One of the things they teach you during night scuba-diving training is to direct your flashlight down, not directly in front of you. The aim is to avoid accidentally shining a spotlight on a prey animal, making it suddenly visible to any predators nearby.
As a nerdy 15-year-old completing my NAUI Master Diver course at Seacamp marine biology summer camp in the Florida Keys, I conscientiously logged this information along with all the other advice and tips I was being given. Even so, when I set off for my first ever night dive with my fellow marine biology nerds, I was nervous.
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I had completed a few dozen dives by that point, but this felt different. Scuba diving is fundamentally about entering an alien world that humans aren’t built for. If the technology fails – or if you use it incorrectly – a lot of things can go very wrong, very fast. And all these risks are amplified when you can’t see, and other people can’t see you.
We left the dock around sunset and headed for a nearby coral reef. Despite my nerves, the start of the dive went incredibly well – I relished using my flashlight to illuminate the world around me just a little bit at a time.
Then, about halfway through, I made a mistake. Just for a moment, I messed up and shined my flashlight ahead of me, where it illuminated a large fish. I think it was a snapper or hogfish, but I didn’t get a good look at it before the bull shark that was apparently directly behind and above me accelerated and took it out. It passed close enough that I felt the whoosh of the current – then it was gone, leaving only a cloud of scales and blood swirling in my flashlight beam.
- It's huge, crotchety, has a fondness for head butting, and is dangerous to humans – oh and can be found in BOTH rivers and oceans
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Though I know (and use) all the statistics about how sharks aren’t a major threat to human safety, in that moment – before I had a chance to feel awed by the experience – I was simply terrified. Wonder at what I’d been fortunate enough to witness came a little later.
The shark wasn’t interested in me at all, of course, just the prey animal I unwittingly lit up for it. Sharks are amazing, powerful, ecologically important, threatened and misunderstood animals – and they need our respect as well as our help.
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David A Shiffman is a marine conservation biologist. His book, Why Sharks Matter: a Deep Dive with the World’s Most Misunderstood Predator (Johns Hopkins University Press) is out now
