In the Seventies, when a younger filmmaker named Steven Spielberg was researching a brand new film based mostly on a novel about sharks, he returned to his alma mater, California State College Lengthy Seaside. The lab at Cal State Lengthy Seaside was one of many first locations in the USA to review sharks in a rigorous manner. Spielberg was growing a personality who was a shark researcher, so he despatched an artwork director to campus. There, the artwork director discovered the workplace of Donald Nelson, the unflappable biologist, spear fisherman, and shark fanatic who based the lab in 1966. Nelson’s workplace was an artwork director’s dream, crammed with maps, scientific papers, shreds of napkins with engineering plans on them, numerous shark repellents.
The director took each single piece of paper—all the pictures, nautical charts, scribbled notes on napkins—off the wall and made photocopies. Then he put all these items again of their locations, one after the other. He used them to construct the character of Matt Hooper, the charismatic double-denim-wearing shark scientist performed by Richard Dreyfuss.
The film was, in fact, a smash hit. It earned over $260 million in its preliminary home launch in 1975, sufficient to make it the largest moneymaker in Hollywood historical past to that time. It additionally left its mark on the status of sharks. The opening traces alone, backed by that daggered two-note musical rating, gave a way that sharks had been a virtually demonic pressure: “It lives to kill. A senseless consuming machine. It’ll assault and devour something. It’s as if God created the satan, and gave it … jaws.” David Shiffman, a marine biologist and writer of Why Sharks Matter, says, “Jaws made a technology completely afraid of sharks.”
Nelson had an epiphany: Sharks have to be interested in sound.
Nelson was credited as a science advisor and totally supported the movie, in addition to its 1978 sequel, Jaws 2. However over the subsequent 20 years, as Nelson’s analysis profession took off, he would flip the script about sharks, bringing them out of the darkish realm of fevered creativeness into the clear gentle of science. By researching shark habits up shut for the primary time, and making numerous documentaries that allowed folks on their couches into the underwater world he cherished, he started to alter folks’s minds. A lethal, despised predator with a face stuffed with enamel started to look susceptible, even elegant, a vital choreographer of the ocean ecosystem. By the point Nelson died in 1997, sharks had develop into the main focus of conservation applications throughout the planet.
Nelson was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, as an solely little one, close to the jap shore of New Jersey. He grew up fascinated by fishing, images, and ornithology—when different youngsters had been taking part in sports activities, Nelson was typically taking a look at birds, amassing chicken nests, and taking photos. A lover of cameras and expertise, as a toddler he had a daring ambition to {photograph} each residing species of chicken on Earth.
However the ocean tugged at him, and his capability to spearfish meant he may make a pleasant aspect revenue promoting fish to eating places. He bought a biology diploma at Rutgers College in 1958, after which moved to Florida to review biology on the Marine Laboratory of the College of Miami. It helped that Miami was the spear fishing capital of the USA on the time. Nelson joined a aggressive group of spear fishers referred to as the Glug Glugs. Aboard a 22-foot Prowler, he may spend an entire weekend catching grouper—and contributing to his training.
It was on a spear fishing journey in 1959, the story goes, that Nelson met his first shark. He had speared a small grunt—a bottom-dwelling fish identified for the guttural noises it makes—and because the fish was making a racket on the seafloor, a shark darted in out of nowhere. “Right here was this 4-meter tiger shark taking a look at Don as if he had been a considerably impaired, giant, marine organism—maybe a wierd sea turtle,” recalled colleague and former graduate scholar Samuel Gruber in a eulogy to Nelson revealed in 2001. Nobody knew, on the time, whether or not such a shark would possibly assault on the spot. Don speared it and took it dwelling with him. “That encounter on the reefs in 1959 was each to alter Don’s life and ultimately a lot of what we learn about shark habits,” Gruber writes.
After the encounter, Nelson had an epiphany: Sharks have to be interested in sound. That perception led to one of many first research of shark senses and habits on the planet. Collectively, Nelson and Gruber crafted artificial sounds of struggling fish and recorded them on audio tape. Then they used an ultrasonic underwater speaker developed by the Navy and a tape participant and arrange area checks with quiet, management durations.
Within the preliminary playback collection, a complete of twenty-two sharks got here to research their phony fish sounds. The sharks solely appeared once they had been taking part in the recordings, not when it was quiet. The outcomes urged that sharks had been attracted over doubtlessly lengthy distances to pulsed low-frequency vibrations like these emitted by wounded fish—or thrashing swimmers. Although the duo had been nonetheless simply graduate college students on the time and their analysis had by no means appeared in a scientific journal earlier than, the findings had been revealed in Science in 1963.
