Beach of fear
The outbreak of shark attacks in Recife is historic. Scientists have discovered the causes of the incidents. So why do people continue to be killed?
By Thiago Medaglia / Photos of Daniel Botelho and Fábio Nascimento
BAREFOOT IN THE SAND, a couple walks hand in hand by the sea. A few meters ahead, a family enjoys the bath in the natural pools. Boys play ball carefree. Here is a typical day on the beach of Boa Viagem, Recife’s ‘postcard’ city. These people do not notice, but attentive eyes follow their footsteps. And the horror lurks offshore.
From the interior of a lifeguard stand, a firefighter operates a system of video surveillance. Two computer screens show the move on the beach. All along, the cameras of the eleven stations cover the entire perimeter of the urban fringe of the city. There are 9.5 km (5.90 miles) of beach, monitored by the electronic eye of the Reverse Split Fire Sea (Gbmar), part of a new, expensive and modern security apparatus developed by the government of Pernambuco. With the use of technology, the authorities intend to minimize the occurrence of thefts, cases of missing children, drowning and the possible presence of sharks.
However, on July 22, 2013, the monitoring system, instead of allowing for peace, created terror. A shark attack to a human is recorded. The camera will zoom in, far enough to record the moments of panic experienced by Bruna Gobbi, an 18 year old tourist from São Paulo. Brought by the sea to a track where she could not reach the bottom, Bruna lifts her arms waving for help. The firefighters, who earlier, had warned the girl about the current, swim towards her, but before they arrived, a huge blood blister appears on the surface of the water. The lifeguards reach her by jet-ski and she is taken to the sand. This time, the footage is taken by the cameras of the vacationers’ cellphones. Within hours, the scene of Bruna’s left leg, torn, with the tibia bone exposed, swirl around the world via internet.
To make matters worse, despite the heroic act, the procedures of the firefighters received bad criticism from experts. A tourniquet should have been done around the leg of Bruna and her members put up, so that the remaining blood could go to the head and heart. The young woman dies in the hospital.
SHARKS ALWAYS populated the imagination of human beings. Large species such as the great white and the tiger shark are able to kill a person with just one bite. The truth is that when we are surprised by ferocious savage predators, whether sharks or jaguars, our developed brain can do little for the preservation of our fragile physique. Thick skins, brute force and sharp teeth make unequal, the struggle. At sea, there is another aggravating factor. “We tend to look at the beach as an extension of the city,” says marine biologist Otto Gadig, coordinator of the Research Laboratory of Elasmobranch of the State University of São Paulo — Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). But a sea bath is not the same as a dip in the pool water park. “It resembles much more walking in the forest,” explains Gadig. No matter how many modern buildings or lifeguard stations built facing the water: the ocean is a wild environment.
Among the countless life forms of the marine environment, are the just over 500 known species of shark. According to official statistics from the International Shark Attack File, only four of them were involved in a significant number of conflicts with humans: the great white shark, the oceanic white-gall, the flat-head and the tiger shark. The presence of the first was never registered in Northeast Brazil: the warm-blooded white shark prefers areas where the ocean has lower temperatures. The second lives in remote open waters. The other two are identified as the likely perpetrators of the attacks in Recife.
An adult tiger shark can reach 6 meters (19.69 ft) long and weigh 700 kg (1543.24 lb), whereas the flat-head reaches 4 meters (13.12 ft) and 300 kg (661.39 lb). The feeding behavior of both is not very selective. In the stomach of tiger sharks has been found a pad boat, paint cans and the head of a crocodile. The fact is that the two species tend to investigate — with their mouth — much of what crosses their path. And there are more and more people in their path.
The areas of occurrence include places like the Indian Ocean, the African coast and the coasts of Australia, Central America and Brazil — especially in the North and Northeast of the country. Mostly in areas with high population density and in which attacks just do not occur in larger quantities for a simple reason: we are not on the menu. “Sharks are not man-eaters,” emphasizes Gadig. Proof of this is that all four most dangerous varieties have been filmed in the wild by unprotected divers. Even at points where scientists are aware of the existence of tiger sharks and flatheads, bites on people are quite sporadic. But then what happens in Recife?
INCIDENTS WITH SHARKS always occurred in Recife, even prior to the current outbreak, which started in June 1992 and has already resulted in 59 victims, being Bruna Gobbi’s the last of the period. Throughout the Brazilian coast today, attacks happen. “But they are rare and no cause for concern” points Gadig. “There are no coastal regions in the world where the risk of a shark attack is equal to zero.”
