Blog about "The World's best Shark Dive" by Beqa Adventure Divers.
Featuring up to eight regular species of Sharks and over 400 different species of fish, Shark diving doesn't get any better!
Brazzaville - The government of Congo-Brazzaville has banned shark fishing off its Atlantic coast to prevent depletion of stocks caused by massive demand in Asia for shark fins, the government announced Sunday.
Cristina must be delighted!
Bloody excellent!
Correct me if I'm wrong - but this would be the first African nation to do this?
Which of course begs the question, if the small island nations and emerging market economies can do this, what about the rich, "enlightened" nations that are so long on telling others what to do and so short on doing the right thing themselves?
Europe?
Australia and New Zealand?And what about South Africa with its legacy of excellent terrestrial wildlife stewardship and its thriving Shark tourism business?
Oh for crying out loud!!! This has come as a complete surprise, at least to me!
Did you know? Turns out that theSouthern Bluefin of Tuna Cowboys fame is in even worse shape than his Northern relative! Which once again begs the question, what were those inept monkeys in Doha DOING - campaigning for the wrong species??? Those people should have known about the issue since at least 2005!
Quite frankly, I'm totally shocked. Gotta do some digging and try and wrap my head around this utter and total conservation debacle. More as a clearer picture emerges.
Now, more details are starting to emerge. New Zealand's 3News have aired a stellar piece on Clinton Duffy's GW research including a first glimpse at the tracks - and I notice that Grim (4:20 ff in blue) has navigated tantalizingly close to the SRMR! Alas, the embedding feature has not been enabled - but you can watch the program online right here.
Very much looking forward to the published results! Keep watching this space!
She's smart, she's pretty and she's here! And yes, having just landed upon our shores, she's way too pasty as well - but we're working on that! :)
Meet Kirsty Richards, Juerg's newest protégée. She's here to work with our smaller Sharks as part of her master thesis and we very much look forward to reading her posts on Juerg's Fiji blog. Focusing on Sharks other than our flagship Bulls is important and long overdue as it will help round up what we know about the dynamics at play within the SRMR. Juerg is continuing to decipher our huge data base and having been shown some excerpts, I know that the latest Bull Shark abundance paper will soon be followed by an analysis of the other Sharks, something that will undoubtedly dovetail very nicely with Kristy's research.
Anyway, very much looking forward to all of this! As to the exact meaning of the intra- and interspecific variations along the shy-bold continuum: we shall see shall we not! :)
Finally protected - unbelievable pic by Jimmy, you simply must click for detail!
In all the joy about Fiji, let's not forget the Bahamas! I've run of of time for a lengthy post but if you really dunno what I'm talking about, read today's various press releases on the Pew Global Shark Conservation webpage and on the blogroll on the right hand side!
I must say, I am overjoyed - and that would be an understatement! Today's media release by Kalpana Prasad of the Fiji Ministry of Information reads as follows.
(Wednesday 06 July 2011, No:1398/MOI) Fiji reviews fisheries law to protect the 'King of the Seas'
First it was turtles and now the Fijian Government is out to protect sharks. A new landmark policy to counteract the alarming decline of sharks in Fiji is being drafted by Government.
Department of Fisheries and Forests permanent secretary Commander Viliame Naupoto confirmed that a review of Fiji’s fisheries laws would include a ban on the trade of all shark fin and other products derived from any type of shark that is captured in Fiji waters.
The ban only affects trade and does not stop villagers from consuming shark meat.
Commander Naupoto clarified the proposed ban was being styled upon a ban protecting turtles. The only variation from the turtle ban is that locals can still consume shark meat.
The policy aligns the fisheries department vision of achieving growth and ensuring food security through sustainable marine resource management as outlined by Pillar 5 of the People’s Charter for Change, Peace and Progress. The pillar makes clear that the achievement of higher economic growth can be achieved through the agriculture and marine sectors but this must be carried out in a sustainable manner.
“We want to ban all trade of shark products in Fiji, in order to conserve this species,” Commander Naupoto said. “We are reviewing the fisheries management law and in it we want to incorporate the ban of all shark meat and products in Fiji, especially the trade of shark fins.”
Sharks often termed the ‘king of the seas’ with their position at the top of the marine food chain, play a critical role within these ecosystem by controlling the population of certain marine species. “If those animals have no predator than their increase can cause an imbalance in the marine ecosystem and can affect the middle of the food chain, which is where we get most of our livelihood from,” he said.
