Criminal - Sharks

Episode Date: May 4, 2018

The U.S. Navy attempted to develop a shark attack repellant after many sailors were attacked during WWII. The first step was the formation of a "Shark Research Panel," which led to what we have today: the International Shark Attack File. When someone is attacked by a shark, anywhere in the world, the investigation closely resembles police work. "We're not reinventing the wheel. There's been no shortage of trial and error that went into police investigations and what we do follows," says George Burgess, the world's foremost shark attack investigator. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving

homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. As we're going down to the beach, my parents decide to take my sister and I to, you know, one of those beach shops with trinkets and just fun stuff.

And I remember picking out this new bathing suit, and it was bright orange and red, and I was so excited to wear it that day. And my dad got this kind of dorky but cute fisherman's hat, one of those floppy ones, and we were just really excited to go to the beach. This is Avery Olierchuk. When she was nine, she and her parents went to a family reunion one Fourth of July weekend in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. So when we get down there, my family, there's about 40 of us, you know, aunts and uncles and second cousins and people I've never met before or hadn't seen in a long time.

And so we have this big family tent set up on the beach. Avery lived in Northern California, where the water is very cold almost all year. So this was going to be her first time really swimming in a warm ocean, where she could go in past her ankles. And that day, the current was really strong. It was running parallel to the beach. So as, you know, our family group was swimming, we would get pushed down the beach further away from the family tent and where people were watching us. And so every like 30 minutes or so, somebody, my dad or an uncle would call all of us kids out of the water and we would walk back up the beach and start swimming, you know, in front of where our family was. Around four, I had this really strange feeling

that something was going to happen, something weird, and it just felt really uneasy. And all day I had been having a great time. And so later in the day, after five o'clock, my cousin and I, we had drifted further away from the group just because the current had been pulling us further down the shore. And so my dad started signaling to us to get out of the water. And we were so far down, we couldn't really hear what he was saying, but we, you know, he had been doing this all day, getting us out of the water so we could just be in front of the family. And so as my cousin and I, and she's 10 and I'm nine, we're getting out of the water. I just get hit really hard from behind on my right side. I was only in about waist deep water and I instantly knew that it was a shark.

Like, I can't—people ask me all the time to describe what it feels like, and the only thing I've been able to say is it feels exactly like it looks like it would feel. And I instantly knew I was being attacked, and I needed to do something. And so the shark comes up again behind me and grabs the back of my leg and starts dragging me basically out further to the ocean. And I just reach around and start punching down with my right hand as hard as I could to try to get it off.

And my arm slipped into its mouth a little bit. But you're nine and you're punching this, you're punching this shark. I was, yeah, I was trying to hit it as hard as I absolutely could. So I was hitting, like forcing my arm down and behind me to hit, to hit behind me to get it off of my leg. I had all of these teeth marks and scrapes and my arm was bloody up to my, from my pinky all the way down to halfway down my forearm. And at that point, after I was hitting it, it let go and my dad ran into the water and got me out and he actually took his brand new fisherman's hat off his head and he clamped it onto my legs to just try to hold everything in

because there was tendons and skin and blood everywhere. And he just ran up the beach with me to our family tent. And when he put me down in the lawn, it was like one of those lounge chairs under our family tent. Then that's when all the lifeguards came over and started doing compression wraps on my leg. And oh my gosh, I will never forget this like 16 year old surfer lifeguard dude was just like, does she have all her toes? And I just remember just, oh my gosh. You know, at that point, I hadn't even considered that I might not have my toes.

You know, I couldn't really see my leg at that point because I had wrapped it up. And they checked, and thankfully, I do still have all my toes. My poor mother came by. She had been going to the bathroom at the time, so she missed witnessing the actual attack, but just came back to the aftermath and the blood everywhere, and she just was hysterical, just started screaming what happened, what happened, and we all knew what happened. It was pretty obvious what had happened. How big was the actual bite? So on my foot, you can clearly see the shape of, it came from the side, so you can clearly see the

shape of a C, like a bite mark. And you can see the teeth pattern really well on the top and the bottom of my foot and up my leg a little bit. And then where it grabs me on the back is where it ripped out tendons and a lot of skin. An ambulance took her to Cape Fear Hospital. The orthopedic surgeon on call was at a Fourth of July barbecue. He rushed to the hospital, and Avery was in surgery for almost two hours. Her father says she got more than 80 stitches. They kept her overnight for observation. And then, Wrightsville police showed up and asked to look at her wounds. Two people came, and they extensively photographed my shark wounds

with, like, rulers and just asked me for, like, a description and took information on, you know, the temperature of the water that day and the weather and the time and that sort of thing. And I didn't realize that that's how shark attacks are treated. Did they find the offending shark? So while I was on the beach, before I had been taken to the hospital, they did send lifeguards to go look to see if they could find the shark, and as soon as I was out of the water, it was gone. They never found it.

