Swimming with sharks all in a day's work

Kelly Tarlton's aquarium curator Andrew Christie removes a snapper from a quarantine tank. Picture / Kenny Rodger

Wobby the 2.8m Australian carpet shark has a reputation as a grump, but today she has a reason. Generally an inactive bottom-dweller camouflaged in a paisley coat of brown, yellow and grey, she's swimming in agitated circles around the shark tank at Kelly Tarlton's Underwater World.

Aquarium curator Andrew Christie, standing in the tunnel below, spots a bulge on the wobbegong's belly. Her last meals haven't digested properly, he says, and they're fermenting. It's time to burp the carpet shark.

Dive gear on and weighted more than usual, Christie, 37, and two of his fellow "fishos" drop into the 3.3m deep tank and ambush Wobby as she swims towards them.

They slide an open-ended bag over her head. This prevents the shark using her long, pointed teeth on the divers but allows her jaws to open enough so Christie can poke in a hard "bite pipe".

As expected, Wobby struggles, tossing the two divers holding her head and tail.

The bubbles rising above all three men show they are ploughing through oxygen. Christie gets the bite pipe in and threads a soft, metre-long tube through that into Wobby's stomach.

Slowly, still wriggling in the divers' grip, the shark is rotated so she faces up.

Then Christie locates the bulge and massages it. After several minutes - long ones, Christie says - Wobby starts blowing big oily, stinky bubbles laced with half-digested fish.

Mission accomplished and the divers surface reeking of Wobby's last meal, an odour one of the fishos describes as spicy Thai noodles with tuna.

"I ain't so sure," says Christie, hooting with laughter. "You come up with it all through your hair, and even if you have a shower, it's with you all day."

Andrew John Christie - AJ to colleagues - delights in his work, but his funny anecdotes about life among the fishes don't mask the responsibility. He cares for more than 2000 creatures, only seven of them human.

Christie admits he's more comfortable making Orectolobus ornatus puke than dealing with large numbers of people - especially Homo journalistiens.

But he's grinning when he says it. Anything that teaches people about marine life, he reckons, is worth the effort.

Christie joined the aquarium 12 years ago with a degree in maritime biology from the University of Auckland. (In the weekends he helps to run the family deer farm at Kaukapakapa - that's 200 more animals.)

Childhood was suburban Birkenhead with librarian mum Colleen, architect dad Lindsay, brother Malcolm and an urban zoo of cats, pigeons, guinea pigs, pheasants, ducks and a turkey.

"Mum used to put duck eggs underneath the bantam hens," Christie recalls.

"But the ducklings that hatched obviously wanted to swim, so we used to fill up the wheelbarrow, and the mother hen would sit on the side and squawk her head off as the little ducklings ran up the ramp and into the water."

Home was near the park-like, waterside New Zealand Sugar Company property, where Christie went fishing. He'd spot sharks sliding in to breed

"I've always loved the water," he says. It is now his preoccupation - a huge, noisy, multi-million dollar network of pumps, tanks and cables combine to pump water in and out from the Waitemata Harbour, filtering out sediment and adjusting temperatures to mimic the seasons.

Christie's team of four full-time and three part-time staff record every last detail: temperature, quality and salinity, at what time the divers last cleaned the insides of the aquarium's two tanks, and how many fish each shark is eating at the twice-weekly hand-feeding sessions.

It keeps him awake some nights, especially when the animals are out of sorts: "Has something changed with their diet? Is something happening in the tank between species? Has the water changed quality or temperature? Have there been little kids coming past, banging on the glass?"

Visitors will never see one of the headaches - a venomous yellow-bellied sea snake discovered at Muriwai last year. It swims alone in a tank among the back-room pumps, "danger" notices on nearby walls.

The snake is still poorly, will never go on public display, and requires antibiotics for a snout infection caused by bumping against the glass walls. It won't eat, so needs force-feeding. Some have suggested Christie just bump it off.

"That's not the point," he says, standing on a stepladder over the tank and snatching up the snake, which starts writhing around his gloved hands. "It's a cost to the business to be able to rehabilitate them, but it's a buzz to see them go back into the wild."

Feeding is a three-person job - Christie holding, curator Myles Farmer tweezering thin herring slices into the snake's mouth. When it shows no inclination to swallow, the third party to this scene, the one holding the notebook, is asked to massage its bulging throat. Um. Okay, then. The snake feels muscular and powerful under its unexpectedly unslimy skin. A few strokes later, the bulge starts pulsing south.

Christie says he has two recurring bad dreams about work: one of them is "being nailed" by the sea snake, whose venom can kill. The second "is having my arm pulled out by the shark".

In reality, despite the number of hours he spends around stingrays, sharks and the hiwihiwi (native kelp fish) which like biting divers' lips, Christie is statistically more likely to be hurt driving home to Devonport where he lives with partner Karin Feickert, a flight attendant, and 18-year-old stepdaughter, Jessica.

Regularly fed animals pose little danger. No aquarium staffers have been badly hurt, although Kelly Tarlton's owns two species implicated in non-fatal human attacks: seven broadnose sevengills and Tommy the 1.7m bronze whaler. Still, says Christie, it's a compelling blend of awe and fear that makes handfeeding the sharks his favourite task.

"There is nothing like feeling the rasp of sharks on your wetsuit," he says, face animated. "You get mouthed sometimes, and you can feel the teeth starting to come through - it's an amazing feeling. They are not trying it on - they are hunting around looking for food."

Christie makes the sharks work for their grub, maintaining his grip on a fish tail after a shark has grabbed the other end: "I wiggle it a bit so it feels like a live one." It's time to let go when you can "feel these little pinpricks ... "

Being lashed by a stingray's barbed tail "is having your hand banged in a door".

Once, while his attention was elsewhere, Wobby floated down and sat on his lap. This is, apparently, not cute. Five divers are needed to herd big sharks into nets so they can be knocked out for the vet. "A distressed shark will snap at everything in its path".

Christie says it's hard not to anthropomorphise the animals. "You get attached to them, no doubt about it. You're quite protective of them. And you do find some animals are more gregarious with human contact than others."

Tommy, aged 7 and raised at the aquarium since he was a 30cm pup accidentally caught in a fisherman's net, is a favourite. But he's no fluffy bunny and once inadvertently bit clean through Christie's regulator hose.

Operational requirements mean that occasionally an animal has to be returned to the wild, and Christie can find those moments bittersweet. He describes the day he swam out with a broadnose sevengill that had been carried on a stretcher into the tide at Cornwallis beach. "I swam out with her for about 40 seconds, until she disappeared into the murk of the Manukau Harbour."

The released sharks "are carrying on their journey in life, but the sad thing is that she could be caught in a net later. But she's got the chance to be free".

"You want them to stay and be a part of your life ... but it is better to let the things you love go."