Commander Naupoto said the emerging market in shark tourism had huge potential in Fiji, as an economic exchange earner but also in terms of providing employment to the local communities. “Due to the emerging new trends in shark tourism in the country, sharks are more valuable to us alive than dead,” he said.
Beqa Adventure Divers director and shark conservationist Mike Neumann highlighted that Beqa Adventure Divers generated about $3million in direct and indirect revenue that were all invested in Fiji. “It has been shown that divers will prefer and pay a premium for destinations where they are likely to encounter Sharks.” Mr Neumann said.
“Every single tourist coming to Fiji, does so because of Fiji’s pristine marine environment, if Fiji’s oceans die, the tourists will go somewhere else where the sea is not depleted. “They have a choice – we do not, we will end up losing an industry that contributes to 55 per cent of Fiji’s GDP. Conversely, if Fiji protects Sharks, it will over time have a huge competitive advantage over other island states that do not.”
Neumann said globally all sharks were endangered because they mature late in life and have only few offspring, meaning that trying to restore depleted shark populations is practically impossible as it would take decades, even centuries for slow growing species. “This legislation will be hailed worldwide and contribute substantially to enhancing the positive impression of the Government of the day,” he added.
Results of the review of the fisheries law will be submitted to Cabinet. “Our paper should go to Cabinet with the intention of protecting sharks, we have circulated the paper once and it is in to its second circulation,” said Commander Naupoto. “In the interests of the sustainable management of marine resources he hopes reviews to the fisheries laws will be approved by year end.”
Fiji will be the first Melanesian country to approve such a law.
-ENDS-
How GREAT is that!!! It has already been reported by the FBCL and by today's main news on FijiTV, and will very likely be featured in all of the Nation's newspapers tomorrow. For our Fijian readers: tomorrow Thursday July 7 please tune into Fiji Gold's Talk Back program at 11am and tell them about your support for this visionary legislation! Internet users can listen in by going to the FBCL website, putting the cursor over the Fiji Gold icon and then clicking on Listen Live.
Our involvement? Before you start thinking that I may be hinting that yours truly, or BAD may have played some pivotal role in achieving this: no we have not. But after so many years of successful cooperation with Government and having made public statements about the need for Shark protection, I've kinda become the go-to man when it comes to proffering pro-Shark sound bites, and I was thus asked to say something.
Having been graciously kept in the loop, I however know who did this. So before the usual suspects start beating their chests, here are the people that have been working tirelessly to make this happen
Very much first and foremost: The Fiji Department of Fisheries, namely our good friend Principal Research Officer Aisake Batibasaga, the Director Commander Naqali and the Permanent Secretary Viliame Naupoto, and their teams. I must say, ever since I've come to Fiji to talk about Sharks, Fisheries have been unbelievably open, supportive and proactive, being in helping create the SRMR and the Shark Corridor, in training our Fish Wardens, in supporting the Fiji Shark Conservation and Awareness Project or more recently, in mediating contacts to planters under our Mangroves for Fiji project (excellent news there, too - keep watching this space!). A big Vinaka Vakalevu and congratulations for showing the way forward in Melanesia!
In brief, this is very much a Fijian initiative. But, there have been two NGOs who have extended their assistance.
Surprise surprise, the simply unrivaledPew Environment Group's global shark campaign, namely Matt, Jill, Liz and Angelo and probably more members of their team. It's not for me to divulge details of their involvement but I can say that it has been invaluable and will continue to remain so as the legislation is being drafted and then implemented.
CORAL The Coral Reef Alliance under the leadership of Rick MacPherson and locally, under the management of our friend Heidi Williams and of several members of her team. CORAL is notorious for getting things done and this project is certainly no exception. Well done!
As always, this is not a done deal quite yet. The law needs to be approved by Cabinet, drafted and gazetted and then comes the hard part, i.e. the Capacity Building, the Enforcement and at the same time, the Outreach. And there will undoubtedly be backlash, as there always is.
But I am highly optimistic. I was extremely grateful to read this statement of support by a prominent Tuna fisheries executive. Fiji's Tuna industry is currently being assessed for MSC certification and this statement is certainly an indication of its commitment to sustainability. Well done Russell! The bycatch argument is of course valid - but there are cheap and nifty solutions that actually result in a win-win for everybody, and my hope is that the legislation will include a provision that caught Sharks must be discarded whether alive or dead, this to avoid creating a convenient loophole.
