SEARCHING FOR SIX
GILLS - written by Cat
Gennaro
I've been in the
water with white sharks, tigers, great Hammerheads and Makos,
all the "headliners" in the shark world, but never a Six-Gill.
Honestly, I had no idea what a Six-Gill even looked like before.
I agreed to dive to the bottom of the frigid Puget Sound in the
middle of the night to photograph one. Shooting all the shark
headliners, you kind of know what to expect when you get in the
water; people have done it (though not many women) and their
experiences have been well documented. Plus the survival rate is
pretty near 100%. But the Six-Gill, for me, was the great
unknown. Here's a shark that only a handful of people had
actually dove with, which was a complete mystery to scientists
and had almost never been filmed or photographed very well.
My Six-Gill
adventure was part of Discovery's Shark After Dark (2009)
produced and directed by my long-time and very talented partner
Jeff Kurr. The objective of the film was pure exploration;
discovering what sharks are doing at night and the Six-Gill was
a perfect specimen to study because they are never seen during
the day.
Now, when the sun is
up, the Six-Gill is deep in the water up to 6,000 feet down and
only viewed through the port hole of a deep submersible. Not
exactly a hands-on experience. But at night, these sharks head
for the surface to feed and scavenge where they can be
encountered in 60 feet of water in the Puget Sound. This all
happens a couple hundred feet from shore in the middle of the
night while the cities of Seattle and Tacoma sleep. If they only
knew 14 and 15-foot sharks were cruising the s hallows just
offshore! I don't think a Six-Gill has ever attacked a human,
but I found out after my first encounter how potentially
dangerous they could be.
Travis Swanson of
Team Hydrus led our expedition. Travis and his crew set a bait
station on the bottom along with a cage, lights and a couple of
lines leading to the surface. There was a surveillance camera
locked onto the bait that we all were glued to once the sun went
down. Travis warned us that the sharks didn't often show for
several hours, so we settled in for a long night of staring at
the monitor. The "mother ship" was very comfortable and a lot
better place to wait for sharks than at the bottom of 48-degree
water.
I think it was 2am
when I awoke from a doze and heard some of the crew yelling
"shark!" I looked at the monitor and saw a huge, shadowy "beast"
tearing the bait ball to pieces. I was going in with this? In
the dark? Freezing water? Well, what I was about to see made it
all worthwhile. I descended into the icy water, holding the line
and trying not to think too much about the 10-foot visibility
and what looked like a 14-foot shark somewhere below. I was
burning air pretty fast before I even got a glimpse of the cage.
A glowing beacon below that sat anchored in the green water.
Finally, I reached
the cage, slid down through the open top door and settled in on
the bottom. I peered between the bars and felt like I had been
transported to some prehistoric time. Here, just a few feet
away, was an ancient looking shark having his way with a
massive, semi-frozen bait ball. Powerful jaws ripped and
shredded the meat along with violent shakes of its head that
tore off huge chunks. Other Six-Gills circled the periphery, but
the big boy on the block was eating and the smaller sharks would
have to wait.
Despite the cold
water, limited visibility and middle of the night diving, my
Six-Gill adventure was perhaps the most thrilling I'd ever had.
on the second night, I grew comfortable enough to get out of the
cage and realized the sharks weren't going to pull me apart...
though I wouldn't want to be mistaken for bait. I would imagine
that these sharks do a lot of scavenging, probably devouring
anything that dies and sinks to the bottom, and they've been
doing it for millions of years very successfully. Six-Gills are
one of the most widespread species of shark in the oceans and
the Puget Sound may be the only place where you can actually get
in the water and dive with one.
In the course of
filming, we encountered a baby Six-Gill (that actually swam
through the bars of the cage) and deduced that the Puget Sound
is a nursery for these animals. The bad news is the Puget Sound
collects a lot of runoff from people generating pollution. So
these sharks may be facing a slow poisoning courtesy of mankind.
In the final scene
of our film, Travis and shark expert Andy Dehart collected a DNA
sample from one of the sharks that will be analyzed to determine
how the sharks are faring with the presence of toxins.
Hopefully, changes can be implemented to help protect this
delicate nursery ground of the Six-Gill, an ancient species of
shark that has been a part of our oceans since the time of the
dinosaur.
