In Baldridge’s own tests, he presented four species of shark with the novel menu option of a swimming, bleeding lab rat. As fellow mammals, rats should possess blood that’s about as enticing (or unenticing) to a shark as our own. As he expected, the sharks showed no interest.
The bottom line is that the preponderance of shark attacks, like most animal attacks, are prey-specific. If you don’t look or smell like dinner, you are unlikely to be so treated. Predators are attuned to the scents of creatures they most want to eat. Sharks don’t relish human meat. Even though a shark can detect human blood, it has—unless starving—no motive for tracking it to its source.
That fact should be reassuring to women who enjoy swimming in the ocean but worry about doing so during their periods. But menstrual blood is different, in a uniquely shark-worrisome way. If you’ll permit it, a brief shore leave; the US Navy of the 1960s was not interested in menstruating women. The National Park Service, however, was. In 1967, two women, at least one of them menstruating, were killed by grizzly bears in Glacier National Park. Conjecture arose that it had been the blood that inspired the attack. Wildlife biologists didn’t buy it, and one of them, Bruce Cushing (delightfully mis-cited in subsequent bear attack/menstruation research as Bruce Gushing), set out to collect some data. Cushing opted to study polar bears, because they feed almost exclusively on seals, yielding a clean baseline with which to compare the animals’ zeal for menstruating women.
If you put seal blubber in a fan box and aim the aroma at the cage of a wild polar bear, that bear will exhibit what Cushing called “maximal behavioral response.” It will lift its head and sniff the air. It will begin salivating heavily. It will get up and pace. It will chuff. It will groan. Only one other item that Cushing placed in the fan box could make a polar bear groan: a used tampon. Chicken didn’t do the trick, nor horse manure, musk, or an unused tampon. Coming in a close second: menstruating women. The women weren’t in the fan box, but in a chair facing the polar bear cage, where they “sat passively,” perhaps marveling at the strangeness of life on Earth. Cushing also tested ordinary blood, drawn from people’s veins; this elicited no response whatsoever from any of the four participating bears.
In other words, it isn’t the blood that makes a tampon attractive to polar bears. It’s something uniquely… vaginal. Some kind of secretions that, please forgive me, smell like seals. This makes sense, does it not? When a feminine hygiene company hires a lab to test the efficacy of a scented menstrual product, the standardized odor employed for this purpose is known as a “fishy amine.”
So alluring is the intensely vaginal/sealy scent of a tampon that a polar bear seems not to notice that it does not also taste like seal. In 42 of 52 instances, a wild polar bear who encountered a used tampon affixed to the top of a stake (scientific nomenclature: “used tampon stake”) ate or “vigorously chewed” it. Only seal meat was more consistently pulled from the stake and consumed. Paper towels soaked with regular blood—here again, nailed to a stake like a skull warning foolhardy jungle explorers—were eaten just three times.
What does this tell us about sharks? Should women be worried? Hard to say. How crazy are sharks for seal meat? Do dead groupers smell like used tampons? Unknown. I’d stay in my deck chair, if I were menstruating you.
Cushing concluded his paper by suggesting that since polar bears enjoy used tampons, there was a strong possibility other ursids would, too. But bears, like sharks, vary by species. Forest bears aren’t connoisseurs of stinky marine life as polar bears are. Grizzlies like salmon, but they take them fresh. Black bears forage for garbage, so who knows what they’ve come to develop a taste for over the years.
To settle the matter, here comes the US Forest Service. Had you been off-loading garbage at a certain Minnesota dump on August 11, 1988, you would have been witness to an arresting sight. “We tied… [used] tampons to a monofilament line and spin-cast them to foraging bears,” wrote Lynn Rogers and two colleagues at the North Central Forest Experiment Station. Despite some fine fly-casting chops on show—the bait being “cast past the bears and dragged back under their noses”—20 out of 22 tampons were ignored. Such was also the fate of used tampons proffered “by hand” to black bears that frequented—though perhaps not anymore—an experimental feeding station. Also ignored: five used tampons tied together and thrown at a group of black bears, as well as all but one of a tasting flight of sodden tampons placed in the middle of a bear trail—four soaked with menstrual blood, one with nonmenstrual blood, and one with rendered beef fat. Ten out of eleven bears “swept their noses closely over the group, ate the tampon containing beef fat, and walked on.”
