596 ECOLOGY AND BEHAVIOR 



INTRODUCTION 



No region on earth exceeds, or in all likelihood equals, the southwestern 

 Pacific Ocean in the frequency and variety of encounters between men and 

 sharks. Throughout an area of more than 15 million square miles, geological 

 and ecological evolution have produced environments that sustain large and 

 diverse shark populations. Certain species of sharks are everyday components 

 in the lives of island and coastal peoples of this vast area. 



In the southwestern Pacific, sharks are important, even preferred, food 

 sources. They also provide valuable materials for tools or artifacts serving as 

 media of exchange. Not surprisingly, a preoccupation with the habits and 

 characteristics of various sharks is evidenced by their incorporation into 

 artistic motifs and religious rituals in many localities. Elaborate and careful 

 training may be given to children, especially boys, in the methods of detect- 

 ing, capturing, safe handling, and otherwise exploiting sharks. 



Even a cursory acquaintance with the indigenous cultures of Micronesia, 

 the Gilbert Islands, or the Solomon Islands (to name only a few) reveals 

 abundant folk knowledge about sharks. It is easy to overlook or dismiss such 

 knowledge as simple, primitive, and essentially valueless for serious study, 

 but this is a mistake. Unfortunately, it may account in part for the scant 

 attention paid to such matters in the past, and for certain inadequacies of 

 even the most detailed ethnographic surveys. 



To consider the facts from a very different viewpoint, one need only 

 reflect that sharks are about as commonplace to many Pacific islanders as 

 automobiles are in urban Western cultures. It would be surprising, therefore, 

 if local knowledge from the Pacific failed to provide clues to aspects of shark 

 biology worthy of further investigation through controlled laboratory and 

 physiological techniques. Since the eventual applications of many laboratory 

 studies on sharks might be to increase the predictability and safety of man- 

 shark interactions in natural situations, it seems appropriate to examine the 

 procedures developed toward that same end by many generations of Pacific 

 islanders. They have worked out their procedures by trial and error, under 

 conditions that certainly include strong selective factors against mistakes! 



The object of the present analysis is twofold: first, to compare some of 

 the knowledge obtained from modern scientific studies on the sensory bi- 

 ology of sharks with the empirical knowledge included in certain Pacific 

 cultures, and second, to discover any local observations from the south- 

 western Pacific suggestive of additional problems worthwhile for scientific 

 study. 



At the outset, it must be frankly admitted that the analysis is of necessity 

 highly selective and incomplete. Published anthropological reports on shark 

 fishing, for example, while extremely valuable, typically have not been as- 

 sembled in cognizance of modern knowledge about the biology of sharks. 

 Hence, they are often inadequate for the present considerations. Cross- 

 checking information, much of it necessarily available only from verbal 

 accounts, is time consuming but essential; this too imposes an important 

 limitation on the scope of the present study. One of the values of these 



