Januari 14, 2017
the third in the four speciesof sharks that i wanna share with you tonight isthe oceanic white tip shark, a shark that has been listedas the fourth most dangerous species of sharks if youpay attention to such lists. it's an animal that isa true pelagic predator. this animal lives wayout in the open ocean, hunts in deep water, occasionally risesto the surface, it's been called theship wreck shark,
because there are sort ofinfamous stories about them taking out sailorsthat were ship wrecked that are drifting at sea. but this is an animal thathas to be very efficient at hunting. the open ocean has beendescribed as the desert and there's only pocketsof life here and there so these animals have to bevery very good at what they do. oceanics tend to begenerally in size
between nine and12 feet in length. and they have thosebeautiful long pectoral fins, not unlike the thresher orthe blue shark that we saw but even longer. their scientificname, their latin name is longimanus whichwhen translated means the long hand orthe long fingers, which is an apt description. you can imagine ananimal like this,
swimming up toward the surface and then just gliding down. maybe a mile deepinto the ocean, looking for prey. completely effortlesslywith its pectorals, those dermal denticles,completely hydrodynamic just swooping in silently andnailing some deep water fish. very efficient predatorand this one as you can see is kinda, find itbeefy, kind of fat
so there's noproblem getting food. this is an image i made thatshows that distinct shape, the silhouette shape. this was in a place calledcat island in the bahamas. and it was back in 2006 thati did an expedition there as part of a story i wasdoing for national geographic because we had heardsome fish tales about oceanic white tips being seen there.
now oceanics hadn't been seen. i didn't know any diver thathad seen one in 20 or 30 years in the bahamas. but these sport fishermensaid they were catching yellow fin tuna and as theywere reeling in the tuna, they said that oceanicswere stealing the fish off their line. so on that gamble i wentout there for 16 days and in 16 days only found one.
but i brought a cage along because we didn't knowwhat we would find, this is wes pratt a sharkâ– biologist inside. turns out we were thereat the wrong time of year but if you go at differenttimes of year you can see more oceanic white tips. but oceanic white tips,as recently as about 1970 or in the early 70s weredescribed as the most abundant large animal on the planet.
most abundant largeanimal, large meaning anything bigger thana hundred pounds. so think about that,there must have been zillions of em out there. today they're 99% in decline. they're on theverge of extinction. largely because of their fins. their fins are highlypriced in shark fin soup. cat island in thebahamas is one of the only
remaining pockets ofoceanic white tips that's left on the planet. you can find them in hawaii, a little bit, sporadically. you can find themin the red sea, but this is really one ofthe only concentrations. this is my friend jeromearrow, a shark camera man swimming with one of them here. so it's one of the onlyplaces you could go
to photograph themand for this story, it's where i spent my time. we have two of emhere, it's like one is saying to the other one, don't look now but there'sa guy taking our picture over there. but, it's all donewith free diving, we're not using scuba with this, we're just snorkeling.
mask, snorkel,and fins and a wet suit. and it can get a littleinteresting when there's several of em around, there's threein this particular frame, especially when theocean is a little rough, they'll come in andoceanic white tips, as gimbel mentioned,will often bump. i've never seen their teethbut unlike some of the other species that are a littlebit more standoffish, they are quite curious andthey will come in and bump.
and when they do thatnictitating membrane, that white membranegoes over their eye to protect them. so if they were attacking prey that might scratch theireye, it's an evolutionary thing that they've developed. but beautiful animals. and on one of mylast days there, i photographed this pair.
and the one in theforeground as you see, has a satellite tag onit near the dorsal fin. and these are researchersthat have begun to tag these animals and try totrack their movements, they don't stay at cat island. and we're not quite sure ithink where they're going so, we need to knowthat information if we're gonna beable to protect them. bahamas has protected all sharks
which is a very good andprogressive thing to do but if they go somewhereelse and get killed, that wouldn't be good so, it's gonna be helpful to havethat sort of information. so i have another littlevideo of what it's like diving at catisland with me here, oops, maybe we don't. alright, well we'll just goright to great white sharks, how's that?
so the last species offcourse is great white sharks. that i wanted toshare with you tonight and as you may know, greatwhites are the largest predatory fish on earth. an absolute ultimate predator. this is an animal thatcan weigh well over a ton and has more than 300 bigserrated teeth in its mouth and it can grow tolengths of at least 20 feet, some anecdotal reportsof bigger ones out there
but we know at least 20 feet. but it's an animal thatis largely enigmatic. we know very littleabout great whites. we don't know howmany there are, or very much aboutthem in the places that we even get tosee brief glimpses. now you can imagine aterrestrial predator the size of apickup truck hunting along the coast of california.