All in all, a resounding testament to the safety of national forests, and the patience of black bears.
FRANK GOLDEN was an authority on the things that happen to a human body immersed for any length of time in cold seawater. Golden—a physician who, by his own description, “swam like a stone”—researched the topic for the Royal Navy Air Medical School during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The text headings in Golden’s classic Essentials of Sea Survival provide a menu of horrors awaiting service members or anyone else forced to abandon ship or ditch a plane over water: Cold-Shock Response, Breath-Hold Time Reduction, Swim Failure, Drowning, Secondary Drowning, Saltwater Ulcers, Hydrocution, Trapped Under Ice, Severe Hypothermia, Oil Contamination, Immersion Foot, Turtle Blood,[53] Sunburn, Wave Splash, Osmotic Diarrhea, Rescue Collapse, Rewarming Collapse. There is no heading for Shark Attack. Sharks don’t even make the index.
To a sailor whose sunken craft is a submarine, all of this, the myriad dangers and discomforts of the ocean’s surface, are a distant fond dream.
12. THAT SINKING FEELING
When Things Go Wrong Under the Sea
THERE’S A SOUND THAT water makes, under pressure, when it pushes through a hole too small for its urgency. I know it mainly as a sprinkler sound, a pleasant lawns-in-summer sort of sound. Phhhhhhhh…. To a sailor on a submarine, where there are no lawns and no summer, it’s not pleasant, this sound. It’s the sound of water coming in where it mustn’t. A leaking flange, a ruptured pipe. The ocean with its foot in the door. The deeper you are, the harder it pushes. Three hundred feet down, seawater slams through a two-inch hole with enough force to bend a knee the way knees don’t bend. At a thousand feet, an eight-inch hole lets an Olympic swimming pool on board every three minutes. If it’s not fixed fast, you’re in trouble. You’re sunk.
I’m looking down into a submarine engine room that’s putting out a lot of that sound. Eleven wet necks are bent over leaks—first three, now four. We are 200 feet above sea level, inside a building in Groton, Connecticut, so the risk of drowning is minimal. The room is a mock-up, part of the Naval Submarine School’s Damage Control Trainer, a.k.a. the Wet Trainer, a.k.a. “one of the reasons sailors swear.” I’m on the dry side of a large and very clear (it has wipers!) window that looks in on the engine room and the cursing sailors.
With me at the window is the instructor in charge today, Chief Machinist’s Mate Alan Hough. Every few minutes he gives directions over his shoulder to a colleague at a console manning the leaks, but his main focus is the students. He’s both grading them and giving them feedback. The latter he conveys via signs that he holds up to the window, because no one can hear him through the glass and over the phhhhhhh. TWO PERSONNEL PER LEAK. WORK BEHIND THE PATCH. NO STRAPPING IN THE WATER STREAM. The signs are rigid red plastic, custom-printed by someone who must have wondered.
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This one is not so bad, provided you know what you’re doing. Norwegian shipwreck survivor Kaare Karstaad, whom Harold Coolidge interviewed while working on an ocean survival booklet during World War II, knew what he was doing. He’d catch the turtles at night, when their blood was “cold and refreshing.” “Drink it right away,” he counseled, “before coagulation takes place.” Don’t shy away from body cavity fluid! A fifty-pound turtle yields “about 2 cups of ‘consommé’ which… is delicious and not extremely fishy.” Sharks, by the way, were “not particularly vicious.” (Or delicious.)