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Trip to Ocean City nets specimens for Sharkfest!
Friday, May 29, 2009
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photos by ERICA MITRANO
Doug Poole of Port Republic rushes a spiny-hound shark to a tank of seawater, saving its life. The female shark will be displayed at the Calvert Marine Museum's annual Sharkfest! event.
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It takes a village to catch a shark.
This could be the motto of Doug Poole, organizer of an annual shark festival at the Calvert Marine Museum, who flies to Ocean City about six times each spring to collect specimens for the hands-on exhibit.
Recently he made the trip once again, accompanied by Laura Magdeburger, an aquarist at the Solomons museum. On their list were two female spiny-hound sharks for the festival and two male clearnose skates, relatives of the stingray, for the museum's permanent exhibit. Their quest is aided by sympathetic individuals at local airports, car rental agencies, fishermen and others who give them low rates and special privileges in support of their work.
Unlike Magdeburger, Poole has no formal training in marine science. Instead, the Port Republic marine mechanic and pilot said he is motivated by a desire to teach others about conservation. Visitors at Sharkfest! can interact with sharks up close, even being able to touch some of them in their tanks. This approach is vital to reaching children, who learn by touching, Poole said.
Their mode of transportation to the beach is almost as outlandish as their mission — they travel in Poole's 1965 Cessna C337 Skymaster, a small plane that has been in his family since 1977, when his father bought it.
"A pretty airplane," Poole said, admiring the blue and white craft after landing in Ocean City. He takes meticulous care of it, wiping grime from the paint near the engines after every flight, as his father had taught him.
On this trip, the two were trying a new approach by going out on a small boat, the Titan America, instead of casting lines from a public pier. The gamble paid off.
As if knowing what was needed, the first skate bit Magdeburger's line minutes after she cast it. A male, just what the aquarist ordered. Before an hour passed, she had another, also male. The shark hunters then had another stroke of luck — the Morning Star, a chartered fishing vessel, announced by ship-to-ship radio that it had caught several spiny-hounds, and they could have as many as they liked. The boat returned to shore so the pair could wait for the Morning Star at its pier.
The Titan America's skipper had assumed Poole and Magdeburger wanted the sharks dead. The mistake was eventually corrected but by that time several sharks were on ice, some for more than an hour, and all but two had died.
Hurrying over to the cooler, Poole cut open the stomach of a dead female and eased her embryos out of a gooey white placenta. Except for yolk-sacs attached to their throats, they were perfectly-formed palm-sized sharks. But when dropped into water they drifted to the bottom of the tank, not attempting to swim. They were too young to survive on their own.
This left two survivors, both females about 2 feet long. The more vigorous one was transferred to a plastic tub in their rented van; another, barely moving, was left in a tank on the boat on the off chance it would revive.
Neither shark's prospects were good.
"[S]he's been out of the water for 30 minutes. That stresses them so much," Poole said.
Dispirited, Magdeburger and Poole left for lunch, leaving the van running while they were in a restaurant so they could keep their captives cool with air conditioning. On their return they were relieved to find the first shark still moving in its tub, but were not optimistic as they returned to the Morning Star to visit the other one.
Poole reached into a trash can filled with seawater to examine the listless-seeming creature. As he did, it lunged, and he pulled back just in time to avoid being bitten. He was thrilled.
"That's pretty wild," Poole said.
"You never know," Magdeburger answered.
"This is amazing," he replied.
It looked as though it would pull through, without the brain damage he had feared would cripple if not kill it. The good news was unexpected, but not a total victory for the pregnant shark.
"If she lives, she'll hemorrhage out all the babies," Poole said, because of shock.
As he loaded the plane, Poole fulminated against the way the spiny-hounds had been left to die. But altogether the trip had been hugely successful. Able to leave before sundown with four specimens in hand, the excursion was the pair's fastest ever.
"That's amazing. I still can't believe it. I thought for sure they were doomed," Poole said.
"We brought them back to life," Magdeburger said.
Even better, perhaps, they had a standing invitation to accompany the Morning Star on future trips. The village had just gained another member.
Poole opened a telephone conversation with his wife by saying, "Hello? We have sharks coming home. We have sharks!"
She would have learned that soon, in any event. Poole has been keeping sharks in his family's garage, now equipped with a pair of tanks 12 feet in circumference. The cost of having them runs about $14,000 annually, something he hopes his new nonprofit organization, the Poole Foundation, will begin to offset.
For the first time, Poole is actually raising sharks at home.
He says they are thriving, and he sometimes has to return them to the ocean as they get too big to be worth keeping.
He hopes the project will inspire children to connect with nature and pay attention to their effects on the environment.
"Give a child a Playstation and you've helped destroy a part of the Earth. Give a child the knowledge about the ecology and you've helped with conservation," he said.
The next morning, Poole sent a one-sentence e-mail: "Hi, the sharks are doing just fine."