Goblin Sharks as seen by Kristen Campbell of the Polarkeet Den - click twice for detail!
Talking about weird Sharks (and here!), behold the Goblin Shark! Looking at the following aquarium video, it looks kinda cute albeit weird and not at all deserving of the name.
But then, here comes the protractile business end! Goblinesque indeed!
Very possibly, by swimming there from Oz! They got there because a few pregnant females got lost around the Cape of Good Hope some 450,000 years ago and ended up in the Atlantic Ocean, according to scientists from Aberdeen University. This is a beautiful hypothesis and a fantastic paper and everybody should read it!
Talk about an epic going walkabout!
Antipodean white sharks on a Mediterranean walkabout? Historical dispersal leads to genetic discontinuity and an endangered anomalous population Chrysoula Gubili, Raşit Bilgin, Evrim Kalkan, S. Ünsal Karhan, Catherine S.Jones, David W. Sims, Hakan Kabasakal, Andrew P. Martin and Leslie R. Noble
The provenance of white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) in the Mediterranean is both a conundrum and an important conservation issue. Considering this species's propensity for natal philopatry, any evidence that the Mediterranean stock has little or no contemporary immigration from the Atlantic would suggest that it is extraordinarily vulnerable. To address this issue we sequenced the mitochondrial control region of four rare Mediterranean white sharks. Unexpectedly, the juvenile sequences were identical although collected at different locations and times, showing little genetic differentiation from Indo-Pacific lineages, but strong separation from geographically closer Atlantic/western Indian Ocean haplotypes.
Historical long-distance dispersal (probably a consequence of navigational error during past climatic oscillations) and potential founder effects are invoked to explain the anomalous relationships of this isolated 'sink' population, highlighting the present vulnerability of its nursery ground
And then, there is Malta.
There, the Great White is protected thanks to our friend the indefatigable Sharkman, it is there that the largest ever GW was thought to have been caught (since debunked) and it is from there where we're being regularly entertained with fishy tales of attacks and further catches.
Thing is, we know next to nothing.
From what I understand, everybody knows there's GWs but nobody seems to be studying, let alone tracking them. Maybe this may be a fertile new ground for somebody of the caliber of Domeier instead of wasting energy on combating the territorial Californians?
Just a suggestion! :)
BTW Junior is doing just fine.
The latest ping shows him migrating normally and he's due to track back shortly - and I must say, I'm very much looking forward to the comments, and the images (!) by Domeier's abuse spouting detractors when he shows back at the Farallones!
Junior tracks: 2009/2010 offshore migration in yellow and the 2010/2011 offshore migration in red
Now Randy Honebrink et al have published the report.
Nothing spectacular but still worth reading, be it only because this is the first ever documented attack by a Cookiecutter Shark on a living person, as previously documented bites have all been post mortem.
BTW Randy's name did ring a bell.
Yes that would be that Hawaiian anti Shark tour dude - good to see him doing something constructive instead of wasting taxpayer money on spouting his anti industry BS!
Bingo! I've just blogged about it and it now looks like the efforts by the Pew and the BNT have been successful: Bahamian Environment Minister Earl Deveaux has just announced that the Government is about to enact Shark protection laws. More details here. So much for those who said it was never gonna happen!
BUT,this is just the beginning. The law needs to be drafted, gazetted and signed by the Minister, and then comes the really hard part. Yes once again I'm talking about putting in place all the necessary legal, human and financial resources that are required for its successful enforcement - it will take time, it will be challenging, there will be setbacks and the various players will have their mettle tested. But I am hopeful, the more as the BNT and the dive industry are already working together on education and outreach. Only by changing the public's mind set will the legislation endure in the long term.
Kudos! And: looking forward to the various statements by the B-listers! :)
Wow. Underwater Thrillshave discovered some epic video. To my great surprise (and disdain), the dude is spear fishing on SCUBA and very much appears to be a lousy shot on top of it.
But then...
