When Whale Sharks Fly

by Howard Krum, MS, VMD, MA

Someone yelled, “The shark is STUCK!”

I blurted out, “What the hell do you mean, the shark is stuck?” Though I was well aware that good veterinarians were expected to be calm, cool, and collected—virtual pillars of medical confidence—my nerves were shot.

The big guy next to me gestured down at one of the high-pressure air casters levitating the 25,000-pound fiberglass box filled with shark and water. “We're stuck,” he repeated. The device was jammed on a microscopic crack in the brand-new concrete floor.

I groaned. “Holy crap—you've got to be kidding me.”

We were only a few feet, twenty-seven to be exact, from our final destination. We'd just traveled eight thousand miles with two enormous animals code-named “Ralph” and “Norton” and now were stalled directly in front of our goal. The behemoths were to be the crown jewels for the grand opening of the Georgia Aquarium's brand-new, 6.2-million-gallon Open Ocean exhibit: the world's largest fish tank. The new exhibit was scheduled to open later that year, in November 2005. But at this moment, these two sharks, each well over one thousand pounds, thrashed impatiently in their custom transport containers. The sooner we could release them into the big tank, the better. Just then, Norton regurgitated massively, critically fouling his water—again.

This day had begun over fifty-four hours earlier. Feeling weak, I thought: I don't handle crises well, or novel challenges, or getting up early in the morning. Why did I take this job? I am a “big-boned” junk-food connoisseur with the physical vigor of a three-toed sloth, and this marathon mission had required a game plan of outrageous, nail-biting, even death-defying logistics. Why had I signed on for the record-setting transport of two huge whale sharks halfway around the world?

___

Three days earlier, I'd been in Taipei, meeting with the National Fisheries Council. The entire project was on the brink of collapse.

“No, we won't sign it!” said the minister of Taiwanese Fisheries as he slammed his notebook shut, stood up, and began pulling on his jacket. The “it” to which he was referring was a certificate stating, among other things, that the animals would be transported safely and humanely, in accordance with international guidelines. The situation was more than a little ironic, considering that the aquarium had purchased these two animals from a Taiwanese fisherman and they had originally been en route to an Asian dinner table. But without this document, everything would come to a screeching halt: over two years of planning and two hundred million dollars in aquarium construction would be in vain. Moreover, these animals were intended as a surprise gift to the city of Atlanta from Bernie Marcus, our benefactor and the cofounder of The Home Depot.

Our Mandarin-speaking interpreter, Eunice, relayed the rant as the minister and other officials stomped away from the fifty-foot-wide conference table. “Your country insults the Taiwanese government and Taiwan itself! Other countries would not have this requirement.”

I grabbed Eunice's hand. “Wait, wait!” I realized that they hadn't understood our request. “Please, sir, this certificate merely states that you believe we are going to transport the animals safely. Your government is certifying our efforts, not the other way around.”

The fisheries minister paused as the translation sank in. He slowly took off his jacket and returned to the table; so did the twenty-three others.

Dr. Chen, the council's Taipei veterinary representative, spoke next. “Dr. Krum has worked with aquatic animals for years and has brought with him all the supplies the animals could require—medications including IV fluids, medical testing equipment like a blood gas analyzer, an ultrasound unit, and even a water-quality laboratory. He and his team are equipped to deliver better medical care than even humans could receive in flight.”

Ten minutes later, they agreed to sign.

On my way out, I shook Dr. Chen's hand gratefully. He said, “I really enjoyed your bluefin tuna presentation at the zoo vets conference in Pittsburgh.” Wow, I thought, what a stroke of pure luck.