Sharks are notoriously troublesome to review. They dwell within the murk, are inclined to draw back from divers, and journey consistently. Too giant to maintain within the lab, and troublesome to trace within the wild because of their in depth ranges and secretive natures, they weren’t the main focus of rigorous examine till the Fifties. Because of this, a lot of what folks knew about sharks derived from temporary, spontaneous encounters out at sea—or studies and media protection of shark assaults.
One assault particularly captured the general public’s consideration. In 1945, a Navy heavy cruiser referred to as the Indianapolis sank between Guam and the Philippines, and sailors had been thrown into the ocean. Oceanic whitetip sharks had been drawn to the scene. Over the course of the subsequent few days, the sharks devoured sailor after sailor. Of the 1,196 males on board, solely 318 survived—150 had been eaten by sharks. (The occasion even turns up in Jaws as Quint, the shark-obsessed boat captain, is a survivor of the assaults.)
The incident is usually cited because the worst shark assault in historical past, however it wasn’t the one assault on Navy crews. As a result of many naval battles throughout and after World Battle II occurred within the heat tropical waters of the Pacific Ocean, in addition to the temperate waters of the South Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea, and since rescues at sea may typically take days within the time earlier than GPS beacons turned commonplace, sharks turned a major concern for the Navy. It started funding lab analysis into the event of strategies that would forestall assaults—with little end result.
Sharks are notoriously troublesome to review.
In 1965, Nelson acquired his Ph.D. in marine biology and was employed at Cal State Lengthy Seaside as a professor within the biology division. By that point, his work had a brand new focus—utilizing his rising information about shark senses to guard folks from them. “U.S. navy morale was so low that they had been having a tough time getting sailors on ships, they had been so afraid of shark assaults,” says Chris Lowe, present director of the Shark Lab at California State College, Lengthy Seaside. Nelson had a grant from the Navy for 17 years.
Nelson and his college students needed to design shark repellents that will deter however not hurt sharks. They tried creating shark tasers—cattle prods that shock the shark if it got here too shut (the issue was, it additionally shocked the diver). One other mission checked out surfactants—soap-like substances—that might be squirted right into a shark’s mouth. College students would fill fireplace extinguishers with soapy water of various concentrations and exit into the Catalina channel with blue sharks. “You’d maintain a mackerel in your hand with one hand, and when the shark may are available you stick this hose in its mouth and provides it a squirt,” says Lowe. The shark would swim away together with his mouth open. “The issue was that 20 minutes later, it could flip round and are available again.” Nelson’s shark repellents by no means panned out.
That Nelson spent years making an attempt to develop shark repellents was ironic, as a result of greater than any marine biologist, Nelson was devoted to getting near sharks, observing them of their pure environments. He was utterly at peace within the ocean, calm and unflappable. Nicknamed Reef by his mates, he was stated to be extra comfy within the water than out. He would free dive to 60 toes deep and simply swim round, peeking into the nooks and crannies of the reef. “He had zero concern of sharks,” his widow, Ginger Nelson, instructed me. “Zero.”
An professional free-diver, Nelson swam proper as much as sharks to look at their habits. He was well-known for what turned often known as the Kamikaze Method. “He would merely free dive on a reef shark minding its personal enterprise and chase it alongside the reef face till it turned relatively trapped,” writes Gruber. “At that second, the shark would both flee or start the sinister underwater ballet Don referred to as an ‘agonistic show.’ ” The shark would elevate its snout, depress its pectoral fins, arch its again, maintain its tail sideways, and swim in an exaggerated figure-eight sample. If he continued to method, the shark would launch a warp pace assault, lunging ahead after which retreating quickly. Nelson thought this ritualized habits was motivated by self-defense in opposition to a perceived predator, partly as a result of it nearly by no means occurred in feeding contexts and didn’t appear to be particular to a specific dwelling vary.
However after a 1976 brush with a “relatively pugnacious” shark, as Nelson referred to as it—he ended up driving it away together with his spear—he realized new methods could be wanted to review sharks up shut. “With completely no engineering background, over dinner together with his college students, Don bought out his pencil and on the again of a serviette, his favourite instructing machine, he sketched out a design for a moist, one-man sub,” writes Gruber. He referred to as it the SOS: Shark Statement Submersible. A variation of the SOS continues to be in use as we speak.
A fiberglass contraption, the SOS allowed Nelson to lie on his stomach and look out on the underwater world, controlling it with fins and a small motor. Air tanks meant he may keep beneath the floor for extra time. Whereas he lay there within the submersible’s mattress, he was multitasking. He would management the path of his personal submersible and movie the shark, whereas one other submersible filmed him chasing the animals. “Logistically, it was a nightmare to do,” Lowe says. “And harmful as hell.” Sometimes, the batteries would die and he’d sink to the underside, in want of rescue. Or a shark would chunk the propeller off the submersible.
