As baby great whites cruise SoCal shorelines, science finds little to fear

On a cool March morning near the Huntington Beach Pier, dozens of surfers sat bobbing on their boards — legs dangling in the water, toes wiggling for warmth — and gazed with questioning eyes at the fishing boat going back and forth a few yards away, just outside the break.

From the bow of the boat, I made eye contact with several of the surfers and waved, but it was a little too far for them to hear when I shouted, “We’re tagging the great white sharks swimming around you!”

At least, I assume they didn’t hear, because they didn’t do what I would have done with that particular piece of information: slowly turn my board around, so as not to splash too much or reveal the panic vibrating through every fiber of my being, and paddle like a maniac to shore.

Nobody in the water — nor the people working on the boat, for that matter — seemed particularly alarmed.

The boat belongs to the Cal State Long Beach Shark Lab, and it was crewed by marine biologists documenting the largest group of great whites any of them had ever seen patrolling the waters of one of America’s most celebrated — and most crowded — surf breaks.

In just over an hour, the scientists had spotted at least half a dozen juvenile great whites between five- and seven-feet long. The researchers had speared three of them to attach electronic tracking devices about the size and shape of a cigar.

Such trackers, whose batteries can last up to 10 years, have contributed to countless discoveries, many of them surprising, about the behavior and migration patterns of this much-feared predator.

Christopher G. Lowe, director of the shark lab, said if he had seen that many of the apex predators swimming so close to people a decade ago he would have warned the lifeguards to close the beach — like a scene from the 1975 blockbuster “Jaws,” which cemented the great white’s reputation as a cold-eyed killing machine.

But these days, Lowe said, he and his colleagues have a mountain of tracking data and endless hours of drone footage that show juvenile great whites, some as long as nine feet, routinely cruise among swimmers and surfers with no apparent interest and no harm done.

It happens pretty much every day somewhere in Southern California, Lowe said.

“It’s like humans are flotsam that don’t pose a threat, and aren’t food, so they’re ignored,” Lowe said.

Lowe and other researchers have learned that these groups of young great whites use the beaches of Southern California and northern Baja California as nurseries, moving up and down the coastline with the seasons, in search of warm water. They feed on the abundant stingrays — the true wildlife threat for beachgoers in the Southland — but otherwise mind their own business.

The young sharks stay in the nurseries for about the first six years of their lives, Lowe said. The shallow water helps protect them from larger sharks and killer whales that would eat them with relish, like chewy hors d’oeuvres, if they drifted too far into the deep blue sea.

But once the sharks have reached about 10-feet long, and start to develop a real taste for mammals, it’s rare to see them near Southern California beaches, Lowe said. That’s when they head for spots on the Central Coast and in Northern California where seals congregate in large numbers.

“They’re trying to become adults,” Lowe said, sounding a lot like a proud dad.

Lowe said young sharks will happily stuff themselves on mammals that have died of other causes — seal carcasses apparently are an absolute delight — but they lack the experience and skill to hunt them successfully.

“Learning how to catch nimble prey, like a healthy seal, is really hard,” Lowe said.

But what about awkward, gangly prey, like humans, who unwittingly enter the nurseries?

“As a scientist, I have to say, we’re just not on the menu,” Lowe promised. On the rare occasion that a great white bites a person, he said, it’s probably a mistake. “And sharks make a hell of a lot less mistakes than humans.”

It’s one thing to hear that from a reliable source and accept it, intellectually. It’s another to rein in your instincts and control a racing mind when you’re in the water with wild great whites.

A few years ago, I was kitesurfing alone in Long Beach just before sunset when I became separated from my board. It got stuck on a buoy a few hundred feet from shore, and after landing my kite on the beach, I swam back out to retrieve the board.

As soon as my feet left the ocean floor and I could no longer feel what was beneath me, I thought I saw something flicker out of the corner of my eye. It was gone in an instant, and I had no idea what it was, or if it had even been real.

And then the theme from “Jaws” started playing in my head.

I laughed at first, as I slowly made my way toward the board, but no matter how hard I tried to ignore it, that “dun, dun, dun, dun” kept getting louder.

The next morning, the sky over that beach was full of news helicopters shooting aerial footage of about half a dozen juvenile great whites cruising around the buoy where my board had been stuck. The lifeguards hammered “Shark Sighted / Enter At Your Own Risk” signs into the sand and, for a few days, the local kitesurfers stood on the beach with their arms folded and their wetsuits dry.

Then a newspaper story that quoted Lowe saying the sharks were probably too young to pose a serious threat started circulating among the kiters. And the wind returned.

If the first brave soul who tried his luck while everybody else watched from shore had been eaten, it would have been a somber summer at the kite beach. But he survived, as did the next person, and everyone who followed, including me.

It became one of the best kitesurfing summers anyone can remember. Nobody got bitten, and the sharks ate so many rays, almost nobody got stung.

Collecting the data that shows juvenile great whites are no big threat takes a lot of expertise, and it doesn’t come cheap. Boat maintenance, fuel and pay for the long hours the researchers spend on the water adds up, and with budget cuts looming at CSU, Lowe wonders how he’ll keep the vital operation running.

On Sunday, the researchers started by launching a drone from the pitching deck of their boat to get a bird’s-eye view of the large, dark shapes meandering lazily through the surf zone. When he spotted one, Anthony McGinnis, the field tech at the controls, would hover the drone about 30 feet above the shark, and Lowe, using the drone as a beacon, would steer the boat to the quarry.

When we got close, McGinnis would call out which direction the shark was facing, and Lowe would ease off the throttle so we could quietly glide up behind the shark. In almost every case, they were nearly motionless at the surface, sunning themselves in the warm morning light.

Ryan Logan, on the bow with a GoPro attached to a long stick, would dip the camera in the water beneath, to snap a picture of the shark’s genitals — essentially up-skirting the poor fish in the name of science. It helps to know the sex, he explained, to see if males and females behave differently.

The stick usually spooked the sharks, and they would dart a few yards from the boat before settling again.

That’s when we’d creep up a second time, with Logan now brandishing a spear like some character out of Moby Dick. He thrust the blade into the thick muscle beneath the dorsal fin to attach the tracking device.

The astonished sharks, clearly not used to being on the wrong end of an ambush, would thrash — sometimes dramatically breaching the surface when the blade went in — and then dive into the murky depths. But a few minutes later, we’d spot them back at the surface as if nothing had happened.

“People always ask if we’re hurting the sharks,” Lowe said, and gestured toward one of the freshly tagged sunbathers. It didn’t look too stressed.

In fact, the most worrisome thing Lowe observed all day was the assortment of fishermen on the Huntington Beach Pier. Most were using light gear that would have broken in a heartbeat if they accidentally hooked one of the great whites, but sometimes people use lines that can hold up to 800 pounds.

“Then you have a pissed-off animal at the end of the line that’s trying to get away, and if somebody gets in between, that’s how people get bitten,” Lowe said.

That’s exactly what happened on July 5, 2014, when someone fishing from the Manhattan Beach Pier hooked a seven-foot juvenile great white. He had the shark on the line for about 45 minutes — no doubt enjoying the spectacle and attention — when a group of ocean swimmers approached.

“The shark came up out of the bottom of the water, lunged at me and bit right into my chest, along my torso,” one of the swimmers, a 50-year-old real estate agent from Lomita, told a reporter. “I was locking eyes with this great white shark who was biting into my chest.”

He suffered horrific injuries and was bleeding profusely, but some very brave surfers got him to shore and saved his life.

Which goes to show, even if science tells us the risk is low, accidents can happen.

“And I don’t think anybody wants to be an accident,” Lowe said.