Make Friends with the Sharks

by William Blac

The menacing hunter doesn't see the eager faces on the other side of the glass as he closes in for the kill, fearsome jaws agape, the rows of razor-sharp teeth playing a starring role in the daily entertainment of hundreds - sometimes thousands - of rapt spectators.

They've come for the violence. He's come for the food.

Welcome to shark feeding time at the Blue Zoo Beijing.

While visitors clog the 120-metre tunnel, gaping through the 80-centimetre clear acrylic panels, diver Ding Xiafen and his partner reach into their baskets of mackerel and start to hand-feed the zoo's 21 sharks, much to the crowd's surprise and glee.

The word of the day is "Wah!"

As the fishy feeding machines close in on the divers, clad in black wetsuits with bright yellow air tanks strapped to their backs, the comments fly through the winding tunnel.

"He's got a big mouth!" points out a middle-aged woman with a camera.

"Are those people real?" asks an alarmed, but vaguely disappointed schoolboy. "Why don't sharks eat the people - how come they just eat the fish?"

"I can't see, I can't see!" mutters an older man, holding onto a railing and walking against the slow-moving conveyor belt.

As the crowd jostles for position while fish fragments fly in the 4.5 million-litre tank, biologist and diver Paul Besant and his assistant Andy Chen Bing assure a visitor that this weekday crowd of about 200 is nothing. The daily 2:30 p.m. event is a big draw, but the twice-daily show on Saturdays and Sundays, at 10:30 a.m. and again at 2:30 p.m., is when the divers really earn their pay.

On weekends, the crowds for the 2:30 p.m. event - reach into the thousands. "Ah, mate, those days, it's full up - it's a real brawl," says the amiable New Zealander, director of curatorial services at Blue Zoo Beijing for the last nine months.

The 27-year-old Aucklander has a marine gene - he's a diver, studied marine biology in Australia while getting cozy with the sharks of the Great Barrier Reef, and has in been in China working for Blue Zoo's parent company, Marinescape, since 1996. In addition to helping set up aquarium parks in Dalian, Xiamen and Beijing, Besant is involved in developing other parks in China, though locations have not yet been announced. One of his most important jobs - certainly his strangest duty - is training Chinese divers to feed the sharks. As occupations go, he concedes, it's not for the timid.

The hardest thing was finding candidates for what surely is one of the city's oddest occupations, then convincing them they would survive the training. Besant found most of his employees from Beijing diving clubs, the presence of which still makes him shake his head wonderingly. Feeding a shark isn't an easy job, Besant says, but having a steady bearing and knowing what you're doing helps. The notion of making an on-the-job goof prompts an unconscious glance at Besant's hands -- he's still got 10 fingers, which he holds up with pride. "I've gotten a few scratches, but nothing that ever needed stitches," he says.

"The important thing is to hold the fish out behind you. Sharks track their prey based on vibrations -- they can't see very well when they're coming in on an attack, so you should never hold the fish in front of your face. It's like ping-pong - there's a last second reaction. You've got to get out of the way."

If he sounds calm and confident now, he says his introduction to shark feeding, in Kelly Tarlton's Underwater World, an Auckland aquarium, was a bit of a thrill.

"It was the biggest adrenaline boost of my life - like bungee jumping, or jumping out of an airplane. Just getting into the tank was a charge."

Chen, a 23-year-old from Xiamen, also does some feeding. He says people reacted with a mix of admiration and puzzlement when he disclosed his occupation. "Feeding a big shark is very exciting," he says. "They would say 'You're very brave.' Then they would ask if I had ever been bitten."

"It's a strange job," Besant concedes.

But retaining one's digits isn't the only responsibility. Caring for sharks isn't easy, and Besant has had to design a mix of nutritional supplements, including iodine, algae and variations on the mackerel diet, to keep his seven species of sharks happy.

The aquarium has the fierce-faced sand tiger sharks, the biggest and scariest-looking of the bunch. There are also large, sluggish sharks that spend time on the sea floor, such as the lumbering tawny nurse sharks, whose dangling, whiskery barbels make them look like toothy catfish. Other bottom dwellers include Australia's wobbegong, a speckled shark with a long tailfin; the zebra shark, another multicolored type; and a lemon shark.

Reef shark species include the blacktip shark and the whitetip shark, so named for the colours of the ends of their fins.

Among the other denizens of the saltwater tank -- savage-looking green moray eels; graceful, ghostly rays that look like underwater spacecraft; and enormous, lumbering groupers that would make a Hong Kong restaurant owner weep with envy -- the sharks are clearly the stars.

Besant prizes the sand tigers, which look every inch the menace of the deep. Flying each of them over from the United States -- a 36-hour journey -- makes them worth an average of US$15,000 apiece. Divers chart their feeding patterns, and have given them names based on their appearance: Biggie, Curly, Nick, Blotchy, Small Nick, Gap and Glider. The curator holds a chart with their last meals marked on it as he rides through the crowd, which is still glued to the 40-minute fish feeding festival.

Keeping a consistent schedule is part of good overall aquarium management, Besant says, which is his overall goal in Beijing.

He stops at the end of the tank's tunnel and listens as Lu Tse-Yi, 11, boldly announces that although the feeding was very interesting, especially since she has only seen sharks on television before, she's not a bit scared.

Besant has mentioned that the aquarium will soon be hiring some female divers, but no interview is offered. Not yet, anyway.

Blue Zoo Beijing is located by the south gate of the Workers' Stadium in the District. Open daily from 9:30 to 8 p.m.