Are you surprised by some of the locations on that list? Chances are that you may have fallen victim to the unabashed self promotion of some B-listers that may, or may not have played a supporting role in getting those legislations enacted. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of Palau where with the exception of Dermot who is totally legit and deserves praise for having gotten the ball rolling as early as 2001, there has been a ignominious veritable deluge of self professed visionaries, ghost writers, congratulators, prize awardors and outright moochers trying to claim a piece of the action and of the global accolades. Unfortunately, much of it is attributable to the notorious modesty of the good people of the Pew project team, and to the fact that they appear to pursue a policy of always consulting the entirety of the local conservation community and of aligning themselves with prominent local players. Case in point: the Bahamas where Cristina started the conservation push and where Matt's team has chosen to work with the BNT and the local dive community, something I cannot but applaud for having created a powerful local lobby that cannot be accused of meddling from the outside – but it of course carries the risk of those orgs creating the impression that all the success is attributable to them alone.
With that in mind, I'm really glad to see this bit of soft self promotion. I could be mistaken, but this may well the first time that Matt outlines the strategies and the many successes of the group he heads. I’m particularly thankful for their commitment to working globally to establish pragmatic, science-based policies that protect our oceans, something that is imperative when dealing with real problems in a real world. This puts them in a league of a very few result- (as opposed to agenda-) driven NGOs and hopefully helps counteract the recent worrying upsurge of strident activist Facebook pages where an unholy alliance of truism-spouting desperate housewives and Shark whacks is very much threatening to dolphinize the global Shark conservation movement. Just FINtastic - and yes, I’ll certainly leave it at that!
Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you. With you guys congratulating everybody else, I thought that it was bloody time that somebody returned the favor. Congratulations!
Top oceanic predators, especially large predatory sharks (TOPS), appear to be experiencing varying degrees of population declines. Life history data (e.g. diet, reproductive status, age and growth, mortality) are critical for developing effective conservation strategies for TOPS. Presently, lethal sampling remains the most effective and accurate means of gathering these data. To meet such challenges, many scientists have utilized specimens obtained from recreational and commercial fisheries, but have needed to supplement those data with fishery-independent sampling.
However, there is growing public and scientific debate as to whether lethal sampling of TOPS is justified for obtaining conservation data. Here we describe the development and use of non-lethal alternatives for collecting data on (1) trophodynamics; (2) maturity state and fecundity; and (3) growth and mortality rates necessary to enact conservation measures for threatened or even data-deficient TOPS.
CONCLUSION
In the case of TOPS which are highly protected, lethal sampling is not an option. As such, scientists have generated innovative non-lethal alternatives for obtaining data on trophodynamics, age-growth, maturity, and reproductive status. This is best exemplified in the white shark Carcharodon carcharias, which is designated as Vulnerable to Extinction by The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN; Fergusson et al. 2005), listed on Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), and fully protected in South Africa, Namibia, the USA, Australia, Israel, Italy, and Malta (Fergusson et al. 2005).
For example, white shark diet and feeding habits have been determined from gut content analysis of specimens obtained from fisheries (Cliff et al. 1989, Bruce 1992, Cortés 1999, Hussey et al. in press, Smale & Cliff in press). Sulikowski et al. (in press) recently developed non-lethal techniques to assess the reproductive biology of white sharks. Moreover, electronic tagging (Domeier & Nasby-Lucas 2008, Weng et al. 2007, Jorgensen et al. 2010), mark-recapture (Anderson et al. 2011), photo identification (Domeier & Nasby-Lucas 2007, Chapple et al. 2011), and application of molecular genetics (Gubili et al. 2009, Jorgensen et al. 2010) have been used to determine population size and structure of white sharks in a variety of locations.
In his book ‘Why big fierce animals are rare: an ecologist’s perspective,’ Colinvaux (1978) elegantly described how the second law of thermodynamics restricts the abundance and size of apex predators. He wrote: …Great white sharks or killer whales in the sea, and lions and tigers on the land…are very thinly spread. One may swim many lifetimes in the world oceans without encountering a great white shark… (p. 27) Even nearly a century ago, long before overfishing, Elton (1927) pointed out that large carnivores were rare.
Given the threatened status of many TOPS, there is a growing need to develop feasible alternatives to lethal sampling. We recognize that this will not happen overnight; but as scientists, we need to become creative, collaborate, and challenge ourselves to do so, because this is the direction we need to be moving in, if conservation is our goal.
Finally, a voice of reason! The above is from Killing for conservation: the need for alternatives to lethal sampling of apex predatory sharks, by Neil Hammerschlag and James Sulikowski and you can thankfully read the whole (short and clear, so do not worry) paper here.
