When I was 14, I won a National Science Foundation grant to spend some time at the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory, working with the Shark Lady, Dr Eugenie Clark. It was a great experience, I and the other student interns would help out on the shark boat that harvested the big hammerheads, bulls, lemons and tigers off our trot lines offshore. If the fish did not survive the stress of capture, we kept them for dissection and study. Those still alive we brought back and released into our shark pens where the scientists were conducting some behavioral experiments and operant conditioning.

I told my grandfather about this, and he asked if I had seen a specimen of “la tintorera”. I asked him what a “tintorera” was, and he replied; “la hembra del tiburon”, the female of the shark. I told him what I knew from my reading, which had been confirmed by my hands-on experience at the lab. The male and female sharks are identical in appearance, except for their claspers (the twin penises males carry at the base of their anal fins).

“You’re mistaken, Mr Know-it-all. Ask any fisherman and he’ll tell you. The female shark has a striped and spotted back, and she is larger, more aggressive and more vicious than her mate. Everybody knows that. It is common knowlege.”

My grandmother’s brother-in-law was a waterman on Tampa Bay, and he had been crabbing those waters for years after he emigrated from Cuba. My grandfather had worked with him on his boat during the Depression and the cigar worker strikes of the 1930s. My grandfather was a city boy, well read, but his knowledge of marine biology came solely from that limited maritime experience. Still, that’s what the fisherman said, and fishermen must know the sea better than anyone else. Certainly, no snot-nosed kid and Cracker professor were going to challenge true experience.

I was one of those obnoxious kids that always had his nose buried in a book, and I immediately figured out what a tintorera was–the whale shark, a very large but thoroughly harmless plankton feeder often seen cruising the surface, mouth agape, hoovering up tiny fish and crustaceans from the sunlit upper waters. Small boat fisherman seeing this gentle monster leisurely gliding just under surface of the tropic sea must have created this elaborate fiction of the tintorera, and it had spread, with numerous embellishments, to the population as a whole. I’ve since learned that the tintorera myth is a common Cuban folk superstition, it wasn’t just abuelo pulling my leg.

I tried to explain to grandfather that I had personally cut open a dead lemon shark and its belly had been full of baby lemons, (sharks bear their young alive) flipping, flopping, and pissed as hell and my fellows and I had to rush around barefoot catching the snapping little buggers and throwing them into the shark pens before they died on the dock. Surely, the lemon was a female, by process of elimination, and except for her lack of claspers, she was externally indistinguishable from the male of her species.

Grandfather would have none of it. No reason or evidence or witness testimony could dislodge him. “There’s more to this world than book learning.” My grandfather was an intelligent man, and well-educated, but he had a distrust and suspicion of the academic, the elitist expert, that I have since learned is not solely a characteristic of Cubans.