you know, we would knoweverything there is to know about that animal. but in the sea,that's not the case. we don't get thatkind of access. so they do remainlargely enigmatic and very mysterious. for this story in the julyissue of national geographic, i worked in two locations. the first of whichwas south australia.
and i went to australiabecause it was a place where i thought i hada pretty good chance of seeing sharks. the first job indoing these stories is to be able to see thething you want to try to photograph andsometimes underwater, that's not always so easy. but it was also a locationwhere great white sharks have been observed andstudied for a very long time.
and there are some newtheories emerging about them. there's various hubs. it was always believed thatgreat whites were loners, that they pretty muchwandered the ocean alone by themselves but we knownow that there is some social behavior,there are these hubs where they tend tocongregate often for feeding or mating. but not much is really knownabout those social behaviors.
this is a photothat i made at dusk, when we see two greatwhites sort of moving in in this hunting behavior,they often get very frisky at sunset time. but besides thingsthat, complex behaviors like social behaviors as i said, we really don't know verymuch about anything else with these animals. we see some patterns intheir migratory behavior,
some seem to follow certainlittle highways in the ocean, but others are very random. it's not really understood andwe've never seen them mate, we don't know where greatwhites are having their pups, there their nursery grounds are. again there's some theories. there's one off in newyork that was described this year but a lot morehas to be done on that. and as i mentioned earlier too,
we don't even know how manythere are in the world. we can't decide ifthey're endangered or not. most scientists wouldthink that they are but there are those who thinkthe population's increasing while others thinkthey're declining. until recently, it wasbelieved that great whites only live toabout 35 years old but a new papercame out last year that said that they livewell into their seventies.
so imagine this predator that'swandering thousands of miles in the course of a year andliving well into its seventies. you know what kind of wisdom might an animallike that possess. i don't know that we'llever tap into that but, it's certainly funto think about. for me, photographically,australia was a place where i could get close andmake pictures of these animals and try to show thatgrace and power.
it's nothing like a greatwhite, it just exudes confidence and to the degree that i couldshow it through photography their personality. i think all animalshave personalities and sharks certainly do. tigers have a differentpersonality than great whites, but even within a singlespecies, you know, some sharks are alittle more bold, others are shy, this wasan animal that had a broken
dorsal fin and herpersonality was pretty mean. she was not very happy,i think she didn't like having that broken dorsal there. but it was also, southaustralia was the only place in the world that i knew of where i could makebottom pictures. most of the white sharkphotos we see are up in the water columnin the blue water. but this was a placewhere the operator
i was working withhad a bottom cage and we could send itdown 60 to 80 feet or so and have a chance ofseeing sharks over the benthic region. now it was a tricky thing to do because the cagewas always moving. as the boat moved, the cagewas bouncing along the bottom so, and there was also thisbig wall of silver jacks, these fish that would just,like a curtain of mirrors
all around. so in order to make this photo, which i hadn't reallyseen anything like this before, i had to open thedoor of the cage and sort of lean out andpunch through that wall of fish, scatter the fish,and then for a few seconds i saw this white sharkswimming through this forest, coming towards this ray. they do predate on rays,
this one didn't get eaten, but they're alsothere to eat seals, but a different view thatmight engage the reader of the magazineto wanna know more about these amazing creatures. i also worked in surfacecages out there as well. i didn't ever getout of the cage because there's alwaysa lot of sharks. there was usually at leastthree or four of em around
and they were checking you out. i mean they would come right in. this was one on sortof a rainy rough day at the surface. and the operatori was working with had a single person cage that he didn't usually use but he let me use it, the reason he doesn'tlet most people use it
is because it has thesebig openings in it and sometimes the white sharks can get a little curious and they'll startpoking their nose in. now usually whenthey get curious, you just poke em withyour camera housing and they get deterredand they swim away but, i had one day whenabout a 14 foot male was a little over anxiousand sort of just started
coming in and he endedup getting caught between my strobecord and my strobe arm and he ended upripping the strobe cord off the camera housing, i almost lost the entire rig, it's about a 30, 25thousand dollar rig. i ended up just loosing athree thousand dollar strobe but, trevor frost, who'sin the audience tonight was assisting me there andhe had a gopro in the water.
so i'm gonna show a little clip that shows me try towrestle this shark to get my camera back. at the end i didn't have fins on so i walking up theside of the cage. can't see it that great but,anyway we'll have a look. (soft music) - oh well, i'mpretty sure i got it. - yeah.
