How To Look A Shark In The Eye

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30348, 25 January 1964, Page 11

How To Look A Shark In The Eye

[From the “ Sun-Herald," Sydney. Reprinted by Arrangement} T)R. Perry Gilbert flew up to Heron Island this week, armed with a one-pint syringe and an opthalmoscope.

The opthahnoscope is of the conventional type. Any doctor might use it for probing the mysteries of his patients’ eyesight.

Dr. Gilbert, however, will not be gazing into human eyes. Instead, he will be looking long and deep into the eyes of sharks.

This procedure is not quite suicidal as it sounds —the sharks will be unconscious. That is where the one-pint syringe comes into the picture. Fully loaded with a special anaesthetic, it is quaranteed to knock even a man-eater out cold, and make him safe for scientists to handle.

Dr. Gilbert believes in boldness when dealing with sharks, but not in bravado. “There is no point in taking unnecessary risks.” he said this we'-k.

“Even people like Hans Hass and Cousteau both of them used to be full of bravado —are coming round to this point of view. . “They have modified their

approach to sharks quite a lot,” Dr. Gilbert, who is professor of zoology at Cornell University, is visiting Australia to take a look at the local varieties of sharks. He will also attend the A.N.Z.A.A.S. conference in Canberra during this stay. As chairman of the United States Shark Research Panel, he is regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject. Sir Victor Coppleson, himself an internationally recognised shark man, puts Dr. Gilbert right at the top of the list. It was, in fact, Sir Victor’s longstanding invitation which brought the American professor to Australia. I met him this week—appropriately enough—at Manly Oceanarium, where he had come to look at some sharks. Not Impressed The sharks, unimpressed, swam moodily near the bottom of the pool, refusing to lured to the viewing windows for a photograph. Dr. Gilbert, a witty, gin-ger-haired man with a humourous face, was wearing a dazzling Hawaiian-type shirt, a souvenir of recent travels in the South Pacific. Round his neck was an outsize fossilised shark’s tooth. “That tooth is 20 million years old,” he said impressively. “I picked it up at Shark Tooth hill near Bakersfield, and had it mounted.” Unperturbed by hordes of schoolchildren scrambling past him as he leaned against

a viewing window, Dr. Gilbert talked calmly about his favourite subject—sharks.

“I am taking my opthalmoscope up to the research station at Heron Island because I want to find out whether sharks on the Barrier Reef are near-sighted or far-sighted,” he said. “I am quite used to handling big sharks, you know. Back home I work in a marine laboratory at Bimini, in the Bahamas. This was built for us by the United States Navy—which is interested in sharks for obvious reasons—and the American Institute of Biological Sciences. “At Bimini, we keep sharks up to 15 feet long in pens. When we want to handle them, we drive them into smaller pens, and net them.” A special anaesthetic— MS222—has been evolved for cold-blooded creatures. Smaller fish are dunked in. the mixture to knock them out, but this is impractical with sharks. “The vulnerable spot in a shark is the gill slit, so that’s where we spray in the anaesthetic,” Dr. Gilbert said. “I can knock out a 5001 b shark in 90 seconds. His tail relaxes, and you can do what you like with him." Much of the work at Bimini has been concerned with trying to establish which sense guides a shark most surely to its prey. Dr Gilbert made history there when he blinded sharks temporarily by fitting them with black contact lenses. “There’s nothing to it,”

he said this week. “You simply anaesthetise your shark, bring him up close, and slip the lenses into his eyes. “It only takes a moment. “What has it proved?— Well, our tests seem to show that at 50 feet or less, sight is the shark’s main sense organ in making a kill.” Working up on the reef with his ophthalmoscope, checking on long-or nearsighted sharks, Dr. Gilbert will take his researches a step further. “I shan’t be tackling the really big ones.” he said. “At Heron. I’m planning to work with small and medium sized sharks—probably four or five footers. “A one-point syringe full of M 5222 should be enough to deal with these fellows.” “Delicate Creatures” Being anaesthetised benefits the shark, as well as safeguarding its human handler. In a quiescent state, a shark will not struggle and harm itself. “In spite of what you may think, sharks are delicate creatures which need tender handling,” Dr. Gilbert said. “We have even to be careful about the way we lift them out of the water. Pulling them out the wrong way can cause visceral damage.” Dr. Gilbert is also intensely interested in the reproductive system of sharks, and the details of their placental attachment.

On the reef, he will collect the young of as many species as possible, preserve them, and take them back to

Cornell for study. Is this dedicated research worker frightened of sharks? “Well, no, I’m an enthusiastic skindiver,” he said. “But as 1 have already told you. I don’t believe in bravado. “At Bimini, we deliberately provoke sharks to attack a prey—perhaps a big marlin.

“But while we watch, we are in a cage, safe from attack ourselves.”

This sort of spectator sport is teaching scientists a lot about the attack patterns of sharks.

They are learning that there is a relation between jaw and tooth structure, and the big fish’s striking power.

But while the research worker painstakingly builds up the structure of knowledge, shark attacks go on, shocking in their savagery, tragic in their senseless waste of life.

Is there any way of putting a stop to shark deaths, once and for all?

"You cannot hope to wipe out the shark,” Dr Gilbert said patiently. “He is always going to be with us. “One of the main lines of experiment currently going on is with chemical repellants. I am taking some up to the Barrier Reef to try out during my visit. “Repelling sharks electrically has also been tried. “But experience has shown that by far the best way of protecting bathers is to mesh along the beaches. “It has worked for you here in Australia, and it has worked in South Africa.”