Fear, Loathing and Common Sense in the Year of the Shark

Posted on Nov. 10, 2015

A TV crew wanted to put a bloody fish carcass in the surf to attract sharks so they could film them.

Another reporter wondered: Is fracking causing this?

In North Carolina’s summer of the shark, in which an abnormally high eight bites on humans were reported in the surf this year between June 1 and July 4, Joel Fodrie ’99 was the reluctant point man when the media called UNC’s Institute of Marine Sciences. When the holiday rolled around, he was weary — he’d done close to 40 interviews, most of them just 
for sound bites with a man who does not describe his work in sound bites.

Fodrie has had more than one brush with a big shark while in the water, working or fishing. He’s held his breath and stared speechless at his companion after the fish turned and swam the other way. But he prefers science to sensation.

He says sharks are almost always skittish around people. He likes the theory that they’re especially protective of their exposed eyes and snouts and will avoid anything they think might hurt them.

When he was a postdoc on the Gulf Coast, he stumbled “very accidentally” onto the records of fishing tournaments off Alabama, Mississippi and Texas over an 80-year period. Until the mid-1980s, 900-pounders were winning the trophies. Then, Fodrie says, the bottom dropped out. Now, 200-pound sharks win. Commercial fisheries, he said, show the same curve. “They probably fished out the population. The big ones disappeared to a degree.”

Data from Onslow Bay off Cape Lookout in North Carolina suggest the abundance of great sharks was declining at about the same time there. And UNC should know; in 1972, now-veteran Professor Frank Schwartz started what has become the longest continuous shark survey in the country. Every two weeks, spring, summer and fall, the institute sends a boat out long-line fishing for sharks.

It’s done exactly the same way, in the same locations, each time. The multi-hook line stays in the water for an hour, then the crew records data on each shark in the catch, tags them and returns them to the sea.

State fisheries officials do surveys on all the food fish, but sharks are just a blip on the commercial and recreational market. So, “we sample sharks as part of the fish community,” Fodrie said. “If you ignore them, you ignore an important part of the community.”

As Schwartz nears retirement, Fodrie will inherit the shark survey.

And he spent some time in New Orleans recently at a seminar on how to talk to the impatient news media.

— David E. Brown ’75

Watch videos of members of Joel Fodrie’s lab tagging fish and running a shark survey and see Middle Marsh from Google’s satellite view.

Local Knowledge: The quest by Joel Fodrie to think like a fish has only just started and has a long, long way to go. Already it’s been a round trip.