I remain generally dead set against lethal sampling and must commend the authors for having tackled a subject that is highly controversial and for having unequivocally spoken out in favor of the animals. May I also add that it cannot be a coincidence that the first two people that are being acknowledged are DaMary and Jimmy, a clear tribute to their excellent advocacy for Sharks. Be it as it may, kudos to everybody involved.
This is clearly the way forward and once again, you have positioned yourself very much at the forefront of Shark research and Shark conservation. Bravo!
I was critical of his last interview but this time, I am totally impressed. His Sharkquest Arabia is conducting extremely important, pioneering and smartly inclusive (as opposed to confrontational) work in the Arabian Sea and fully deserves everybody's support.
Much of the underwater footage in this video is apparently from the largely unknown Musandam that juts into the straight of Hormuz separating the Gulf of Oman from the Persian Gulf. It is a current swept, nutrient rich and consequently, highly biodiverse habitat that much reminds me of the area around the Seven Brothers in the Bab-El- Mandeb that equally features enormous schools of Fish and large seasonal aggregations of Whale Sharks.
These were the crew and passengers of Hunter on June 18. From left to right - click for detail. Top row: Silio, Douglas David Seifert, Vili and Arthur. Middle row: Lui, Cristina Zenato, Rusi, Richard and skipper Netani. Standing in front: Valerie and Ron Taylor, and Eliki Crouching: Rick MacPherson and Emily Irwing Seifert.
What can I say. Except that it has been overwhelming, inspiring, enlightening for all of us. Everybody present, the stellar weather and above all, the lovely Sharks have contributed to what I am sure has been a day nobody will ever forget. Total serendipity, total harmony and total bliss. This is why we do it.
Blunt - very big and showing her teeth like she always does. Great pic by Sergei Shanin (yes those are links)!
Excellent job! I've just received a nice mail from the fiery Iñaki Bue of Kapta Producciones. He tells me that he has posted a new video about our dive and concludes Yesterday I made a presentation at the Getxo Sea Week and after the video I spoke about the shark preservation and everything you told us about Spanish and Bask fishing boats. It was quite good. This is Getxo- charming! :)
I rarely if ever sit for interviews as I believe that showcasing a Caucasian talking head detracts from the fact that the SRMR is very much a Fijian success story. But in view of the continued involvement of Spain in the Shark fishing (and alas, Shark fin) business, I wanted to send a message to what I knew was going to be a Spanish audience - and thanks to Iñaki, it looks like I did.
No this is NOT from SA and thus NOT evidence - it's just a grisly picture illustrating the topic of this post.
So far, this is largely unsubstantiated. Apparently, so the story goes, large protected Tigers and Great Whites are being poached in order to sell the jaws to US trophy hunters. If so, it would be a terrible tragedy for the marine ecosystem and also for South Africa's Shark viewing operators that contribute millions to the country's tourism industry.
Good people are looking into it and my fervent hope is that this will turn out to be nothing more than yet another myth, like the recent unnecessary controversy about the Shark bait. Fingers crossed and we'll keep you posted as events unfold.
Milky viz, heaps upon heaps of Bulls, frantic action - not conducive for leaning back and counting Sharks! But, one customer commented that everywhere you looked, there were scores of big Sharks and Valerie said that those may well have been the fabled one hundred Bulls. The screen shots don't really do it justice as they only cover a small section of the action - so imagine the same happening all over the place!
So there, I officially declare June 24, 2011 to be the day when the prediction came true!
I've asked the question and here is the answer.
The good news: it really looks like this got nothing to do with the commercial Shark diving industry in Guadalupe. For once and with the exception of yet more of those pathetic summit expeditions by the indefatigable and totally unrepentant Amos, I haven't heard about any particularly stunning stupidities and on the contrary, one prominent industry member has posted some remarkable pro-Shark footage, see further below.
The bad news: other people dive there, too.
But lemme first tell you a story so you know where I'm coming from.
It very much looks like GWs may well be just another large predatory Shark, meaning that very experienced people who take the time to observe them and to learn are able to interact safely with determined individual animals in determined conditions. This is really nothing new as evidenced by the following epic video of Valerie hand feeding one particular GW that she observed and deemed to be particularly friendly.
What incidentally totally blows me away here is that a Fish is sticking his head out of the water and very much establishing a personal relationship with a person - just amazing!
And then, there are those free diving dudes.
About ten years ago, GW diving pioneer Andre Hartman whom I totally respect for having spent years learning about GW behavior, and this at great personal risk, allowed a punter named JM Cousteau to hang on to one of his Sharks. This was pure Gallic macho bravado and had nothing to do with trying to demystify anything like it was later portrayed. I know because I got friends who were there.
