well good evening i’m brian scary or as
oprah likes to call me the wet one you
know i love photography and and always
have but i think my passion for
photography is a passion for animals and
wildlife and particularly in the ocean
there is just a host of problems and
threats facing our world’s oceans today
i’ve had the privilege of being a
National Geographic photographer for the
magazine for over 10 years now and I
guess in the beginning when I began I
started to just want to make beautiful
pictures and tell celebratory stories if
you will but in more recent times I’ve
sort of shifted my focus to stories
about these problems stories that I hope
to bring readers that bring and raise
awareness to some of these issues
I think photography has a history of
showing that it can change the world we
hope I suppose as photographers to be
able to do stories that make a
difference
as we all know there’s an incredible
amount of beauty in the world’s oceans
but the business of underwater
photography on the other hand is
anything but pretty I mean this is me of
course prepping one of my underwater
cameras before a dive I can always count
on my assistant to to be there with his
camera and capture that decisive moment
making me look good but you know of
course if you actually get underwater
things improve dramatically the oceans
are spectacular
there’s many beautiful things to see and
a family over the years I’ve often been
asked by people you know what it’s like
to be an underwater photographer and I
often tell them that you know it’s not
that different than being a terrestrial
wildlife photographer you know we have
to spend weeks and months sometimes
waiting for the weather waiting for
animals to show up and for things to
just be right and the only difference is
instead of being cramped up in some
blind in a desert or jungle somewhere
I’m usually on some cold wet stinky boat
in some godforsaken part of the world
well it’s not always stinky I guess
anyway the business of making pictures
underwater is kind of a unique pursuit
within the world of wildlife photography
first of all it requires a great deal of
equipment it’s very equipment intensive
we have to have life-support equipment
like scuba gear and we put our cameras
and housings and have these lights and
strobes and so forth we have to get very
close to our subjects we don’t have the
luxury of using telephoto lenses we have
to get close to those whales or sharks
which i think is a testimony to the
animals themselves but I’ll never
complain with all the problems that are
the things we have to contend with
because once you get under the water
it’s just an incredible world I’ve had
the privilege of swimming with giant
animals like a whale shark to tiny
animals like this tiny little shrimp
living in a sea anemone this guy about
half the size of a grain of rice so from
one extreme to the other but each
equally amazing
I’ve often remarked that I sometimes
think of my career is just one string of
extraordinary encounters with animals
after another I’ve swam with giant
stingrays and underwater canyons and you
and and spent the wee hours of the
morning at night in the Sea of Cortez
with giant Humboldt squid like this one
a real sea monster if ever there was one
is expelling ink here and the and the
Sea of Cortez one night and I’ve spent
countless hours on coral reefs just
looking at one square foot or one square
meter of territory watching this micro
world of little fish down there this one
stopping long enough just to smile for
the camera I guess no matter how long
I’ve been in the field it seems like
whenever I’m home and feel like I need a
rest for a period of time I find myself
pacing the floors and chomping at the
bit to get back out on the ocean because
I know that if I spend time out there
I’ll see extraordinary things but
throughout the 30 years that I’ve been
doing this I’ve also seen some terrible
things as well which is as I mentioned
one of the reasons I’ve sort of shifted
my focus to begin doing some of these
more environmental stories the question
of course is how do you tell the story
and this is what I wrestle with as to
how exactly journalistically you want to
approach some of these subjects one of
the first big Natural History stories
that I did for National Geographic was a
story about harp seals these beautiful
little animals that live up in the Gulf
of st. Lawrence and Canada and initially
when I proposed the story I just wanted
to do a story about the few weeks a year
that they come to this place live on
this transient pack ice and sort of tell
a life cycle story I wanted to show the
pups like this one making its very first
solo swim beneath the the ice shelf and
the mother proudly watching and you know
the the evolution that happens to these
animals getting fat over the few weeks
or a few days actually that before
they’re weaned and ready to go into the
ocean and as an underwater photographer
to show that contrast between surface
and and underwater as well but as I
began to research the story and get more
involved in it I realized that there
were environmental issues that I
couldn’t then I couldn’t ignore
for example the seal hunt was continuing
to go on I don’t know
that many Americans are aware of this
but it’s still the the biggest mass
slaughter of marine mammals on the
planet where they kill they Club these
baby seals at just maybe two weeks old
or so and for the pelts not for the meat
