Dot Earth: Who’s Predator, Who’s Prey?

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By Andrew C. Revkin

Rob Stewart, a 27-year-old diver, photographer and now filmmaker from Toronto, desperately wants us to fall in love with sharks before we wipe them out.

His film, “Sharkwater,” which has been widely seen in Canada and opened today in scattered art-house theaters around the country, amounts to an impassioned ode to sharks (not a requiem, he hopes).

The film is also a searing rebuke to the human species that has so deeply depleted the oceans of this predator, which has existed relatively unchanged for some 400 million years.

The Times’s review is here.

The film chronicles Mr. Stewart’s five-year, 15-country exploration of the lives of sharks and the people who make a living killing them.

Some do so for glory -†like a proud Australian hunter of great whites who tells the camera, “If it wasn’t for me and what I’ve done the last 25 years, there’d be a lot more people killed.”

But most people who kill sharks do so for the cash generated by the booming trade in dried fins sent to China for use in $300-a-bowl shark-fin soup.

Fishing with miles-long lines of baited hooks has spread around the world in the past few decades and has removed up to 90 percent of the large predatory species, including tunas, billfish and sharks, according to a variety of recent studies.

Persuading people to love sharks is tough, not just because of Steven Spielberg and an annual smattering of news reports about chomped swimmers.

There’s just something about sharks. That’s true even for a marine biology geek like me.

I fell in love with undersea life when I was around 10, in the late 1960s, probably while watching one of the many documentaries by the underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau and the intrepid red-capped crew of Calypso.

The one thing I really wanted for my bar mitzvah was a mask and snorkel, and I got them (thanks, Tannenbaums!).

And one of my favorite books was “The Lady and the Sharks,” by the marine biologist Eugenie Clark.

Even so, sharks †then and now †give me the shivers.

The first time I knowingly shared the water with one was in Fiji, when I was around 21 and traveling the South Pacific on a fellowship studying the human relationship to the sea.

I was drifting along the outer edge of a fringing reef, with dark oceanic water to one side and the bright, comfortable shallows to my right. I crossed a cleft in the coral and suddenly a reef shark, surely not more than four feet long, swung toward me from its patrol over the coral.

It was clearly agitated by seeing me block its passage to deep water. Its dorsal fin twitched.

It rocketed into the blue and was gone. Even though the tropical water was easily 85 degrees, I was one giant goose bump.

I asked Mr. Stewart about this primal-fear issue in a phone interview on Friday.

Is it just too deep a gulf to cross to care for sharks the way we appear to care for, say, polar bears, even though they are much more likely to attack a person as a meal?

Mr. Stewart conceded that his quest with the film was an uphill battle. “There’s something deeply rooted that makes people afraid of sharks,” he said. “They come from the deep, dark, unknown ocean. They’re the last demons and monsters we have on this planet. We are working against human nature to some extent.”

But sharks also play an important role in shaping ocean ecosystems, he and biologists say repeatedly in the film. We are, in essence, threatening our own future by devastating their populations, they say.

Boris Worm, a marine biologist from Dalhousie University interviewed in the film, said in an e-mail message that he believes the movie has changed attitudes of people who have seen it.

“In Canada the movie was released earlier this year, and I get comments about it all the time,” Dr. Worm said. “It makes people think about a world that is beyond their immediate experience. Scientists have known about the dramatic decline in shark populations for over a decade, but only now I think it has registered with the general public. I am surprised how strong the reaction is. People really do care about this issue.”

You can help save sharks, it’s not too late!! Go to www.oceanconservancy.org for more info.

†Posted by Mark Powell

Saw the movie in SF last week. Go see it, well done!

†Posted by Patric Douglas

GUIDEPOSTS:

http://www.liveearth.org/

http://www.liveearth.org/?p=314

Thanks,

Steve

†Posted by Steven Earl Salmony

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