Avery was attacked in 2002, one of 661 attacks around the world from the year 2000 to 2009. Last year saw 88 shark attacks, five of which were fatal. That's up very slightly from the average in the preceding five years. Scientists attribute any increase in attacks over the decades to the fact that more of us are getting into the ocean. Water sports have become much more popular, and attacks often happen on holiday weekends

when millions of people are swimming. Shark attack. A teenage boy recovering in the hospital tonight. Officials are investigating two suspected shark attacks in Melbourne Beach, Florida. They believe the sharks targeted two beachgoers, including a 10-year-old girl. The first 911 call at 4.12 p.m. Sunday afternoon,

an hour and a half later, a second victim two miles down the beach, and all of it coming just days after another shark attack 30 miles away. New this morning, a popular beach on the big island of Hawaii is closed after a shark attack. It's the latest in a number of shocking shark attacks across the country. But the thing is, it can be hard to say for sure how often people are

attacked by sharks. In some cases, including Avery's, a shark attack is reported as a fish bite. The day after Avery was attacked, her family woke up to read about themselves in the newspaper. The headline was, Fish Attacks Child at Beach. They didn't understand. They'd seen the shark. When they got home to California, there was a letter waiting for them, from a man they didn't know. The letter requested photographs of Avery's wounds and contained a list of questions about what had happened. What clothes they were wearing, what colors they might be, what kind of activities were being done by them or others nearby and so forth. And so there's literally hundreds of set questions that we ask of all the witnesses. And just like in a police investigation,

when you get enough information, you can piece the thing together and get an accurate appraisal of how and why the attack occurred. This is George Burgess. He's a shark bite investigator who studied thousands of attacks, including studying so-called serial

killer sharks. For 30 years, he headed up something called the International Shark Attack File. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. After looking at the photographs of Avery's injuries, George Burgess sent an email to the family. He wrote, I am sorry that you were not told the truth about your daughter's injuries. There is absolutely no doubt that a shark was involved. The marks are classic shark injuries. The Wrightsville Beach Police chief, John Carey,

later said that it was never the town's intention to keep Avery's attack a secret. In many communities, local folks, namely the politicians, don't want to utter the word shark and beach together in one sentence because they're worried about loss of visitors or tourism. And so sometimes the easiest route is to not acknowledge something as shark and to blame it on something else. The shark attack file was launched after World War II, when there were said to be a lot of shark attacks on U.S. naval officers.

In 1945, the U.S. naval ship Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine. 900 men made it into the water alive. They would wait four days for rescue. The first night, sharks went after the corpses of sailors who'd already died, and then moved on to the living. They were attracted to the blood in the water and the sailors' movements. Survivors tried to get away from the blood, but they had nowhere to escape. By some estimates, 150 men were killed by sharks. The Office of Naval Research thought they had to do something. They hoped to develop, and were willing to pay for,

some kind of effective shark repellent. But first, they had to collect data. The shark attack file was created with the goal of documenting attacks on a global, historical basis, going all the way back to the 1500s. When George Burgess joined the project in 1988, he renamed it the International Shark Attack File. Today, they're based at the University of Florida.

Just like the police, we want to get to the witnesses as quickly as possible because as time goes on, their memories of the events or their perceptions of the events change and we're all human. We tend to listen to people around us and so we begin to connect the dots ourselves in our heads even if it's wrong. And so what we think was an observation sometimes becomes our evaluation. We look very carefully at the environmental factors that were present at the time of the attack, the salinity, the water temperature, the tides, the moon phase. They ask what kind of bathing suit you were wearing. Do you have tattoos? Were you wearing

nail polish? What about a toe ring? Are you menstruating? Did you urinate in the water? Things like that that might have been a tractor to a shark. Do you try and keep track of sharks that may be habitual attackers? You know, it's highly unusual. At the risk of offending some, I suspect the human equivalent would be how many murders occur in the United States and how many of them are done by serial killers. And a very small percentage of them would be done by serial killers. Most of the murders in the United States are one-off events. But he has been called in to investigate a few. About five or six years ago, there were a series of bites in the Red Sea off the coast of Egypt. And I went over there during the midst of that to help the Egyptian government try to cope with the problem.

And my investigation there suggested that one individual shark was involved in at least three or so of those or four of those incidents because we actually had photographic evidence of the attacking shark. And so we could follow it by the basis of its coloration pattern and other marks on its body. So that was an absolute proven one, which was no longer speculation. Habitual attackers may be rare, but they get a lot of attention. The movie Jaws was believed to be loosely inspired by a series of attacks

during the summer of 1916 off the coast of New Jersey. Five people were attacked. Newspaper accounts referred to the shark as a seawolf and the Jersey man-eater. President Woodrow Wilson got involved and agreed to give federal aid to drive away all the ferocious man-eating sharks which have been making prey of bathers.