Ever since, there has been a deluge of copycats abusing Sharks as underwater scooters, first Great Whites and now alas also those poor placid Tigers. There's no denying that all of them are brave (and probably stupid) and that many have an excellent water sense - but still, I find their lack of respect simply appalling and would wish that this idiotic fad would go away, be it owing to the insight that the message, or whatever, actually sucks or far more likely, due to somebody pushing it just a bit to far and finally getting nailed - and take a wild guess as to who would be blamed if that happened! :(
But the fact remains that certain individual GWs appear to be unendingly tolerant of our shenanigans and that so far, everybody has lived to tell the story, sometimes in a disarmingly charming way. Good on them.
Anyway, with that in mind, I had an idea about a possible documentary.
After talking to people in the know, I am intimately convinced that given a suitable site and a lot of time, patience and dedication, one can develop a dive where one can safely interact with GWs outside of the cage, very much along the lines of what we do here in Fiji. If somebody of the caliber of, say, Mike Rutzen of whom I remain a big fan put his mind to it, I see no reason why one would not be able to safely feed a GW underwater. Our Rusi speaks Shark and I wondered whether one could shoot a documentary about him feeding our Bulls and Tigers and then traveling to Lupe, spending a long time observing the Sharks and then identifying and feeding a suitably mellow individual - not out of bravado but in order to show that given the respect and the empathy, people and Sharks can work together harmoniously, just like what happens here in Fiji.
Having asked two friendly operators in Lupe, their reaction was unequivocal: no way!
Apart from it being illegal, they did not want to take on the responsibility of a possible accident and above all, they were extremely wary of possible copycats, something I had overlooked and where I completely concur.
Consequently, out of respect, the project was shelved.
But the idea remained, and I was thus happy to read this.
Synopsis
A shark is a mindless killer, an eating machine. They are so dangerous; in fact, that the only way we can observe them safely is through the bars of a steel cage. But, is it possible that our terror of the animal and perhaps even the cage itself, is warping our perceptions?
Academy Award filmmaker Mike Hoover, believes the answer to that question is, “Yes”. Having spent much of the last decade filming and interacting with the great white sharks at Guadalupe Island, he has come to believe that the common perception of the mindless killer is not only deeply flawed but incredibly destructive. Hoover believes that the only way to change that perception is to interact with the great white shark in a new way. Essentially, he wants to do for sharks what Jane Goodall and Dian Fosse (sic) did for the chimpanzee and the Mountain Gorilla.
The goal, is to see the world through their eyes, to interact with them, touch them, maybe even form a relationship with the animal. If we can do all this, we might learn new things about white shark behaviour and, just maybe, change the perception of the demon shark.
And then, I watch the trailer.
And then, I see the token Shark pornographer spout his pseudo-conservation message.
And then, I see a bunch of weapon brandishing yahoos abuse those poor GWs as underwater scooters. And then, here comes the f@$%ing mermaid.
I mean, you just can't make these things up!
A MERMAID???? Is that the f@$%ingmessage??? Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey my ass! How darethat guy compare himself to them!
This is nothing but yet another one of those self promoting punters parachuting into somebody else's turf and using bogus conservation messaging to play to the googly-eyed sharkitarians in order to justify the latest stupid and utterly disrespectful circus stunt with Sharks - the sad part being that like all those other self professed visionaries, he's likely to be successful! Makes me wanna puke!
The correct way to go about it?
Look no further than this stellar video by Lawrence. Those peaceful scenes of mellow GWs minding their own business, the harmony between them and those Sea Lions - that's the message.
No need for arrogant weapon toting simians, let alone brain dead bimbettes, in the same way that nobody would dream of depicting the African wilderness by having people in clown suits go walkabout in the Serengeti.
And that latest trailer about night diving with OWTs?
My call: not everything that can be done needs to be done and not everything that is being done needs to be publicized. Once again, those dudes are seriously brave (and probably stupid) and all the power to them for having pulled it off. But this got NOTHING to do with conservation: it remains extremely dangerous and the bogus conservation messaging will inevitably encourage the punters to try and do the same. The old man with the red hat and incidentally, Ron and Valerie are right when they deem this Shark to be exceptionally dangerous!