so i lost the strobebut i kept the camera so that was the good news. well the other locationfor this story, the last locationfor the evening here is cape cod massachusettsmy home waters where i live andwhere i started out. what's happening in cape codis actually unique i think in the animal kingdom. what we have is anewly emerging hub
for white shark activity. there's about five knownhubs of white shark activity in the world. but cape cod is the newest one. and it's only startedhappening since about 2009, when the white sharkshave re-emerged here. and this would be analogous to a new pride of lionsemerging in the serengeti. and i'm not aware of anyother new group of predators
just sort of takingup residency somewhere but that's what'shappening in cape cod. it seems as though there'ssome anthropological evidence that seems to indicatethat there was a robust seal population in massachusetts back in the 1600s aroundthe time that the pilgrims came there but they werewiped out by sealers. so they were gonefor hundreds of years but in 1972, with the marinemammal protection act,
they were protected and theseseals have slowly come back and overtime the sharkshave come back as well. chatham is sort of theepicenter of all this activity in the middle of cape cod and they have sort ofembraced their sharkiness. all kinds of little nick knacksand sharky stuff for sale in many of the gift shops, at least untilsomething happens. but yeah so thisis where i worked.
i spent two seasons out there trying to tell thisemerging story. very difficult place to work. but this is why thesharks are there as i mentioned the growingnumber of grey seals. this is what's fordinner, at least if you're a great white shark, theyseem to be singularly focused on seals. they're not feeding onfish or anything else,
they just come hereto feed on the seals. and this is anaerial photo i made of one of these great whites. you can see in thelower right of the frame and all those seals,they're hunting in very very shallow water. most of theliterature that exist, all of the literaturethat exist says that for a great white shark tohunt a pinniped, a seal,
it needs about 80 feetof water to ambush them. but we've beendocumenting predation in as shallow as fiveor 10 feet of water. so this is a unique strategy, unique in the world. not all of theirattacks are successful. this was a grey sealthat was attacked and got away, but it did actuallydie later so,
they're not always, i don'tknow what their success rate is, it hasn't been measured, butthat's what's going on there. in the years since 2009, the state biologistwith mass state fishery he's a friend of mine gregschumble, has been conducting a population study. what he does is hegoes out on a boat with a big pulpit like this, we use spotter planesto help find the sharks
and then we get ourboat in position, or he gets his boat in position and he'll put alittle gopro camera on the end of a long pole and try to get some video of it. and each shark hasunique markings, they might have scars ordifferent counter shading patterns on them so he'sbeen able to identify in just the last few years
over 200 individuals. so you know jawswas about one shark, we've got over 200 at least and no doubt there'sgonna be a lot more. but you can also see inthis picture i made of greg doing that study, how closethey come to the beach. this is nauset beach in orleans, which is right near chatham, most popular beach on cape cod.
and i was out therefor two seasons and everyday i'd see surfersand boogie borders and people. one day these guys sawme out there in the boat and they scratched in the words shark with a questionmark on the beach there. so i climbed up ontop of the pilot house and i yelled, yes. there is one right here. so far we've beenable to co-exist
and the sharks seemvery discriminating about what they're hunting but who knows. but photographically, thiswas one of the most difficult things i've ever done. these are completelywild sharks, they can't be chummed in. they have no interest as a rule in coming close to the boat.
the researchers up there have used all kindsof attractance and things and nothing works to get em close to the boat. so my first season up there, the best i could dowas a pole cam picture. this is a picture i madewhile our boat was underway of one of these giantgreat white sharks in that very murky water.
there's lots of currents, youcouldn't use a cage there, you wouldn't see anything and the currentswould blow it over. pretty impressive tailthough, right, shark tail. but i eventually figuredthat what i needed to do was build a seal decoy. so i went back to myfriends at woods hole and we built thisbig great seal. we tried to make it asauthentic as possible,
like an adult grey seal. i had the head sculptedby a model maker and we put cameras insidewith fiber optic cables and i could watch inreal time and live view back on the boat. we had a little wet suitcarved like a seal body here and we would deploy it dayand night, day and night, day and night, and nothing. sharks had absolutelyno interest.
they were laughing asthey gave me the fingers, they just went by. and that was about it. so over the winteri went home dejected and wasn't sure iwas gonna have story. i didn't know if i'dget any pictures. but over the winter italked to a friend of mine who's a veterinarian on cape cod and also a shark researcher
and he had also beenworking on his own seal decoy design. and he had perfected it. he got it to a point where it was a much simpler design. a much smaller seal design, only about three orfour feet in length. and he said he was having alittle bit of success with this. so i took his design and iadapted my cameras to it.