However, since 1990, Recife suffered a percentage of deaths almost four times higher than the world average besides the survivors with severe mutilations. The decisive year was 1994, when ten hits followed between February and December. The bloody period made it clear to the authorities that something needed to be done. Scientists at the Federal Rural University of Pernambuco (UFRPE) returned their gazes to the question: why are the sharks attacking so often on a stretch of coastline that is just about 12.5 miles long?
“In the Northeast, the occurrence of large tiger sharks and flatheads near the coast is higher than in the Southeast,” says Gadig. Attracted by the hot water, the presence of these animals is one of the factors that explain the events. This natural condition was associated with the construction and expansion of the seaport of Suape in the 80s, southward from the area of the attacks. It is known that some species such as the tiger shark track ships on ocean crossings, perhaps attracted by the organic waste thrown overboard. The construction also resulted in changes in the local ecosystem, such as the closing of mouths of rivers, of destruction of reefs and of mangroves grounding. Used as a natural nursery for crustaceans and fish, the mangrove is a spawning and development area for marine biodiversity in coastal areas.
With so many changes in the environment, the local food chain suffered a blow. Then, guided by the winds and currents, sharks have moved north in search of a new location for delivery and supply. Given the clogged mouths of rivers, they started attending the next mouth in those outskirts, the Jaboatão River, which flows into Jaboatão Guararapes, in the metropolitan area of Recife. In other words, the predators migrated from a lower population density preserved area to an area that is impacted and heavily populated by humans.
Other factors were revealed: the existence of a deep channel, parallel to the beach, which facilitates the movement of large sharks just 500 meters (1.640, 42 ft) from the shore. More: catching shrimp trawl. The technique, which collects fish on the seabed, damages the reefs and is not much selective. For every pound of seized shrimp, 50 pounds of fish, mollusks, and different crustaceans are released already lifeless, back into the water, because they are too small for consumption.
Finally, in February 2005, allegations have exposed a clandestine slaughterhouse on the banks of a tributary of Jaboatão. Remains of a hundred cattle slaughtered there every day were been thrown into the river. Before the site was closed, thousands of gallons of blood and offal had been thrown a few miles away from the ocean — an unique attractive for the refined and complex olfactory system of sharks.
EVEN IN CLEAR WATER and with good natural lighting, the aquatic environment scatters light in a kind of fog limiting vision. In Recife, where the sea is cloudy, visual information is even smaller. Among other things, sharks are able to differentiate the time of arrival of the odor to its two nostrils, skill that allows them, in a matter of seconds, no matter how scattered is the plume of odors, to identify in which direction is the next prey .
Sharks can confuse people with their usual hunts or even bite for other reasons — to investigate a possible meal or for territorialism, for example. The females of a flathead, which are larger than males, are even more aggressive during their breeding season. “ It is a mistake to say that they invest against swimmers because they are hungry”, says Fabio Hazin, former chairman of the Comitê Estadual de Monitoramento de Incidentes com Tubarões (Cemit ) — State Committee for Monitoring Incidents with Sharks — a public agency created in 2004 . The main motivation of the attacks is the proximity. “Anywhere in the world where tiger sharks and flatheads come near crowded beaches, incidents occur, been them well fed or not”.
The outcome in Recife, facing this situation, sounds inevitable. Accommodated on an alluvial plain, the city spreads out among islands, peninsulas, mudflats and mangroves — all stocked and surrounded by five major rivers. An industrial pole and urban center with 4 million people — the largest metropolitan region in the north-east of the country — Recife is a powerhouse built from the removal of large areas of mangrove, from the first settlers to today’s real estate project.
The attacks hit the town in its heart and changed the routine of the people. In January 1995, a government decree banned surfing, which was at the peak of popularity in the city. Lifeguards stopped training offshore and began to practice in swimming pools. The swimmers were also affected. “I grew up here. We made reefs trampoline”, recalls the lawyer Fernanda Magalhães”. Today I avoid entering in the water”. The Cemit ensures that safe bathing in Boa Viagem beach exists: at low tide, in points protected by the barrier of reefs, with the water at the shins.
Except that there has been at least one confirmed attack in these conditions. And others happened in places where there was no signage. It was the case of Jose Rogério Tavares da Silva, who died in May 2013 at the Enseada dos Corais in the great Recife.
