That fact should be reassuring to women who enjoy swimming in the ocean but worry about doing so during their periods. But menstrual blood is different, in a uniquely shark-worrisome way. If you’ll permit it, a brief shore leave; the US Navy of the 1960s was not interested in menstruating women. The National Park Service, however, was. In 1967, two women, at least one of them menstruating, were killed by grizzly bears in Glacier National Park. Conjecture arose that it had been the blood that inspired the attack. Wildlife biologists didn’t buy it, and one of them, Bruce Cushing (delightfully mis-cited in subsequent bear attack/menstruation research as Bruce Gushing), set out to collect some data. Cushing opted to study polar bears, because they feed almost exclusively on seals, yielding a clean baseline with which to compare the animals’ zeal for menstruating women.
If you put seal blubber in a fan box and aim the aroma at the cage of a wild polar bear, that bear will exhibit what Cushing called “maximal behavioral response.” It will lift its head and sniff the air. It will begin salivating heavily. It will get up and pace. It will chuff. It will groan. Only one other item that Cushing placed in the fan box could make a polar bear groan: a used tampon. Chicken didn’t do the trick, nor horse manure, musk, or an unused tampon. Coming in a close second: menstruating women. The women weren’t in the fan box, but in a chair facing the polar bear cage, where they “sat passively,” perhaps marveling at the strangeness of life on Earth. Cushing also tested ordinary blood, drawn from people’s veins; this elicited no response whatsoever from any of the four participating bears.
In other words, it isn’t the blood that makes a tampon attractive to polar bears. It’s something uniquely . . . vaginal. Some kind of secretions that, please forgive me, smell like seals. This makes sense, does it not? When a feminine hygiene company hires a lab to test the efficacy of a scented menstrual product, the standardized odor employed for this purpose is known as a “fishy amine.”
So alluring is the intensely vaginal/sealy scent of a tampon that a polar bear seems not to notice that it does not also taste like seal. In 42 of 52 instances, a wild polar bear who encountered a used tampon affixed to the top of a stake (scientific nomenclature: “used tampon stake”) ate or “vigorously chewed” it. Only seal meat was more consistently pulled from the stake and consumed. Paper towels soaked with regular blood—here again, nailed to a stake like a skull warning foolhardy jungle explorers—were eaten just three times.
What does this tell us about sharks? Should women be worried? Hard to say. How crazy are sharks for seal meat? Do dead groupers smell like used tampons? Unknown. I’d stay in my deck chair, if I were menstruating you.
Cushing concluded his paper by suggesting that since polar bears enjoy used tampons, there was a strong possibility other ursids would, too. But bears, like sharks, vary by species. Forest bears aren’t connoisseurs of stinky marine life as polar bears are. Grizzlies like salmon, but they take them fresh. Black bears forage for garbage, so who knows what they’ve come to develop a taste for over the years.
To settle the matter, here comes the US Forest Service. Had you been off-loading garbage at a certain Minnesota dump on August 11, 1988, you would have been witness to an arresting sight. “We tied . . . [used] tampons to a monofilament line and spin-cast them to foraging bears,” wrote Lynn Rogers and two colleagues at the North Central Forest Experiment Station. Despite some fine fly-casting chops on show—the bait being “cast past the bears and dragged back under their noses”—20 out of 22 tampons were ignored. Such was also the fate of used tampons proffered “by hand” to black bears that frequented—though perhaps not anymore—an experimental feeding station. Also ignored: five used tampons tied together and thrown at a group of black bears, as well as all but one of a tasting flight of sodden tampons placed in the middle of a bear trail—four soaked with menstrual blood, one with nonmenstrual blood, and one with rendered beef fat. Ten out of eleven bears “swept their noses closely over the group, ate the tampon containing beef fat, and walked on.”
All in all, a resounding testament to the safety of national forests, and the patience of black bears.
FRANK GOLDEN was an authority on the things that happen to a human body immersed for any length of time in cold seawater. Golden—a physician who, by his own description, “swam like a stone”—researched the topic for the Royal Navy Air Medical School during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The text headings in Golden’s classic Essentials of Sea Survival provide a menu of horrors awaiting service members or anyone else forced to abandon ship or ditch a plane over water: Cold-Shock Response, Breath-Hold Time Reduction, Swim Failure, Drowning, Secondary Drowning, Saltwater Ulcers, Hydrocution, Trapped Under Ice, Severe Hypothermia, Oil Contamination, Immersion Foot, Turtle Blood,§ Sunburn, Wave Splash, Osmotic Diarrhea, Rescue Collapse, Rewarming Collapse. There is no heading for Shark Attack. Sharks don’t even make the index.
To a sailor whose sunken craft is a submarine, all of this, the myriad dangers and discomforts of the ocean’s surface, are a distant fond dream.
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* Two months into it, the Chief of the American Intelligence Command wrote to Harold Coolidge urging him to add piranhas to the list. AIC needed better piranha intelligence. Years ago, nature filmmaker Wolfgang Bayer told me the story of the time he was sent to the Amazon to get footage of bloodthirsty piranhas devouring a capybara. Bayer strung nets across the river to trap a school of piranhas. He captured a capybara and herded it into the river. Nothing. He starved the piranhas. Still nothing. He went home.
? You may have heard stories about how Julia Child’s first recipe was for shark repellent. Her OSS employment file shows that she indeed worked for the head of the shark repellent project, Harold Coolidge, in the Office of Emergency Rescue Equipment in 1944. However, her title was Senior Clerk, and her name appears nowhere in the OSS shark files. Child herself made no claim to have come up with the recipe for Shark Chaser but said merely that she followed it, mixing the ingredients “in a bathtub.” This seems odd, as none of the other repellent prototypes were produced or tested at OSS headquarters. Leading me to wonder: Did she cook up Shark Chaser, or just a good story?
? The creator of the two-piece swimsuit, Louis Réard, named it “bikini” because of the explosive reaction he hoped it would generate. The false prefix “bi” has duped many over the years—including the inventors of the monokini, the tankini, the trikini—into wrongly assuming that bikini means “two pieces” in Marshallese. In fact, it means “coconut place”—making the term deliciously if inadvertently appropriate.
§ This one is not so bad, provided you know what you’re doing. Norwegian shipwreck survivor Kaare Karstaad, whom Harold Coolidge interviewed while working on an ocean survival booklet during World War II, knew what he was doing. He’d catch the turtles at night, when their blood was “cold and refreshing.” “Drink it right away,” he counseled, “before coagulation takes place.” Don’t shy away from body cavity fluid! A fifty-pound turtle yields “about 2 cups of ‘consommé’ which . . . is delicious and not extremely fishy.” Sharks, by the way, were “not particularly vicious.” (Or delicious.)
That Sinking Feeling
When things go wrong under the sea