However the SOS had different limitations, too: The period of time Nelson may spend monitoring sharks in it was temporary—and it couldn’t inform him something about what they did or the place they went underneath cowl of darkness—at evening or within the deeper waters of the ocean that the SOS couldn’t attain. So Nelson additionally dreamt up new acoustic transmitter expertise that will enable him to trace sharks and examine them remotely for for much longer durations of time. This identical expertise kinds the idea for contemporary research of sharks and rays.
“This occurred within the prehistoric period, earlier than built-in circuits, lithium batteries, and well-stocked telemetry distributors,” writes Timothy Tricas, a shark researcher on the Florida Institute of Expertise and former scholar of Nelson’s, in an essay about Nelson’s legacy. “There have been even fewer biologists who may deal with the customized electronics designs wanted for his or her analysis initiatives. Nonetheless, Don and his college students (the current writer included) spent numerous weekends and holidays designing and soldering collectively ultrasonic transmitters from discrete transistors, capacitors, and resistors.”
Nelson’s lab was solely the second group on the planet to place an acoustic transmitter on a free-ranging shark. Transmitters—both connected to the animal or popped inside a fish that will be fed to them—opened up a completely new world of distant shark analysis—following them as they moved over tons of of miles of open ocean.
Over 30 years, Nelson’s lab produced nearly 50 publications about shark habits. His detailed area research of enormous free-ranging shark species, akin to the grey reef, reef whitetip, blue, angel, leopard, and megamouth sharks, took him to websites everywhere in the world, together with the Gulf of California, Marshall Islands, Polynesia, Australia, and the Bahamas. In examine after examine, Nelson uncovered proof that sharks are complicated and clever social animals, relatively than the solitary, unpredictable killers pushed by primitive instincts and insatiable starvation featured in Jaws.
Many shark behaviors are, in reality, extraordinarily predictable, Nelson discovered. One of the elegant examples is the agonistic show. However Nelson additionally discovered that shark feeding and migratory exercise is intently tied to the rising and the setting of the solar: Although it varies considerably from one species to the subsequent, most sharks journey primarily after darkish and feed at daybreak and nightfall, with some seeming to make use of the solar as an orientation cue. Nelson and his colleague Richard Johnson studied one species of shark in French Polynesia that’s so common in its each day actions that they had been capable of forecast the place the sharks would seem alongside a longtime route inside a matter of minutes.
Nelson swam proper as much as sharks to look at their habits.
Nelson additionally discovered that many sharks are social and able to studying: In repeated research of sensory operate, he confirmed they had been capable of “habituate” to each visible and auditory stimuli and to the presence of people. And so they make mates: Plenty of species journey in teams, he discovered, most notably the scalloped hammerhead shark, which kinds daytime colleges off of a number of islands and seamounts within the Sea of Cortez. The lemon shark additionally associates with its personal variety, in addition to with different species of sharks and rays and sure species of fish, relationships which can be mutually helpful—the shark provides safety to the fish, for instance.
Overt aggression, he discovered, is definitely uncommon in sharks, outdoors of the grey reef shark. Few species have interaction in chasing or threats—both to different sharks or to people. Even throughout lively feeding, together with notorious “feeding frenzies”—through which a number of sharks vigorously feed collectively over an prolonged interval in a single space—sharks appear solely in getting meals versus competing with each other. And few species exhibit territorial habits, Nelson reported in his analysis.
Observing and describing shark habits put them within the class of animals that might be understood. Nelson discovered to decode their physique language and create a dictionary of that language for others. Taken as an entire, his work painted a sympathetic image of a creature that’s like so many different acquainted species roaming the Earth: defensive when threatened, social by nature, offering ecosystem advantages to different creatures, pushed by the rhythms of the solar and the seasons.
In October 1990, the lab’s cellphone rang. The message: A shark thought of to be a residing fossil had been caught in a fisherman’s gill web off Dana Level, California. The fisherman had introduced it in, alive, within the waters off the purpose.
Nelson was instructing a category, however everybody within the lab knew what to do. They began mobilizing a small military of researchers—armed with transmitters—to fulfill the shark. Nelson would drive his boat, The Discovery, to Dana Level, whereas others raced there in automobiles.