From there on out the plan was straightforward: Examine the animals via mask and snorkel to make sure they were fit for flight. On the day of the transport, weather permitting, motor an hour out on two modified ships (one for each animal) to our two-hundred-foot-diameter, fifty-foot-deep sea pen moored off the coast. Then invite the fifteen- and seventeen-foot-long sharks to swim into their stretchers (they'd been trained to do so). Gently crane them on board into temporary, water-filled transport boxes, and head back to the harbor. Lift the animals in custom-made “wet stretchers” (cradling the shark in thousands of gallons of water) and install them in their individual, custom-built ICU transport aquariums with integrated, battery-powered life support. Truck them, us, and approximately five thousand pounds of support gear to the Hualien Airport and load everything onto a heavy-lift prop plane for the short hop to Taipei, where a UPS 747 cargo plane would be waiting. Transfer the animals and take off for Anchorage, where we'd clear customs, get a fresh flight crew, fuel up, and head on to Atlanta. Upon arrival in Atlanta, deplane the boxes onto individual roller-bed tractor-trailers and truck the animals to the aquarium. Off-load the enormous boxes onto high-pressure air casters for a short hovercraft ride to the Open Ocean hoist way. Then, with the eight thousand miles and twenty-seven feet behind us, hoist the beasts in their water-filled stretchers up four stories and release them into their spacious new home.

We'd spent months planning every detail of this move. How many other things could go wrong? Compulsively, I'd already run the calculation in my mind: 1,462. None of this—not one single step—had ever been attempted before. And did I mention that the whole plan was to be carried out while flying under the radar of the world press?

As it turned out, the novel challenges had just begun. On the sleepless night before the transport, a sizable earthquake threw me out of bed and onto the floor. This was followed by a thirty-knot gale that miraculously gave way to a sparkling sunrise at sea. Then our sharks inexplicably forgot their training of the past two months. Using buckets of shrimp, we had conditioned them to swim into their stretchers, which they hadn't seemed to mind—until today. Instead, we had to improvise and coax them along with a very big net. Minutes later, Ralph nearly capsized his forty-ton transport vessel when its captain miscalculated the physics of craning the world's largest fish species on board.

Norton's lift went more smoothly. The crane operator on the second, forty-five-foot Chinese fishing boat scooped the leviathan from the ocean without incident, gently depositing him into the seawater-filled twenty-by-six-foot box on the deck. With Norton came a dazzling, life-filled slice of the western Pacific: half a dozen surprised, skin-hugging remora, a tiny school of shimmering jacks, and a rich assortment of colorful seaweeds. It was my first opportunity to see this massive fish up close. His skin tones ranged from a deep, warm slate gray to vibrant aquamarine, dotted with brilliant white spots. I was mesmerized. This was the opportunity we were hoping to offer millions of viewers very soon.

Few people on earth have ever seen a living, breathing, krill-gulping whale shark. The world's largest shark is also the world's largest fish: this gentle, filter-feeding giant can grow to fifty feet in length. Some sharks do eat people, but not this kind. It works the other way around. The flesh of this fish is known as tofu sha, an Asian delicacy. And after cruising the world's oceans for sixty million years, this species is vulnerable to extinction thanks to just a few decades of overfishing. The motivation behind our mission—to put Ralph and Norton on public display in the world's largest aquarium—was to inspire millions to care about whale sharks and engender support for their protection.

As our vessel chugged along at five knots, puffing black diesel smoke, we began plowing into subtle ocean swells. Norton started to ram his previously unblemished, three-foot-wide snout into the white fiberglass wall. Contact with any surface is something these animals probably never encountered in the wild. Norton stiffened, appearing stunned by each successive jolt. I envisioned the deepening trauma as thousands of cells were crushed and exploded. If this abuse kept up, it would lead to open ulcerations that could easily become infected. I had no idea how to manage an open wound on the head of an eternally swimming half-ton shark.

