More Shadows Attack 53 



lona Asai, a pearl diver in the Torres Strait between New Guinea and Australia, lived 

 to tell the tale— and show the scars— after a shark seized his head within its jaws. 



Courtesy, Sydney and Melbourne Publishing Co. from 

 The 'Fishes of Australia by G. P. WTiitley, 1940 



his neck and jaws. Three weeks after he left the hospital, a small abscess 

 developed on his neck. When the abscess was drained, in it was found 

 one last bit of proof of lona's tale: the tooth of a Tiger shark. lona, 

 aged 38 at the time of the attack in 1937, had been wounded by a shark 

 19 years before. He was aptly named, for lona is the native version of 

 one of their heroes of the Christian Bible, Jonah. 



The Shark Research Panel's quest for a solution to the mystery of 

 shark attacks is leading down many trails. Water temperature, for in- 

 stance, once seemed a likely factor in attacks, and the SRP did establish 

 the fact that sharks attack most frequently in waters warmer than about 

 65 °F. (Some experiments have shown that certain sharks seem to lose 

 their appetites when the temperature drops to the low 60's.) 



When the coastal waters in temperate seas warm, the temperature 

 change is often a harbinger of large, voracious sharks, roving from their 

 tropical home waters. The sharks arrive in their new pastures just as 

 these same seas are teeming with migrating fish— plus waders, swimmers, 

 boatmen, water-skiers, spear-fishermen, and surfboarders. Great Whites, 

 formerly reputed to be tropical, have been caught and spotted so often 

 outside of the tropics in recent years that some ichthyologists believe 

 that the sea's most dreaded sharks have become regular summer visitors 

 to waters as far nortn as Nova Scotia. 



There has been one known fatal shark attack in New England waters, 

 and it was almost certainly the work of a Great White. The victim was 

 a 16-year-old Massachusetts boy, Joseph Troy, Jr., who was swimming 

 on July 25th, 1936, about 150 yards oflr Hollywood Beach, just above 



