Collecting the fish - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 234

dition. However, it did not adapt well to the tank and after four
days was taken out and released near the Farallon Islands. Finally,
Ian Gordon at Underwater World in Sydney, Australia, captured
one on a setline only forty-five minutes away from his aquarium.
Unfortunately, the space in his aquarium was too confining for a
free-swimming white shark, so after a few days he took the shark
out and released it exactly where he'd collected it.
The failure of the great whites to show interest in food appears
to be a result of stress during capture and transport, or it is pos-
sible that the aquarium itself alters their physiology, causing their
normal appetite to shut down. It's ironic that the animal that was
pictured in Jaws as being a ravenous eating machine refuses to eat
anything at all in an aquarium.
It's puzzling, moreover, that this stress doesn't seem to a¤ect other
species of sharks. Predatory bull sharks and lemon sharks collected
in much poorer condition, for example, have quickly and com-
pletely recovered and gone on to live for many years in an aquar-
ium. The problem can't be a matter of size, because giant whale
sharks thirteen to twenty feet in length are being kept at Okinawa
and Osaka aquariums in Japan.
I believe that if the e¤ects of this initial stress could be coun-
tered, white sharks would do well in an aquarium. A number of
possible approaches exist, the simplest being an injection of a stress-
reducing steroid or vitamin B 12 . A more complex solution would
be to intravenously counteract the changes that stress causes to
the chemistry of the shark's blood, much as is done to a human
su¤ering from shock.
A more holistic approach, and one that I had plans to use at
one time, would be to net o¤ a cove at an island. When a healthy
shark was caught, it would be transported to the island pen and
o¤ered food. Once it began to feed (assuming it did), the netted-
o¤ area could be gradually reduced until it approximated the size
of the aquarium that would eventually be the animal's home. The
cove, thus restricted in size, would still have ample room for the
shark to swim, but it would also have rocky walls and a shallow-