A tiny fisherman, clad in fish-slime–encrusted boxers and a yellowing T-shirt, jumped to my aid. We reached for Norton's snout, trying to hold his mass off the wall. It was futile, of course, but in the process, I noticed that the shark was able to withdraw easily from our touch. I experimented by dipping one hand in the water about a foot from Norton's right eye; he was somehow able to recoil despite the continued roll of the ship. Next, I tried just a finger: he maintained his distance. Within minutes, and with just two fingers, we had Norton hovering safely off the container walls. It appeared that this sensitive, gentle hulk just needed a frame of reference. With our success, the fisherman grinned broadly at me and I returned a relieved thumbs-up, the only Mandarin I knew.

As we approached the pier, I saw to my dismay that it was crawling with reporters. Our cover had been blown. Luckily, our captain didn't appreciate the swarm of uninvited guests either. After a brief skirmish that ended with a cameraman swimming for shore, we loaded the animals into their flight containers on flatbed tractor-trailers and made our way to the airport. Here we ran into another snag, a tense standoff with a machine-gun-laden militia who insisted we wait on the tarmac in the scorching sun for government clearance we already had.

The plane's loadmaster, Jose, gave me more bad news. “Doc, these army jerks told me that we have to load and secure the contents of each of the three trucks separately. One at a time on the runway—load, exit, then bring on the next truck.”

Knowing that Jose had previously worked as a bodyguard for a warlord in Uganda, I asked, “Do you think you can persuade them to change their minds?”

Jose bullied his way back through the guards and guns to what must have been the officer in charge. After a lot of arm-waving and angry Spanish, he strode back to me.

“I told him, look, if you want to be the reason these animals die on this runway in front of the world media”—he pointed to the cameras only two hundred yards away—“be my guest!” Grinning, Jose slapped me on the back. “Doc, we can load everything now.”

About two hours later, crammed with equipment and supplies, including approximately five hundred pounds of ice melting on top of each animal container, the shiny silver prop plane roared to life. With all the doors open it felt like an enormous convection oven stuck on high. We seemed to taxi for miles before the lumbering craft pivoted, the engines revved, and we were off—well, sort of. The plane shimmied and shook and its wings flexed wildly. As we finally felt the ground slip away, I thought I saw razor wire whiz by the open doorway.

One of our Aussie flight crew appeared, wearing a captain's hat, button-down long-sleeved shirt, navy shorts, and a pair of black high-top Converse sneakers. He said, “I think those bloody sharks weigh more than you guessed. We nearly took out that fence. That would have been a bit of a cock-up.”

Yeah, I thought—crashing to a fiery death, pulverized by fifty thousand pounds of gear and shark, would indeed have been a bit of a cock-up. Thankfully, we began our descent ten minutes later and glided gracefully into Taipei without incident.

Once on board the 747 cargo plane provided by UPS, I checked the animals, their water-quality and life-support systems. All appeared stable. I could see Norton's and Ralph's eyes and gills through the transport tank portholes. They appeared calmer, cooler, and quite a bit more collected than I felt.

Liftoff for the really long leg of our journey was impressive. We shot from the runway like a rocket—I'm sure we would have won any 747 drag race. The only problem was that the force from all those extra G's must have caused one of our watertight hatches to pop open. A few minutes after takeoff, the copilot scurried down the ladder into the massive cargo hold and grabbed Chris Schreiber by the shoulders. Chris, an affable, unflappable bear of a man with an ever-present Fred Flintstone five-o'clock shadow, was our veteran shark transporter.

The copilot yelled in his face, “There's water leaking somewhere. We've lost electronic control of temperature and cabin pressure!”

The engine roar was deafening. Chris just shrugged as if to say Okay, I'll figure it out. He quickly secured the hatch and reported back. “It's all fixed. We only lost about fifty gallons.”

The copilot said, “Good,” and nodded at a pocketknife in his hand. “We'll try to control things manually.” Fabulous, I thought. If anything else breaks, like, say one of the engines, I've got a bottle opener in my suitcase, just in case.

I compulsively checked and rechecked the water quality. Sharks and other fishes not only produce huge volumes of fecal matter via the usual route, they also excrete pure ammonia from their gills, which in confined spaces can lethally foul their water. But since the water was sparkling, with no detectable ammonia and a dissolved oxygen (DO) concentration of about 115 percent saturation, we decided to nap in shifts.