Ten years earlier, in April 2003, on the beach of Pau Amarelo, in the city of São Paulo, one more place without warning signs, amateur surfer Thiago Augusto enjoyed wall — running water with his body board when he lived a nightmare.
A 2.5 meters (8.2 ft) bull shark sank his teeth into his left leg. “It was like the impact of a car,” Thiago recalled. The day of the accident does not leave his memory. Then aged 17, he provided services as an apnea diver to a company in the business of ornamental fish. When, after school, his colleagues Gustav and Alexander invited him for a surfing session on the peak known as Curral, he did not blink.
Curral is the name given by locals to a formation of distant reefs a bit more than one kilometer (¾ of a mile) from the coast. It was after 2 o’clock in the afternoon as he and his friends got into the water. “We surfed for two hours”, recalls Thiago, until, while looking at the horizon, he noticed a dark spot in water 300 meters away, but only distinguished the animal when 50 feet afar. “It was bigger than a door and came towards me”. The attack was immediate. With prey in mouth, the predator dipped and began to shake the boy’s leg, tearing the flesh with its serrated teeth. On impulse, Thiago kicked the shark’s head with his free leg until released and return to the surface. Severe pain did not stop him from catching a wave to the reefs, where were his companions. Together, supported on submerged rocks, they accommodated the wounded friend on top of two surfboards and improvised a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. Thiago already spoke in a tone of farewell, but that procedure recuperated his strength.
Gustavo, bold guy, paddled through the channel in the direction of a small fishing boat and thus saved his friend’s life. On the sand, Thiago received first care from a neighbor doctor, and half an hour later, was taken by ambulance to the Hospital da Restauração, in Recife, where he received the news that his left leg needed to be amputated.
THE SUFFERING OF SURVIVORS and of the relatives of people killed by sharks is the most dramatic side of the incidents in the coast of Pernambuco. The brutality of the strike generates physical scars and emotional trauma of long duration. The state government does not offer psychological counseling neither indemnifies victims or relatives. “More than that”, says Neyff Safo, “the state blames the victims”.
In the large living room of the apartment with white walls, a window ajar lets in the hot air and the noise of cars. Sitting in a chair leaning on the wall, Safo, a retired colonel of the Fire Brigade of Pernambuco, scours his notebook looking for pictures and information. Sharks of various sizes and shapes surround us: on the computer screen, on the shirt of the householder, in paintings and photographs on the wall, in miniature carved wood.
All in all, what most frightens is the folder on the table. They are newspaper clippings and an extensive file of photographs of bitten people in Recife. Most of the records were made by Safo himself, when he had direct access to victims. Human thighs with extensive tears, deep lesions in muscles, bones exposed, torn limbs, bodies that barely resemble a person. “Did you notice the exposed bone?”, he asks. The images are accompanied by accounts, like that of “a bather lifted out of the water line by a shark and then never seen again”.
The purpose in view of strong scenes is to question the number of 59 casualties recorded by the official government list of Pernambuco. To Safo, “since 1992, there were more than a hundred shark attacks on the urban fringe”. Although he doesn’t have proof of this count, a study by Otto Gadig in Recife in 1990, gives evidence that there was underreporting.
The biologist analyzed more than 30 bodies recovered from the sea and recorded as drowning followed by the bite by the medical legal institute — Instituto Médico Legal (IML). In a third of them, “I believe people have suffered the onslaught of the animal while still alive”, says Gadig. It is known that sharks also feed on dead bodies; however, characteristics of the wounds indicate that those people were in a vertical position at the moment of the attack. Even Fabio Hazin, Cemit’s president between 2004 and 2012, recognizes that “cases reported as drowning may have been in fact, shark attacks”. This perspective leaves many people in uproar. “In Recife, one must understand that, as in Florida and Australia, we will have to live with the sharks”, emphasizes Hazin. Except that not everyone is willing to.
Some groups advocate population control of aggressive species. These are mostly local surfers and former surfers, professionals from different areas and urban fringe dwellers who say they are tired of the lack of effectiveness of official actions. For them, in the last 20 years the government of Pernambuco has spent a lot with a research that does not put an end to the attacks. From 2006 to date, 1.5 million Reais were intended annually for research and environmental education.