Eventually, an eight-foot great white shark was captured. Human remains were found in its stomach. When are people most often attacked? We find that in studying shark attacks that most of the patterns we see are reflective of human utilization patterns rather than shark natural behavior. In other words, to get a shark attack, the obvious is that you have to have a shark and a human together in the water at the same time. Well, when do we as humans go into the water?

Most of the time we go in daylight hours and even predictably within daylight hours from certain times to certain times. So we see that most shark attacks occur from about 10 o'clock in the morning to about 4 o'clock in the afternoon. And we even see that there'll be declines in shark attacks at certain hours. So between 12 and 1 or 12 and 2 in the afternoon, there's a decline in shark attacks. Why are the sharks suddenly not hungry at that hour? No, it's because we as humans are. And so that's time when we go get our lunch. And so there's less people in the water. So most attacks do occur at daylight hours, even though for many species of sharks, the

preferred time for them to go feeding is at dusk and dawn and during nighttime hours when they have a competitive advantage over their prey and can sense their prey in the darkness. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home.

His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. podcasts. reporter for The Verge to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. No matter how scary sharks may seem to humans,

they're much more likely to be killed by us than the other way around. An estimated 100 million sharks are killed by commercial fishing every year, which means around 11,000 die every hour. But George Burgess and his colleagues at the International Shark Attack File understand that people are still really scared, and try to reassure us with data on how much more likely we are to be injured by pretty much anything else, home improvement equipment, falling off a bicycle. For instance, in New York City in 1987, more than 8,000 people were bitten by dogs, and more than 1,500 people were bitten by other people.

Do you have any tips for people? I mean, we can acknowledge that the chance of being attacked by a shark is like the chance of getting struck by lightning. I mean, it's very rare. But what are some of the things that people could help in the event? Well, there's lots of things we can do to reduce the risk of shark attack. First of all, we can get an understanding of where shark attacks tend to be more common. So for instance, in the United States, in Florida, we have more attacks than any other place in the country and in fact anywhere more in the world. And so New Smyrna Beach has been dubbed the shark attack capital of the world. So if you're really concerned about your chances of being bitten by a shark, you don't

go into the water in New Smyrna Beach with a surfboard. So that's a matter of choice. Now the attacks or bites that occur there continue at the same rate that we've seen in years past because the surfers, which have full knowledge of this information, choose to disregard it because they would rather go surfing and take their chances and go ahead and keep going and doing their thing. So it just depends on how worried you are as an individual entering the sea. When you consider the literally hundreds of millions of people that enter the water each year and billions of human hours being spent in the water each year, to think that only six people go into the water but don't come back out because of sharks, you get a pretty good feel for what your odds are as an individual of dying in the mouth of a shark. And it's pretty much infinitesimal.

But that said, if that's high on your mind, probably you want to go to the YMCA pool instead. Is it a good idea to try to punch a shark that's trying to attack you? First of all, if you see a shark acting aggressively, you should try to get out of the water. If you can get out of the water, that solves the problem. So my general recommendation for anyone is to get out. If you're in a situation that you have the capability to do so, in other words, if you're scuba diving, you can go down to the bottom and look for some sort of structure to hide against or behind, generally speaking.

If you can do that, sharks will forget about you and move on. But if you're not in the situation where you can get out of the water or hide, then you're stuck in the midwater column and you got to deal with it. And if a shark actually approaches, my recommendation is to be aggressive to a shark. They respect size and power. So show them how big you are by giving them a full body view of yourself. And certainly I think it's positive to act aggressively towards them. If one comes close, the tip of the snout is sensitive in sharks and so if you can give

them a bop to the snout, most of the times they'll veer off. It's best to do that if you can with an inanimate object, if you've got something other than your hand, because keep in mind the nose is located just a little north of the mouth. So if you miss, you're going to be putting your hand into the mouth of the shark. I do like to say I punched a shark in the face and I survived. I lived through a shark attack. But I really dislike the idea of ruining the ocean for other people. I just think that sharks are doing what they're supposed to do

and people get in the way. I don't think sharks are malicious or intend to attack people. So many people are terrified of sharks. Can you understand that? Why are we so terrified of sharks when we know that shark attacks are actually rather rare? Well, of course, as much as we, as brilliant as we are and as cultured as we are and all that, we're still animals and we still probably have maybe some genetic hardwiring in there for wanting to look over our shoulder from our caveman days when there were lions and bears and tigers and things that could do us harm on a regular basis. So there may be just a little bit of that still in us.

And, of course, I make the parallel to how we probably all were as kids when we went to bed and the lights went out and there was that unknown in the room, the monster under the bed or in the closet. And we see that monster whenever we enter the sea because we bob at the water's surface, and we don't know what's underneath us. George Burgess retired in November, but he's still working on shark attacks, writing papers using the data he's

collected over the years. And he still gets calls from police departments all over the world asking for his help with their investigations. Thank you. illustrations for each episode of Criminal, you can see them at thisiscriminal.com. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. Special thanks to AdCirc for providing their ad-serving platform to Radiotopia. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

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