When the researchers arrived, they discovered a circus of motion across the animal. It regarded like a hippo’s head had been pasted onto an infinite fish physique—15 toes lengthy, bronze like a statue, with a large jaw. Tied by its tail to the boat that caught it, the animal garnered gawkers from each land and sea. Jet skis zoomed in, and a helicopter circled. Some onlookers had been shouting about letting the shark—dubbed Mega—go free, whereas others stripped off their garments and dove into the chilly waters to have the prospect to swim with such a uncommon shark. Solely 5 megamouths had ever been found, they usually had been all lifeless by the point they had been caught. This was the primary one caught alive.
A diver with a dart gun implanted two transmitters into the shark that will ship again alerts about how deep the shark dove and its location.
After which, the rope was untied and the shark disappeared into the waters of southern California. Nelson hadn’t made it together with his boat but, however the younger graduate college students caught a experience aboard a ship owned by Ethan Wayne, son of film star John Wayne, and Nelson met them at sea and took over the chase.
Over the course of the subsequent three days, the group of biologists tracked the shark aboard the boat, because it zigged and zagged south and west, away from shore, sending again alerts to a radio they monitored from the transmitters it carried underneath its pores and skin. Nobody had ever seen or recorded a dwell megamouth earlier than. And now, a ship was following one by means of its murky underwater habitat for days on finish. A number of the graduate college students free-dived to see if the megamouth emitted bioluminescence. The sensation on the boat was one among whole elation.
“It was like strolling on the moon,” recollects Jim McKibben, director of the Science Studying Heart at Cal State Lengthy Seaside, then a grad scholar in Nelson’s lab, “doing one thing that no one has ever achieved earlier than.”
Nelson spent hundreds of hours filming sharks and picked up a large library of 16-mm movie that features footage of the animals responding to low-frequency sounds and interesting in exactly coordinated behaviors. Between 1968 and 1994, he and his college students made 25 documentaries that aired on tv or made their manner into faculty school rooms. These reveals reached thousands and thousands of viewers every week, and far of his footage nonetheless seems on tv as we speak—for instance, Nelson’s work featured within the well-liked 2019 documentary Deep Blue, in regards to the largest nice white shark ever recorded.
In one among his movies from the ’90s, Shark Docs, Nelson describes preemptive efforts to guard the white shark, which scientists suspected on the time was endangered, doubtlessly numbering within the low tons of of people, regardless of a scarcity of exact inhabitants information. “It wouldn’t take a lot to knock that inhabitants manner down and presumably danger extinction,” he tells us, as we witness on display screen the gleaming jaws of a white shark clamp down on a chunk of bait. Shark fishing, for his or her meat and fins, was already decimating many species of sharks: They had been dying sooner than they might reproduce.
By the point Nelson died, a world effort to preserve and defend sharks had begun. It took one other decade earlier than main protections might be put in place within the U.S.—two prohibitions of shark finning in U.S. waters had been handed in 2000 and 2009. Internationally, conservation approaches are nonetheless gaining steam.
Right this moment, the shark lab that Nelson based at Cal State Lengthy Seaside spends about half its time on outreach efforts—to coach the beach-going public and lifeguards about sharks off California’s shoreline—and about half its time on analysis. Attitudes are dramatically completely different from what they had been within the ’70s. “The pendulum has swung from folks pondering that sharks are so harmful and violent, that should you dip your toe in your bathtub a shark goes to eat your complete household—to some folks saying sharks are simply harmless, lovable, cute pet canines that simply want hugs and kisses and love,” Shiffman says. “We actually have the complete spectrum now.”
Many surfers and swimmers world wide, who proceed to undergo uncommon, remoted assaults, speak about sharks with reverence and respect, describing themselves as guests within the sharks’ properties. In Australia, authorities officers have achieved away with the time period “assault,” as an alternative preferring to make use of the time period “unfavourable encounters”—which they argue is extra correct, as a 3rd of encounters between people and sharks depart no accidents in any respect.
Nelson’s work by some means straddled each side of the divide, first serving to to stoke concern of assaults by means of his work in Hollywood, then encouraging us by means of his analysis and movies to grasp sharks as clever social creatures, very important companions within the Earth’s ecosystem.
In 1995, Nelson discovered a mole on his left forearm and confirmed it to his spouse Ginger. “He thought it regarded suspicious,” Ginger recollects. Nelson was honest skinned, had grown up with no solar safety and spent most of his days diving and swimming. So he visited his physician, who got here again with the outcomes: nothing to fret about.
A few yr later, the mole returned and Nelson went again to the physician, who discovered proof of stage 4 melanoma, which had already unfold to his lymph nodes, Ginger says. Nelson insisted on persevering with to show and analysis as much as a month earlier than he died in 1997. “He simply didn’t need to quit,” Ginger says. “He completely cherished what he did.” 
Lead photograph courtesy of the Shark Lab at California State College
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