Rodney Orr was having a good day. By noon on that breezy Saturday in September nine years ago, the Santa Rosa, California, electrician was spearfishing 50 miles up the coast from San Francisco and had already taken his limit of abalone, so he decided to go for black snapper and ling. He kicked away from his fiberglass paddleboard and took a deep breath when suddenly he felt as if a boat had run over him. "I was ready to turn and make a dive, then the lights went out," Orr recalls. "All I heard was a big crunch, kind of like a garage door closing."
For a second or two he was enveloped in darkness, in water blackened with blood. Then it cleared and a glint of sunlight revealed rows of white teeth. As they pierced an eyelid and cheekbone on the left side of his face and ripped across his nose, he felt other teeth buried in his neck. Orr realized his entire head was in the grip of a shark. Then he saw the sea flashing below. "The shark had me up out of the water," he says. "And the sea was kind of flying by."
Orr flailed at the great white with his speargun in one hand and beat against the creature's teeth with his other hand, but the shark held his skull in a chillingly impassive grip as it thrashed him from side to side. Ten seconds after the attack began, it ended. "All of a sudden, I just popped out of the shark's mouth," says Orr. "He just let me go. When he went down I saw part of his head, and it was wider than my shoulders." Orr swam back to his paddleboard, a trail of blood marking the 60 or 70 feet the shark had carried him, and then paddled for shore as he tried to keep from passing out. He was picked up by a helicopter summoned by a passing highway patrolman, and by 10 P.M. he was home with nearly 80 stitches mapping the grisly encounter. Today, at age 58, Orr jokes that his scars blend with the weathering of his face. "The way the wrinkles went, that's the way the scars went," he says. "So I lucked out."
Why Orr survived--as do most human shark-attack victims--is one of the mysteries surrounding the great white shark, among the least understood of Earth's creatures. Even the size of great white populations--now a protected species in South Africa, Australia, and parts of the United States--is unknown. Scientists have seen as many as 18 sharks at one hunting ground off the California coast but won't hazard a guess about how many more there might be. "The problem is that we only see sharks when they make active attacks on prey," says ichthyologist Peter Klimley of the University of California at Davis.
The popular view of great whites--which most scientists refer to simply as whites--is at odds with the little that is known about them. Far from being the mindless killing machines of Jaws fame, they seem to observe social customs and rituals and appear to be particular about what they eat. They grow to 20 feet and more and can reach a weight of 5,000 pounds. Unlike most fish, they are born live, hatching inside the mother and emerging into the world five-and-a-half-feet long. But even basic information such as how and where the white shark mates remains unknown.