Guys, if you really feel that you must showcase it, tell it as it is: a bunch of brave divers did something dangerous. Please, walk away from that touchy-feely conservation spin. Seriously, and I know you know what I'm talking about: if you really care about those Sharks, please, don't go there.
Special thanks to the saffron pimpernel for having donated the cover shot!
To this day, one of my very favorite depictions of a Bull Shark - Walker's Cay, Bahamas. Click for detail.
What to say about a guy one has never met. Jeremy and I go way, way back when we miraculously managed to somehow always just miss each other, be it in the Sudan during the glorious times of Jack Jackson and Alex Double with their Stormbringer servicing the spartan diving camp on Sanganeb, in PNG on Bob and Dinah's legendary Telita or much later, on Gary and Brenda's iconic Walker's Cay. Anyway, I've known of him forever, as a great trailblazing Shark photographer way back then where taking those pics was tough and as one of the good guys who has always combined his love and his respect of Sharks with the unbridled scientifically inspired curiosity of a true naturalist, as it should be. I also associate him with concepts like gentleman adventurer, renaissance man and patron of the Shark Trust, something that is purely intuitive and not substantiated and something I suspect he would deny - but if not strictly correct, it is certainly not far from the truth. Plus and most importantly, he vocally shares my visceral distaste of the knightly Ueber-Charlatan, and (!) he ranks way low in the infamous CDNN list, and this for being a Shark feeding green-washer, much like my dear friend Douglas with whom he is apparently being confused.
How can I then not like and respect the man! Anyway, we were talking and he asked whether I might be interested in a short piece about Shark photography.Needless to say that I jumped at the opportunity and that I'm totally honored! So there, enjoy our first ever guest blog post!
On Photographing Sharks
By Jeremy Stafford-Deitsch
I admit that I’m a Luddite. When I was first photographing sharks everything was manual. There were 4 knobs on my underwater housing – focus, aperture, shutter and trigger – an eccentrically-hued roll of film in my camera and a pair of hefty strobes that occasionally fired in unison when triggered but flashed with absolute reliability when there was a short circuit, gremlin or leak. There was a water-detecting alarm that I soon learnt to ignore. In fact I’m secretly proud of some of the photos I took even as the alarm was sounding and a red light appeared in the viewfinder window. Indeed, it was only when the alarm was sounding and the strobes were discharging in rapid flashes that things were likely to be serious. But it was progress of sorts: prior to those wildly unreliable electronic flash guns there were the flash bulbs of which about 50 per cent worked – though many exploded killing the subject. This accounts for the upside down fish in early underwater photographs. These were the dying days of diving with a watch and decompression tables – and if you were serious that watch was the original, clunkingly functional PloProf that doubled up as a second weight belt. Decompression computers were just around the corner – and when they arrived they were cruel. I remember ignoring the flashing instructions of an early model (↑ASCEND NOW↑) and instantly being sentenced to 135 minutes of decompression at 18 inches.
Grey Reef Shark, Sanganeb, Sudan
It was a time when The Buddy System was open to interpretation. For underwater photographers, their camera was their buddy. Now please don’t misunderstand me: I think every diver has the right to practice The Buddy System on every single dive (s)he ever does regardless of the conditions or purpose of the dive – ditto, incidentally, anyone who wants to do wreck or night dives. But I don’t want to hear about it. By far the most dangerous thing I’ve ever encountered underwater is a certain overgrown member of the zooplankton community that runs out of air, panics, gets bent, narked, exhausted, lost, has equipment malfunctions and blunders in front of my camera in a chaos of limbs and bubbles.
In the days of underwater film photography you had 36 chances to screw up and usually did. Then I met an underwater photographer with a digital housing and a self-satisfied smirk who kept muttering that he had embraced the future. This consisted in 28,501,277 shots per dive in superfine poster-size image mode, all automatically and flawlessly exposed and in perfect focus. You’d think I would have jumped ship, but no: it just looked like 28,501,277 chances to screw up. I was deterred by the 6,588 knobs, dials and buttons protruding from this fellow’s snazzy digital housing and the terrifying learning curve that they implied – a learning curve that clashed with my unshakeable belief in the acronym KISS. If I struggled at 150 feet down to remember f11 at 3 feet to calculate exposure, what chance did the digital wizards have of even knowing which buttons to push in those mind-blurring depths?
