‘You hear the one about the attack of the killer shrimp?’ : Tall Fish Tales Come in All Shades of True

This fish tale we will call, “The Attack of the Mantis Shrimp.”

About a year ago San Diego fisherman Ron Rogers landed the 12-inch shrimp, a curious-looking, bright pink bit of sea life with two bulbous eyes and blue and yellow appendages.

The unsuspecting Rogers began to remove the hook from his catch, named for its likeness to the praying mantis. Unlike the insect, however, the mantis shrimp conceals razor-sharp claws that work like a switch-blade knife.

“It has lightning fast responses--4/100s of a second--so you can’t see it happen,” explains Bob Snodgrass, aquarium curator at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. “The manta shrimp around here is capable of inflicting a wound if you are not careful.”

That’s what fisherman Rogers discovered. “It slashed his finger,” Snodgrass said. “He needed stitches.”

Newspapers and television stations trumpeted the fish story as “Shrimp attacks man!”

Fast-forward to a more recent tale. Call it, “The Voracious Wahoo.”

Lou Wiczai, 71, of Fountain Valley was minding his own business three weeks ago aboard a chartered fishing boat 230 miles south of the Baja California port of Cabo San Lucas. Suddenly, from the ocean deep, a 60-pound wahoo flung itself 12 feet into the air and across the boat deck right at Wiczai’s face.

Wiczai, an old Navy man, threw up his arm, which took the full force of the wahoo’s assault. The fish, a toothy cousin of the mackerel, inflicted only a nasty three-inch gash.

“If I hadn’t put my arm up, it would have hit me in the face,” Wiczai recalled from a hospital bed, recovering from his wounds, including severed tendons.

Although Wiczai fought off the wahoo, he couldn’t ward off the horde of reporters who tracked him to his hospital room, drawn to the story like sharks to blood.

“It’s the sort of thing that . . . gets a lot of coverage,” said Robert Lea, state Department of Fish and Game marine biologist. “If you have a plane crash and a shark attack on the same day, the shark attack would get more coverage.”

Is this the Moby Dick syndrome? Do we have here real-life images of the Old Man and the Sea?

Just how often do salt water demons attack man?

“It’s like getting landed on by a kangaroo,” said Richard Rosenblatt, Scripps professor of marine zoology. “It’s not intentional. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Obviously, it (the wahoo) didn’t attack anybody,” Rosenblatt insisted. “The only thing they would be interested in attacking would be something they could eat.”

Wahoo, fish experts agree, often become excited when the water is crowded with bait. During such feeding frenzies, wahoo have been known to leap from the sea and collide teeth-first with man.

“What happened was this goldarn fish came up out of the deep beneath the lure and made a lunge for the lure but he missed it,” Wiczai recalled. “The fish was not after me. He was after the lure. He missed the lure, and I happened to be in the way.”

Killed a Lot of Investors

If not wahoo, which fish do pose a threat to humans?

“Snail darters; they killed a lot of investors,” is the tongue-in-cheek opinion of John McCosker, director of the Steinhart Aquarium of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

(At a time when it was classified as an endangered species, the snail darter minnow stopped construction of the Tennessee Valley Authority dam for years.)

Seriously, McCosker continued, “only one (type of fish) is responsible for attacks on human beings. People who have been attacked by white sharks in California have been killed.

“But when you consider the billions of recreational hours spent by people on our coastline, the chances of being attacked (by a shark) are . . . “ minuscule.

According to the state Department of Fish and Game, the most recent shark attack along the California coast occurred in about 30 feet of water in Carmel Bay on Dec. 8. The last fatality was in 1984 near Pigeon Point in San Mateo County.

Man Poses a Danger

There have been only 58 shark attacks, five of them fatal, in California waters in the 60 years that records have been kept. Conversely, man poses a great danger to the shark.

McCosker estimates there are “several hundred thousand times a summer we are eating white and thresher sharks . . . to the degree that some elasmobranchologists (shark studiers) are very concerned that there’s too much shark-eating going on.

“We’re worried about certain sharks becoming rare.”

Mark J. Skidgel, 24, perhaps the City of Yorba Linda’s only shark attack victim, has a different perspective on sharks.

“It was on my birthday; I just turned 18,” Skidgel recalled. “I was in Hawaii out in the water riding the waves. I was lying on the (surf) board and was hit from the left side.”

At first Skidgel thought the jolt was a bump from his surfing buddy, just fooling around. But Skidgel rolled to his right and looked back to his left directly into the eyes of a 14-foot great white shark that wasn’t fooling at all.

