ABSTRACT
This book was inspired by the cold glare of a shark, which happened to meet my eyes in a train station bookstore. A full spread on the cover of a diving magazine displayed the prize-winning picture taken by the underwater photographer Doug Perrine. The image is of two copper sharks (Carcharhinus brachyurus) having their way with a hapless school of sardines. With sardines still stuck between their teeth, they are darting through the evasively maneuvering swarm, and the glance of one of the sharks during this feeding frenzy seems to fixate on the diver’s camera. What Perrine managed to capture here so impressively is the famous sardine run – the annual migration of immense schools of sardines along the coast of South Africa. Their morphologies and dynamics number among the most fascinating phenomena of the animal kingdom that Alistair Fothergill and his team of BBC filmmakers had documented so vividly around the turn of the millennium. 1
