To A Shark, Swimming Humans May Look Like Seal Meat From Below

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Shark!

Coming soon to an Eastport, Maine beach near you – sharks! Big ones, little ones, even huge, bitey ones: In 2021, nearly 50 Great White sharks were seen on marine scientists’ tracking devices in Passamaquoddy Bay and nearby waters. And that’s just one species; eight different kinds of shark visit Maine, eating seals and any other tasty creatures unlucky enough to encounter one of these toothy apex predators.

Tasty creatures like us, for example. Before Europeans arrived in North America, ancestors of the nearby Canadian Micmac tribe had special weapons for battling the sharks that attacked their ocean-going canoes. More recently, in 2010 a Maine lobsterman leaned over his boat’s side to haul up a trap and came face to face with a shark as big around as a 50-gallon drum. In 2018, a couple canoeing in Passamaquoddy Bay were chased right out of the water by a shark so large, they said it was like looking down at a submarine. And tragically in 2020, the first-ever fatal shark attack in Maine waters occurred when a woman was killed by one of the animals while swimming off Bailey Island near Harpswell.

So Maine sharks know what we taste like, is one lesson I draw from this. And even though scientists say Great Whites don’t much like our flavor, I don’t see how anyone still alive could know for sure. Besides, I’m not up for some overgrown JAWS clone taking a test bite; that he’ll spit me out afterwards seems somehow irrelevant.

What he won’t spit out is seal meat, ideally so fresh that it’s still attached to a seal who is trying to swim away. The trouble is, guess what we people all look like from below when we swim?

Bingo. Seal populations are increasing along the Maine coast because they’ve been Federally protected since the 1970s. Sharks think they’re delicious, so the seals’ numbers draw more sharks, attracted to the area by a favorite food, and when people go swimming they’re mistaken for that food because they look like it.

That is, unless a shark targets a specific person, attacking them out of some sharkish variety of pure, dumb meanness. That’s the fate Jake Tiptree and Ellie White, partners in amateur sleuthing and in The Chocolate Moose, Eastport’s chocolate-themed bakery, try to avoid in their newest outing, DEATH BY CHOCOLATE MARSHMALLOW PIE.

Because look, it’s all very well for a cozy mystery to feature a lost fisherman, missing pirate gold, a witch on a half-sunk barge, and a pie with (I kid you not) flaming marshmallows on it, but what’s a seaside adventure without sharks?

For this book, the answer was ‘not nearly enough,’ and besides, I’m a sucker for jump scares. So I did a little local research and learned that around here, at least, that smash-hit film about a ferocious fish was absolutely correct: you do need a bigger boat. In 2022, for instance, a half-ton, ten-foot-long Great White was spotted near the Gulf of Maine on a shark-tracking website (ocearch.org/tracker, for anyone interested). And he’s not the only one; in 2021, a 20-footer surfaced in St. Andrews, New Brunswick. Smaller but still big-enough-to-eat-you sharks were also seen attacking seals.

You might think such fearsome predators would be dreaded by everyone on or in downeast Maine’s waters, but people who go lobstering see sharks often and gladly. That’s because seals are experts at stealing lobster bait out of lobster traps, causing trouble and expense. But a shark cruising offshore is just the ticket for keeping the pesky bait-thieves on the beach and away from the trap lines.

Sharks are also good for balancing the food chain. Because they eat everything but almost nothing eats them, they keep big fish from devastating populations of medium-sized fish, who in turn keep small fish from devastating even smaller ones, and so on down the line.

But should a shark happen to try cleaning up the environment by eating you, here’s a tip: sharks lose a lot of teeth. Scientists don’t know why – none of the dentists they’ve sent to find out about it has ever returned – but they do know that in a lifetime, one shark may go through 40,000 teeth.

The recommended tactic when menaced by a shark is to punch his nose with your fist just as hard as you can – right in the old snot-locker, as some of the salty old fellows in Eastport might say. But if that doesn’t work, you could smack that bad boy in the choppers with something sturdy, like an oar. Because you never know, maybe some of those big, sharp teeth are just hanging there by a thread, and one thing is certain: the fewer he has, the fewer he can use on you.

Despite the Great White’s size and constant hunger, though – these primitive fish have just two urges, and one of them is food – sometimes the tables do get turned. And by that I mean the dinner table: Cookbooks show recipes for baked, grilled, and pan-fried shark cut into steaks, chunks, mince, and filets, as well as for curries and masalas, to name a few. The meat is supposed to taste like swordfish but given what sharks will gobble when seals aren’t around – license plates, beverage cans, whale carcasses – I have doubts. Also, you’re cautioned to soak the meat in milk before cooking, which I imagine makes it taste a little less like license plates and beer cans, and you’re not to use stale fish or it will stink like ammonia.

The sharks of Passamaquoddy Bay have been here or nearby for a very long time. Five thousand years ago, those ocean-going Micmac tribal ancestors not only had anti-shark weapons, but they had also already incorporated shark teeth into their burial rituals. So the creature’s appearance here now is probably not a matter of it being a new arrival but of people again becoming aware of its presence through modern monitoring techniques.

Sharks probably won’t be leaving soon, either. Like people, sharks enjoy Maine’s summer weather, just as seals do. The combination is a perfect recipe for somebody eating someone, and in DEATH BY CHOCOLATE MARSHMALLOW PIE it’s a tossup as to who gets devoured first. (Or shot, or drowned, or hexed by the witch – if she is one.)

Meanwhile, next time you’re in Eastport looking out at the water – or wading, or boarding a boat to go fishing, sight-seeing, diving, whale-watching, or just puttering around – you’d do well to remember one thing about the sharks of Passamaquoddy Bay:

They’re out there. Lots of them; big ones, too. And they can’t tell you from a mouthful of seal meat –

Until they bite down.

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