what i needed to dowas put a wireless underwater camera inthere that i could trigger from hundreds of yards away, i didn't want anycables in the water. and i also had to have realtime video in there as well that i could see on the boat. so i deployed these last summer and the sharks were interested. now the trick was you wanted one
that would come upand check it out, but you didn't wantone that would eat it, because that would be very bad. and that happened, that happenedon a number of occasions where the great whitewould come up and destroy the seal decoy. we had ones that didn'thave cameras in em but em, so this ismaybe 30 or 40 yards off monomoy beach in chatham.
well this picture waspublished in the july issue. the cape cod chamber ofcommerce was especially pleased. they sent me thank you notes. but it's aninteresting behavior. what's happening hereit's not like south africa where these animals arebreaching out of the water and so forth, but it is unique in the world and there's a lot morethat needs to be studied.
i have a little video thatshows some of that decoy work. (slow music) so using that systemi was able to produce the very firstunder water pictures of a great white sharkin cape cod waters. one of these days where theshark just sort of was curious, came up to the seal andusing that rig on the boat where i had the video i couldremotely fire the camera, wirelessly fire it andmake these portraits.
you can see very shallow waters, a shadow on the bottom, maybe five feetdepth here of water. and very murky, this onehad pilot fish with it and this one i named mike tyson because he had a littletattoo on his face there. i think those are scratchesfrom the seal but, i think we certainly havea very long way to go in truly understandingthese sharks.
we may never understandem, but each year i think we'repeeling back layers and learning a little bit more. and i have to say that despitethe devastating decline of sharks, all species ofsharks around the planet, i think we're maybeat a point now where we're turning the corner, where we're beginning toappreciate these animals, through photography and filmwe're creating a new ethic
and maybe we're comingto the understanding that the world isindeed a better place with sharks in it. so in closing i thinkback to when i began looking like liberace here. many decades ago wheni was spending time on stinky fishing boats, ladeling churm into the sea in hopes of just seeing ashark and i didn't know then,
those decades ago thatin the years ahead, i would actually findmyself in the company of many many sharks and icouldn't have known then that i would cometo see these animals as a species in peril. that for all their strength, they remain fragile andcompletely powerless against the overfishingthat's eradicating them from our oceans.
so all these yearslater i find myself still on boats in less thancomfortable conditions, decades spent at sea, which is the price i pay forjust a few precious moments underwater in the company ofthese magnificent animals, where i try to shinea light on them and help to tell their story. so to end i started withmy blue shark story, my very first and i wantedto end with a little video
that was done while iwas on rhode island. it was a one hour documentary in the nationalgeographic channel about my shark work andthis was in rhode island when i was looking for makos but i found my oldfriends the blue sharks. so that'll be the wrap up. my mako story continues,this is the third location in which i've worked.
i started in sandiego california. then earlier this yeari was in new zealand. but these are my home waters. new england is where ifirst started diving. so over the last severaldays we've seen some makos, but they've beena little bit shy, they haven't really comein close to the camera but today was a spectacularday with blue sharks. blue sharks were the veryfirst species of shark
that i ever photographed,i think it was 1982 when i was out inthese same waters and spent an afternoonswimming with a blue shark. so i have a real funplace in my heart for these animals. they're alsostunningly beautiful. they're shaped like an aircraftwith these big pectoral fins that are like thewings of a glider in this long slenderfusologe like body
and their indigo backs, and their discolorationsis really quit exquisite. to see one or twoon recent trips, was sort of theaverage but today, we really hit the jackpot. we had over a dozen, i'dsay maybe 15 or more. and it's a nice opportunitywhen the sun begins to go down to start making somedramatic pictures. so i love to work in low light
where i have somecontrol over the colors and the movement of the animals, a great opportunityfor photography even though it wasn'tthe prime target. and what i'm tryingto do with this is bring readers intothe world of the shark. when you see one, whenyou actually see an animal like a mako shark underwater, you just can'tbelieve that nature
has sculptedsomething so perfect. seeing a dozen or moreblue sharks here today was a hopeful thing for me. i know that their numbershave been dessimated throughout the atlanticocean and this is somewhat of an anomaly. but it does give me hope. i believe we're at a momentwhere the traction is occurring, we're making some momentum,
and if this continues, if weall keep beating that drum, i think the futurecould be bright. thank you very much. (audience applause)
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