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right in Galveston Bay, and they agreed to let me run a simulated ship-
ping test with one of their six-foot bulls. The plan was to design and
build a shipping container in San Diego and send it, together with life-
support equipment, to Galveston for the test. When this was done I
flew back there to set up the equipment at the side of their exhibit tank.
The next step was to capture one of the bull sharks and simulate the
conditions of a real shipment.
The main display tank at Searama was quite interesting. It contained
a collection of just about everything from the Gulf of Mexico —
alligator gars, big green morays, red drums, great barracudas, stingrays,
giant jewfish, and, of course, several bull and lemon sharks. Young
women in bikinis performed daily underwater feeding shows. I was
amazed that these young women were swimming with notoriously dan-
gerous bull sharks, which are known to attack more people worldwide
than any other shark. And not only were these young women swim-
ming with the sharks, but they were carrying food for the other fishes
as well.
The bull shark lives close to shore and often goes into brackish water
and sometimes even freshwater. It has been caught three thousand miles
up the Amazon, and once up the Mississippi as far as Ohio. For many
years this shark was known in other parts of the world by di¤erent
names—the Zambezi River shark in South Africa, the Lake Nicaragua
shark in Central America—until they were all shown to be the same
species.
Curator Tom Whitman explained that it was quite safe to swim with
the bulls because they treat the tank most of the time with a low dose
of copper sulfate to control algae. This suppresses both the appetite
and the aggressive nature of the sharks. Periodically they discontinue
the copper, and the sharks are then fed. It still seemed risky to me, but
they'd been doing it without a problem for a number of years, and I
couldn't argue with that.
Tom organized the capture of our test bull shark. First his divers, us-
ing a large crowder net, herded the bull into a small connecting hold-
ing tank. It was then lifted out on a stretcher and lowered into my test
transport tank. The oxygen was already on, and the bull shark quickly
settled down under the mildly sedating e¤ect of the high oxygen con-
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