of Mexico to Newfoundland. And that’s all very promising.”
So is the development of ways to track sharks with tags often applied from the pulpit of a research boat by Skomal, whether or not the great white below decides to leap from the water and try to take a bite. Tags can now carry cameras, and track the sharks to great lengths and depths.
Skomal describes how such technology might soon “give us a glimpse into why a white shark dives 3,000ft in the middle of the Atlantic”.
“What the hell are they doing down there? I’ll be very honest and say, I have no idea. We think they’re feeding, we think they’re mating, but we have no idea. And anyone who tells you they do, they’re making it up,” he says.
“We’ve tagged 300 white sharks off Cape Cod and we’ve got a lot of data. But the truth is, I still can’t answer the question, where do males and females mate, where do females give birth. All that reproductive stuff is a mystery, which is cool because I think we need mysteries. I think mysteries inspire people. For every answer I get, there’s another question.”
For some time, whenever an Atlantic shark has bitten a surfer, kayaker or swimmer, Skomal has answered questions from reporters. He and Talbot begin Chasing Shadows with a description of a fatal attack off Wellfleet in summer 2018.
The recovery of shark populations, Skomal says, simply brings “more potential for the occasional shark attack and shark bite, and the need for coexistence not just on Cape Cod, which is the emphasis of the book, but beyond.
“We talk a bit about the attack in Maine” – fatal, on a swimmer in 2020 – “which blindsided me and the folks in Maine,” he says. “But people have to start thinking about that, so we’re working really closely now with our Canadian colleagues, because they’re going to be proactive and say, ‘There’s lots of white sharks, there’s a lot of surfers, we need to think about how we want to move forward. I think it’s through education – and they agree.”
In large part, such dark events merely stoke the public desire to talk and learn about sharks. It’s human nature, Skomal says, to want to look into the abyss. More so, if the abyss turns out to conceal a very large shark.
“I acknowledge fear,” he says. “I used, at the beginning of my public talks, to ask who was afraid of sharks and a lot of the room would raise their hand. They were just being honest. I tell people now that I have a fear of these animals too. I think it’s healthy. If you don’t, I think you’re kind of crazy. It’s a wild animal that has been implicated in human deaths and injury.”
The fascination remains. Skomal says: “We live in a phenomenal time. So much has happened over the course of my career, where we went from just putting pieces of plastic on sharks and hoping they get caught again, to tracking them using drones and now camera tags and high-resolution sensors, so we can basically recreate the movements of that shark and what it was doing over a couple of days. And it’s all gonna keep getting better.”
As the mysteries of the great white shark – its mating, its birthing, its diving – come to be solved, Skomal thinks we will simply find more.
Chasing Shadows: My Life Tracking the Great White Shark is published in the US by William Morrow