Caribbean Reef Shark, Walker's Cay, Bahamas
But now the future is here. The young Turks proudly display their dazzling digital images – images in which each pore in a rampaging shark’s snout is frozen in microscopic detail, images in which the species of shark is identifiable from the razor sharp serrations of the teeth in the gurning mouth – and, like the Ottoman calligraphists of old who refused to embrace the printing press, I sigh at my impending extinction. But I’m not extinct yet. All photographs are photographs but not all photographs are pictures. It is only when the photograph captures the moment that the picture emerges. There are of course many kinds of moment but in the case of sharks in shallow waters – on coral reefs for example – there is the moment where the shark and its setting click. This is the moment when the shark-as-devil-fish-from-hell (to use Sonny Gruber’s expression) changes into something different: something formidable yet beautiful that thoroughly belongs. It is the tension between Thanatos and Natural History.
Bull Sharks, Walker's Cay, Bahamas
The pictures presented here are mostly from just two places. One is a specific soft-coral-festooned coral head on Sanganeb Atoll in the Red Sea. The other is Walker’s Cay in the Bahamas. If Beqa Lagoon has the world’s best bull shark dive then Walker’s Cay once had the world’s best bull shark snorkel – even if it gained an unjustified infamy thanks to a certain self-proclaimed ‘shark behaviour expert’ who sacrificed his calf muscle in the name of shark porn and pseudoscience.
Sharks deserve better than this: they deserve to be filmed and photographed – whatever the medium or mechanism – not as a means to an end but as an end in their own right. Indeed, I think the photos presented here are struggling to be pictures though where they fall short is apparent enough. But this is their strength compared to a photograph where the issue doesn’t even arise. Perhaps this is an area where the young Turks with their digital cameras loaded with 28,501,277 shots, nitrox, rebreathers and sane dive computers, can take underwater photography further down the road from craft to art.
Grey Reef Sharks, Sanganeb, Sudan. Of interest, this white-tipped Indian Ocean color variation was once thought to be an own species, C. wheeleri but later lumped back under C. amblyrhinchos.
Biography. Jeremy Stafford-Deitsch has, over the years, combined a love of writing with photography: when writing about a subject illustrated with his own photographs, this allows him to bring an individual perspective to the topic. His photography started when he was a scuba diver bewitched by the underwater world. Intrigued by the challenges of photographing sharks and coral reefs, these were the subjects of his earliest books before he branched out into other marine subjects including mangrove forests. Equally fascinated by ancient history and recording the spellbinding remains of past peoples, he has since moved into archaeology and large format photography. This, to date, has resulted in richly illustrated books on ancient Egypt and the endless ruins of Anatolia, Turkey. Bull Sharks, Walker's Cay, Bahamas
Whilst the contest is progressing.
I've stumbled upon this by pure happenstance. When I started diving the Caribbean a long time ago, the beautiful Nassau Groupers were everywhere, only to be progressively obliterated by overfishing. I understand that they're thankfully staging a tenuous comeback but that they are still locally threatened, as witnessed by the situation in the Cayman Islands.
Check out the video documenting their amazing spawning aggregations - epic stuff!
Great stuff!
Quite frankly, I'm totally shocked.
Pic: Kina Scollay
Finally protected - unbelievable pic by Jimmy, you simply must click for detail!
Very happy Bull Shark - great Pic by Sasha!
This GW was apparently caught in Tunisia.
Junior tracks: 2009/2010 offshore migration in yellow and the 2010/2011 offshore migration in red
Cookiecutter Shark. Sure doesn't look like much - but if one examines the detail, see below... 
Cookiecutter Shark bite on a Pilot Whale
BNT officials and Earl Deveaux with a Shark poster By Guy Harvey
Blunt - very big and showing her teeth like she always does. Great pic by Sergei Shanin (yes those are links)!
No this is NOT from SA and thus NOT evidence - it's just a grisly picture illustrating the topic of this post.
So there, I officially declare June 24, 2011 to be the day when the prediction came true!
I wish!
To this day, one of my very favorite depictions of a Bull Shark - Walker's Cay, Bahamas. Click for detail.
Grey Reef Shark, Sanganeb, Sudan
Caribbean Reef Shark, Walker's Cay, Bahamas
Bull Sharks, Walker's Cay, Bahamas
Grey Reef Sharks, Sanganeb, Sudan. Of interest, this white-tipped Indian Ocean color variation was once thought to be an own species, C. wheeleri but later lumped back under C. amblyrhinchos.
Bull Sharks, Walker's Cay, Bahamas
