Dave Freedman - Natural Selection

Jason hesitated. “Well, why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?”

“Because I talked to the guy. Got the real color, the stuff he might not actually write up. Jason, you’ve got to learn to trust somebody other than yourself.” She exhaled, visibly fatigued. “I’m just so tired of fighting with you. It wears me out.”

“You really think we fight a lot?”

“You’re joking.”

He smiled. “Yeah.”

“Look, Jason, the truth is… I admire you.”

He looked down at the deck. “Sure you do.”

“I do, I really do. That whole manta aquarium was such a disaster, such an unmitigated disaster….”

“Thanks for reminding me.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. It would have destroyed anybody else, absolutely destroyed them—their career, their psyche, everything. But not you, you just kept plugging. Even with Darryl and Craig shooting skeet and drinking, Monique and me doing next to nothing, and Phil doing… whatever Phil does… You never gave up, not for a second. Anyway, I really think you’re impressive.”

He looked at her. “Thank you very much.”

“And now, finally, you’re being rewarded.”

“How am I being rewarded exactly?”

“Jason, we are beyond speculation now. We have physical proof. These teeth are real, and the number three expert in the world has no idea what they’re from. Call Ackerman and tell him. We are trailing a new species. You are definitely onto something here.”

He was staring at her now. “Yeah, maybe I am.”

She stared at him too, if only for a moment. Then thought, God, what am I doing? “Anyway… we’ll see what happens.” She looked at the sky, suddenly aware of how drained she was. “It was a long day. I’m going to change, then help them out with dinner.” She turned to go.

“Lisa.”

“Yeah?”

“I forgot to mention it… you looked really nice today.”

She paused. “Thank you.”

“I mean it, really nice. Of course my only basis for comparison is Craig.”

“Not to mention yourself.”

He looked down at his own white tank top. “The pinnacle of haute couture.”

She smiled. “Thanks for noticing, Giorgio.”

His intense eyes returned. “We are onto a new species here, aren’t we?”

“We have to be.”

She left and he looked up at the sky. Lisa was exactly right. The teeth proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt: they were tracking a new species! He didn’t feel different, but he supposed his life had just changed; perhaps all of theirs had. He smiled wide. A new species!

His smile faded. He still didn’t understand. How could the manta’s deep-sea cousin have teeth like this? He suddenly thought of the repairman who’d gone missing in the waters off Los Padres National Forest. Was there any way the rays had attacked him? But no, that wasn’t possible. Like elephants on land, mantas were incapable, literally physically incapable, of being anything other than docile. So didn’t their deep-sea cousin have to be docile as well? Jason couldn’t help but wonder. Because if they actually did have teeth like this, there was no ambiguity at all about what they had to be. Predators. Real, survival-of-the-fittest predators—nothing like manta rays at all. Jason still didn’t understand. How on earth could that be true?

IT WAS quiet at the ocean’s surface. With a full moon shining down, the only sounds came from the breaking waves and blowing wind.

Suddenly, a two-hundred-fifty-pound body shot out of the sea, flapping rapidly, clumsily, rising diagonally and throwing torrents of cold water everywhere. Then, feeling a gust of wind, the creature angled its horned head parallel to the ocean and, like a seagull, surged into a wind-assisted glide. It coasted for nearly fifty yards, gradually dipping lower, then nosed horns first into a large breaking wave. Then another body splashed out. Then another. Then fifty more. Within moments, thousands of juveniles were shooting out. Fully exposed, they revealed how much they’d grown, larger animals now, all with fierce builds made of solid muscle.

It was an explosion of activity, each creature doing its best to fly. Many failed, but others succeeded. With ferocious, awkward flapping, several hundred gradually climbed to heights of nearly two hundred feet before coasting back down. Others focused less on distance and more on learning a specific skill: the first thrust from the water, the first flapping motion once they emerged. Some tried to fly with the wind. Others against it. Others waited until there was no wind at all. Some tried to turn in the air. Others simply flew straight. A few tried nose-diving. Each tried something different. Like a flock of newborn birds, they continued to experiment.

A THIRD of a mile below the surface, the adults lay at the bottom, unseen. There were fewer of them now. Within just the past twenty-four hours, another 1,500 had died. Some from starvation. Others from a virus.

Two had died for another reason entirely. A shark had killed them. A dozen of the creatures had drawn the animal—a nine-hundred-pound hammerhead—into their darkened lair and attacked it. The shark had thrashed violently, biting anything and everything, and gashed two of them. Both rays eventually bled to death, but not until long after the shark itself had been ripped to shreds and eaten alive.

These predators had devoured tens of millions of sharks during their lifetimes. They’d tasted every type imaginable: hammerheads, requiems, carpets, goblins, great whites, and so many more. Each shark species has its own hunting style, and these creatures knew every one.

Some sharks rely strictly on sound or vibrations to hunt. Others rely largely on sight. Some hunt by locating electromagnetic pulses. Some by smell. Some use every one of those senses and more to varying degrees.

Some sharks approach prey quickly. Others are slower and circle around, sometimes for hours.

Some sharks are very finicky eaters and have sensitive noses. Others can’t smell at all and will eat anything.

Some sharks are small, not weighing more than twenty pounds. Others are huge, weighing three tons.

The sharks vary greatly, but they share one defining characteristic. They are stupid. They always come when they sense prey. This fatal flaw has caused a number of their species to be hunted to extinction. Like terramouth and megalodon. Man will never find either again because they no longer exist. They’ve been hunted far too efficiently.

These predators still bait sharks, just as they always have.

One was doing it at the moment.

Unseen in the blackened waters, it floundered frantically twenty feet above the ocean floor, contorting and twisting in every direction. The animal appeared to be distressed and out of control. It was anything but. Every one of its movements had been precisely choreographed, designed to generate vibrations that varied in frequency from ten to eight hundred hertz. The creature didn’t understand the concept of frequency bandwidths, per se, but what it did understand was that sharks use their senses to locate wounded fish; and that wounded fish move in a certain way and at a certain frequency. When that movement and its resulting frequency are duplicated precisely, the sharks always come. They swim right in, hungry and ready to eat their prey. Only when it’s too late do they discover who the prey really is.

The creature and more than one hundred others like it continued to shake. With vast numbers of other hungry animals lying in wait, the hope was to attract an entire shark school, perhaps numbering in the thousands. Nothing came. Not a school, not a family, not even a lone rogue. The thrashing ray was exhausted. It had been writhing for more than six hours. The sharks had been coming less and less often in recent months, and now they weren’t coming at all.