Two Men Snag Bull Shark Near Livingston Dam

By VANESA BRASHIER Features/special sections editor

LIVINGSTON, June 20, 2006 – When Trey Holmes and Mike Carnegie spread their arms wide to show the size of the fish they caught last week, they are not exaggerating. It really was that big, and then some.

The two local men were fishing with Holmes’ son and nephew below the Lake Livingston Dam when they snagged a 5-foot bull shark, a species normally seen only in saltwater.

Photo Courtesy of Anice Holmes

“Right when we put our boat in the water, we saw him. He was in real shallow water, about 2 feet deep,” said Carnegie. “At first, we thought he was a big spoon bill but, sure enough, it was a shark.”

The men pulled the shark, which was already in last throes of life, onto the bank.

“He had a cable leader (a device used for saltwater fishing) in his mouth,” said Carnegie, adding that this only added to the mystery of how the shark came to be so far up the river.

After pulling the shark from the water, Carnegie and Holmes left it on the bank. A few anglers fishing nearby wandered over to see the shark too.

“Everybody out there was like, ‘Oh, how in the heck did this shark get here?’ It was crazy when we first got him,” Carnegie said.

“We should have taken him to the marina because that is big stuff finding a shark in the river,” said Carnegie. “But we took his head, tail and fin so we could show them to people.”

When asked about the likelihood of a shark swimming so far upstream, Texas Parks and Wildlife Coastal Biologist Rebecca Hensley said there have been reports historically of sharks doing just that.

“I don’t know when the last time one did but bull sharks can go into fresh water. The frequency of them as far as Livingston is more than people realize but it’s still a rare event,” Hensley said.

In fact, fossil records prove that sharks have been traversing the Trinity River for existence.

General movement of sharks is associated with bait availability and breeding, so sharks could follow bait fish as they go upriver, she added.

“We haven’t had a lot of rain this year, so some of our bays, like the Trinity Bay, are saltier now than they normally are. That causes some of our fish to move up and in our rivers looking for some of the bait that stay on the freshwater interface,” she said. “That is why it is really critical for our estuaries to have rainfall at the right times in the correct amounts.

“When we have really dry years, we see a lot of saltwater fish move up into the freshwater areas. Last year, we saw a lot of that too – not sharks, but redfish, croakers and flounder, and a lot of different bait fish,” Hensley said.

Lack of rainfall can also increase the level of calcium and saline in the river, which can enable a saltwater fish to survive in freshwater areas.

“Some of our saltwater fish can survive but it depends on their tolerance to fresh water,” Hensley said.

Though the sighting of a bull shark, an especially aggressive species of shark, in the Trinity River may alarm some people, Hensley said the lake itself is safe from sharks since there is no way for them to get over the dam.

“There are other species in freshwater that have pretty sharp teeth, like gar, that can be just as dangerous. People just need to be aware of their surroundings, what is in the water and the dangers associated with being in the water,” said Hensley. “I wouldn’t let it stop me from going in the water.”

Aritcle Courtesy of the Polk County Enterprise, Livingston, TX

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