Four minutes later Chris shook me awake. “Norton's DO is crashing. It's down to 30 percent; he regurgitated buckets of krill—I can't even see him.” Immediately, we shifted to plan B and added four industrial-grade air stones attached to cylinders of pure oxygen. The DO gradually climbed to 32 percent and on up from there. Like Norton, we all began to breathe a little easier.

Chris surmised correctly that the chunks of semidigested microshrimp had clogged the aeration atomizer. He skillfully and quickly cleaned the pumps, changed the life support filters, and, for good measure, replaced several of the sixty-pound deep-cycle batteries. Norton's tail tip, now slightly protruding out of the water, was still rhythmically pulsing, so we knew he was alive. In a few hours, the water had cleared enough so we could see that his eyes were clear. Surprisingly, he looked BAR (bright, alert, and responsive).And a bar was exactly where I was headed after this was all over.

Now in Atlanta, stranded just a few feet from his new home, Norton was in trouble again. The shark hung somewhere in the opaque, brick-colored water he'd just created. Unable to see if he was still breathing, I felt cold sweat streaming from my forehead. I got a whiff of myself: I reeked more than usual.

I barked to no one in particular, “We're not going to lose this animal, not now. We gotta change his water immediately.”

Several three-inch hoses appeared almost magically and we quickly flushed in clean, well-oxygenated artificial seawater (this was one of the 1,462 potential problems we'd prepared for). I staggered backward. Though this latest crisis had been averted, we'd lost our forward momentum. The jackhammering air compressor was cut off and the boxful of shark and water groaned as it settled on the cracked concrete floor.

After four hours of failed attempts to budge the shark box, someone suggested we try jacking it up with an obviously undersized forklift. At this point, it was worth a try. The fork-lift's engine growled and the tines shrieked as they were wedged under the massive container. As the driver eased back on the lift lever, he yelled, “Okay, everybody get back, this could be dangerous.”

At first, nothing happened except for a lot of ominous cracking and popping. Then the back of the forklift rose swiftly off the ground. This was one of those situations when you don't think, you just do. Ten of us bigger guys scrambled onto the back of the machine behind the driver. Amazingly, the box levered up as the forklift gradually tilted back to the ground. (Relieved, I felt vindicated in my long-held belief that diets were counterproductive; I can only imagine what might have happened to Norton had I curbed my Twinkie intake as so many had foolishly recommended.)

The rest of the move went like clockwork. Only an hour later, a crowd of visitors stood admiring the sharks as they swam calmly in their new Open Ocean home. To a thunderous round of applause, Norton resumed eating, followed soon by Ralph.

For days afterward, I stood at the back of the exhibit gallery assessing the animals' behavior and eavesdropping on our guests.

A little girl would say to her mother: “Mommy, I want to be a marine biologist!”

A little boy would say to his grandfather: “Papa, I love the ocean. And I love Norton.”

Me too, I thought, and that's why I do this job.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Howard N. Krum was born and raised in the Poconos of northeastern Pennsylvania, spending much of his youth on, around, and under the water—frequently skipping school “just to go fishing.” He has practiced veterinary medicine at the National Aquarium in Baltimore and at the New England Aquarium in Boston. At the time of the adventure described in this chapter, Dr. Krum was the chief veterinarian and department head of veterinary services and conservation medicine for the Georgia Aquarium. He is currently the zoo pathology resident at the University of Illinois, College of Veterinary Medicine, working with the Shedd Aquarium and the Brookfield and Lincoln Park zoos in Chicago. In addition to a degree in veterinary medicine from the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Krum has earned a master of science in physiology from Southern Illinois University and a master of arts in science writing from Johns Hopkins University. He has lived, worked, and traveled throughout western Europe and Southeast Asia.