In 2009, one of these groups, the Propesca, organized an expedition on their own to catch tiger sharks and flatheads, but returned from the journey with small and harmless Flemish sharks. Three years later, the Propesca prepared a “tubarãozada” — a barbecue of shark meat — on the beach of Boa Viagem. “It was a way to draw attention to the 20th anniversary of attacks. We do not preach the extermination of these animals”, said fishery engineer Bruno Pantoja, President of Propesca.
Virtual disagreements took unexpected proportion slithered into personal injury and ended up in court. The tubarãozada aroused the ire of environmentalists, but the speech of another local movement, the P5 — This Is Our Beach, is even harder. They refer to researchers and ecologists as ‘sharklovers’ (lovers of sharks) and engage in fierce discussions on the internet. One of their theses is to reduce the “overpopulation” of flat-head sharks in Recife. “What happens is the opposite”, Hazin contests. “This species, like all others, has suffered decline. The idea that Recife is infested with sharks is not consistent with the data of our research”.
Fábio Hazin coordinates, alongside the current chairman of the board, Rosangela Lessa, a project called Protuba, which consists of capturing and removing sharks. The animals are hooked by longlines (lines with multiple hooks) scattered off the coast. Brought to the boat of the entity Sinuelo, the animals receive markings and then are released at 30 km (approximately 18.5 miles) away from the coast. Within ten years of operation, 416 sharks were captured, of which, a quarter was of a potentially dangerous species. Only a tagged tiger shark returned to surround the beach.
Considered official forms a barrier against sharks, the trotlines charge a high price: the mortality rate among sharks caught by Protuba was 18%. The fact that a researchers’ fishing boat captures animals and that results in the death of some of them, is sufficient for a negative impact to the conservationists, about that labor. To add to the confusion, the Sinuelo for lack of release of state public funds, was absent from the sea for seven months when Bruna Gobbi was killed — the same time interval in which the environmental education program of the Cemit, directed by the Aquarium Institute, was not operating. “Informing and educating are different things”, says Otto Gadig. “The plates in Boa Viagem serve to inform, however, education has to be made by experts in a continuous process”.
The circumstances reignited the debate over the installation of a net or a protection screen on the urban fringe. Places like Australia, South Africa and Hong Kong use different models of this type of barrier. The stiffness of the material is crucial because too flexible meshes tend to curl up and choke to death several marine species. The Brazilian Body of Independent Public Prosecutors of Recife began to press for placement of the barrier and its implementation now depends on a process of competitive bidding.
The uproar also explains the current condition of sharks. It is estimated that each year 100 million of them are killed because of shark finning, the practice of cutting the fins and discarding the body alive to the sea. The demand is from the Asian market, where the consumption of fin soup suggests status and purchasing power. There is so much money on finning that this underground economy only outperforms its global financial transactions for drug trafficking. The population of some species of shark has declined by 95 % since the 1970s.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF AN OCEAN with no sharks are difficult to determine. Environmentalists find it extremely difficult to raise the banner for the conservation of these animals — it is much easier to mobilize people to save pandas or friendly sea turtles. And nature does not produce a top predator chain in the same proportion that offers rats or pigeons. With slow growth and late sexual maturity, the sharks produce few offspring and fail to repopulate the areas from which they were removed by fishing on a large scale.
Without them, the marine ecosystem has its health compromised. As each level of the food pyramid is connected, the absence of sharks will result in population growth of their prey, which, in a cascading effect, intensifies predation on another layer. “The result is adverse to all and leads to dramatic decline of the biodiversity”, says Gadig.
There are also implications of unknown nature. At sea, sharks are not just hunters. Many of them act as devouring the carcasses, thus controlling the level of bacteria in seawater. Considering that 70% of the oxygen present in the atmosphere originates from the photosynthesis performed by oceanic phytoplankton, any imbalance in this delicate chemical arrangement is worrying.
Ancient inhabitants of this world, sharks emerged even before the trees and preceded the dinosaurs by 150 million years. Nevertheless, scientists know very little about most species. Basic questions (How long do they live? Where they mate?) Follow unanswered.
However, what we know about them up to now is fascinating. They are animals that heal up quickly from deep lesions and can detect tiny electrical impulses emitted by the heartbeat of their prey. Their ancestors survived to four global mass extinctions and were here before the continents had united, in a time when there was little oxygen available in the atmosphere, and life had to evolve in the oceans. From the single-celled forms to the most complex creatures, the predators helped shape the animals that later, migrated to the land. In other words, the surface life depends on the underwater life. The “monster” to haunt us is, first of all, an indispensable ally.
