Neil Hammerschlag was only 16 when he dove with live sharks for the very first time on a family vacation in the Bahamas. Scuba diving consumed his mind for almost the entire trip, and it became much more than a one-time jaunt.
A shark-sighting advertisement in a dive shop caught Hammerschlag’s eye, and actually set the teenager on his future career: studying shark behaviour and probing into the strange reasons why great whites are booming off coastal Nova Scotia today.
It eventually also landed his camera right in the jaws of a great white, and he has the footage to prove it.
But speaking of his very first dive, it was magic, he says, anything but what he'd expected.
“I thought I was going to see a shark swimming by in the reef in the distance,” Hammerschlag, now 45, told The Epoch Times. “When I got in the water, all of a sudden, underneath me, there were all these sharks like circling, swarming. There must have been 25, and I had a brief moment of panic.”
He tugged on the guide’s flippers but was told everything was fine.
The sharks, it turns out, were tiger sharks, each around 9 feet long, and wanted little to do with having humans for lunch. They were more interested in the buckets of bait they were regularly fed. They were curious, Hammerschlag said, but weren’t acting aggressively.
Almost like a dream, the tour group knelt on the sun-dappled seafloor and watched for a “mind-blowing” 40 minutes as the pythonic sharks swirled overhead and all around them.
“It was a wow moment,” he said, though at the time he “didn’t think of it as a career.”
For his amateur clientele, using a cage just makes sense, he says.
“The sharks don’t see the people in the cage, they just see the outline of he cage,” he said, which is important because “a great white is one of the very few [sharks] that will eat a mammal, and a mammal does look like us. They'll eat seals, things like that.”
The cage also protects the sharks from people.
“It contains them,” he said, and prevents them from “grabbing on the shark’s fin or sticking their hands out in front of the shark’s mouth.”
Hammerschlag once saw inside the mouth of a great white by accident. While towing a baited camera behind his boat, a massive shark mistook the shiny equipment for fish scales and tried to chomp it. Footage of teeth and gills survived to tell the tale.
A few years ago, Hammerschlag used to dive to install and retrieve underwater transmitters to inquire into subjects like how sharks respond to hurricanes or whether they avoid cities. While cage dives and shark tagging were part of the job, this was all just for research. He also dove and swam cageless with sharks for fun.
But then he started noticing strange new data regarding great white populations around the world. In one area, off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, great whites had all but disappeared. Meanwhile, Canada’s Atlantic coast was seeing an unprecedented boom.
On one hand, he took the dire shark situation in South Africa personally, because he'd spent his first jaunt as a masters student researching great whites near Cape Town.
“Great whites in South Africa actually have disappeared,” Hammerschlag said.
On the other hand, the opposite has happened near Nova Scotia, where great whites were once “almost non-existent.” “If someone said 10 years ago that they had seen a great white, they wouldn’t believe you,” he said. “Now, people see them all the time.”
So in 2020, while directing shark research in Miami, Hammerschlag felt a new mission coming on. The mysterious new shark boom was calling him to return home to Canada. Meanwhile, “Florida during COVID became a strange place,” he said. “I just wanted to do something different, you know?”
He relocated, but to take up a new study in Nova Scotia without funding would be daunting. Then he remembered how, as a 23-year-old masters student in Cape Town, he'd paid for his ocean fare by selling spots on the boat to tourists. He tried a similar model for Atlantic Shark Expeditions in 2022.
Although his data support no conclusions as yet, he theorizes what may behind the great white boom. “The seal population has grown, which is now a lot of extra food,” Hammerschlag said, adding that “climate change” might also factor in.
He says shark populations globally are overfished and in serious decline, singling out the shark fin soup trade as the most notorious culprit. He hopes his expeditions will inspire people to become shark cheerleaders.
Lately, Hammerschlag still finds time to dive with sharks for fun. He’s rather partial toward tiger sharks because of their big, brown eyes, he says. He’s grown attached to the species he’s studied the most.
In 2022, on Tiger Beach in the Bahamas, he nearly ran into the mouths of a pair. Loaded up with bait on the seafloor, Hammerschlag was at the centre of a shark scavenger hunt. Two 15-foot tiger sharks followed the odour trail to see what was making a delicious smell and nearly ploughed into the diver.
“They can sometimes bite by mouthing objects to get an understanding of what it is,” he said.
Using his hands to press their giant noses, he redirected the sharks, and they swam elsewhere for food. “I was just letting them know that I’m not something that they want to mess with,” he said.
Even after hundreds of dives, over the last 34 years, Hammerschlag says no shark has ever bitten him. One time, he did injure himself while tagging a small tiger shark on a boat. He made an error in judgment by getting into the water to watch it swim away.
“It was a little disoriented and swam towards me with its mouth open, and I pushed its face away from me,” he said, adding that as he was doing that he caught his finger on a tooth. “It cut it straight down on my finger to the bone. I needed 16 stitches.”
The diver is rightfully forgiving.
“I just put it through a little bit of a stressful situation.”