‘Went Down Eight Feet’

“The scary part was when he pushed me down with the board between us,” Skidgel said. “We probably went down eight feet.”

When Skidgel finally surfaced about 50 feet from shore with blood trickling from his side, he bobbed in the water, unaware of where the great white had gone.

Finally, he spotted the dorsal fin. It was moving away.

Skidgel was saved by a combination of rolling away from the closing jaws and the shark’s overbite. The top teeth made contact with Skidgel’s side, but the bottom teeth closed on the plastic foam board and nothing else.

“I consider it a close call more than anything,” Skidgel said. “I guess it happens once in a lifetime.”

As with the wayward wahoo and man-attacking shrimp, Skidgel’s shark attack made big, if somewhat distorted, news.

The National Enquirer even paid him for a first-person account, which after editing still bore some resemblance to the actual attack, Skidgel said.

‘Much Overstated’

“Jackie Onassis made the page ahead of Mark,” fondly recalled his father, Erik Holsher, himself also a fish attack victim. (Holsher was once stung by a stingray.)

Fish tales have been spun for centuries, of course, and in most cases yarns like “Moby Dick” and “Jaws” are “much overstated,” according to Bob McAllister, state Department of Fish and Game marine biologist.

“The Jonah and the whale myth probably is based on . . . somebody eaten by a giant grouper, not a whale. It’s a very large, bass-like fish” capable of swallowing up to 1,000 pounds, McCosker said.

But for the most part, fish pose little threat, striking rarely and then often in self-defense, the experts say.

“The moray eel is another vastly overrated predator,” McCosker said. “There’s also a fish called the scorpion fish and it has a venomous spine and if you were stupid enough to sit on one, it wouldn’t kill you but it will hurt like crazy. But a blood-crazed scorpion fish? No.”

Ian Baird was 15 in 1981 when he was struck in self-defense. A whale whacked him clear out of the water off Laguna Beach.

“I went out to the beach to go swimming,” Baird recalled. “Some whales came in real close. I swam out to them, 50 yards offshore.

‘Went Under Me’

“I was just watching them and one came up real close to me and went under me . . . then it came up underneath me,” lifting him out of the sea.

“I tried to get back to shore and it hit me,” he added.

Baird thinks the whale did it on purpose.

“This is when the whales are on their way back up from Gulf of Mexico,” he said. “It may have been protecting its young. I was invading their territory.”

Baird was hospitalized about a week with a bruised kidney and internal bleeding.

“It knocked the wind out of me,” he recalled. “They are powerful.

“I still surf and everything, but I just keep away from the whales,” said Baird, a broker.

As Rosenblatt explained: “When somebody spears a fish, you can’t blame them (the fish) for biting. I’m, of course, excepting sharks.”

“Along the California coastline,” McCosker agreed, “sharks are attacking us because they want to eat us, not (because of) an argument over territory. The white shark doesn’t confuse us for another” fish. “Sharks like us too much. They want to eat us.

Sharks in Ohio

“Dangerous species of sharks have been seen in Ohio, up the Mississippi River, more than 1,000 kilometers up river--bull sharks. I don’t say that in jest. That’s the name of the shark.”

In 1975 a six-foot blue shark was spotted in Baldwin Park, about 20 miles east of Los Angeles and 30 miles from the nearest saltwater.

Baldwin Park Police Officer John Smart strolled into the department parking lot after dinner and found the predator on the hood of his patrol car, dead as a, excuse the phrase, mackerel.

Naturally, the shark sighting attracted plenty of news coverage. Of such stuff are fish tales woven.

Experts stress that implausible tales are most often just that: implausible. Nevertheless, Rosenblatt allowed, “There are some mysteries in the sea.”

“There was a story about a bale of rubber that washed in with half a dozen swordfish beaks stuck in it in the 1800s,” Rosenblatt recounted. “That’s always puzzled me.”

Probably Lost Off a Ship

The rubber was probably being transported aboard a ship and somehow was lost overboard.

But swordfish normally do not stab their prey, Rosenblatt said. Moreover, they do not swim in schools, making several “attacks” highly unlikely.

“Yet there are accounts of sailing ships being dry-docked and they would find swordfish beaks through oak and copper sheathing,” Rosenblatt said.

Although he doubts the broken-off swordfish beaks are evidence that the fish attacked the ships, Rosenblatt confesses that “the bale of rubber seems a little hard to understand.”

“That bale of rubber was the most outrageous fish story I’ve ever heard,” he said.