but perhaps the bigger environmental
threat that I recognized was global
warming which I didn’t really know going
into this story but it turns out that
global warming is having a dramatic
impact on these animals this is a
picture I made from a helicopter that
shows the Gulf of st. Lawrence in
wintertime and even though there’s a lot
of ice here traditionally this would be
frozen solid in years past that would
have been solid block ice and as you can
see there’s a lot of open water and what
that creates is a problem for the seals
where the seals need 12 days to become
fully weaned before they can go off on
their own but this is a picture showing
a puppet maybe five or seven days old
still has the umbilical cord on its
belly there and the mother frantically
pushing it back up to breathe here this
animal had fallen into the water because
the ice was so thin it broke up due to
this climactic change that’s occurring
so you know that particular animal
survived and crawled out and made it but
many do not in the last couple years
there’s been an extraordinarily high
mortality rate for these harp seal pups
so I think it was a story like this that
kind of opened my eyes to the the power
of photography form from an
environmental standpoint and what it
could do to tell stories and raise
awareness on the heels of that story
shortly after within a year so I
proposed this story about the global
fish crisis I’ve been diving for about
30 years and I’ve personally witnessed
the decline of fish I see less fish in
the places I used to see fish on reefs
and less sharks in the places I used to
see sharks but it was a few years ago I
read a scientific paper in the british
journal Nature that declared that ninety
percent of the big fish in the ocean
have disappeared in the last 50 years
these are the tunas the bill fish and
the Sharks and I was just devastated I
thought that you know with a statistic
like that 90% of the fish in the ocean
gone it would be on every news outlet in
the world but it really wasn’t so I
proposed the idea of doing this story
and I actually worked with a colleague
of mine Randy Olson a brilliant social
documentary photographer and and tried
to tackle this
big story of the global fisheries issues
and and and when I proposed the story I
wanted it to be a really hard hitting
story I didn’t want it to be a pretty
picture story necessarily I wanted it to
really tackle these issues and show
readers a lot of things about the whole
commercial fishing world that maybe they
didn’t know but the first component of
the story I thought that was important
was to show fish as wildlife and to get
some appreciation from readers consumers
if you will as to what it is they’re
eating you know I think when we go to a
restaurant and of course order a
hamburger you know that it comes from a
cow or you order a piece of chicken and
you know what a chicken is but when you
order a yellowfin tuna steak and you see
a square piece of meat in your plate
next to some vegetables do you really
know the magnificence of that animal
that you’re eating I think most people
don’t so I wanted to go in and make
pictures of yellowfin tuna like this or
bluefin tuna you know when we eat sushi
this is the most highly regarded type of
sushi this is a bluefin tuna but yet
these animals have been decimated their
stocks have declined in excess of 90% in
the Atlantic and Mediterranean they’re
almost on the verge of extinction yet we
continue to eat sushi not realizing that
this is an animal that has no
terrestrial counterpart there’s nothing
like this on the planet this is an
animal the bluefin tuna that continues
to grow its entire life if we weren’t so
good at catching them there’d be 30
year-old bluefin out there weighing over
a ton they crisscross entire oceans
during the course of the year they have
the ability to swim from the equator to
the poles because they can generate heat
they’re faster than a torpedo under
water we would never allow the slaughter
of that on the pond on land but because
it’s underwater it’s it’s allowed I
wanted to show things like the mako
shark which you can go into a lot of
seafood restaurants and order a Mako
steak which is wonderful to eat but
again we’re wiping these animals out and
also with this story I wanted to do it
in a way that drew a contrast to show
the animal in its realm as it should be
seen this magnificent creature the lions
and tigers of the sea if you will and
then to show it on the beach you know
being thinned here that this this was
about a 600 pound female mako that was
caught and you know they’re going for
the fins first because those fetch the
highest price I also wanted to show with
this story the method in which seafood
is harvested
you know I think again most people just
sort of group seafood in with all other
forms of Al Gore a gray culture and we
think it’s just another food but the
truth is its wildlife it’s the biggest
mass harvest or slaughter of wildlife on
the planet and I wanted to show things
like a long line this is an illegal long
line actually that was in the Sea of
Cortez Mexico that was catching Dorado
like this fish catching seven hundred
tons of Dorado a day illegally that
ended up in restaurants in Mexico in the
United States I wanted people to know
what a long line looked like I wanted
them to see the most common method of
fishing in the world which is a bottom
trawler as its called
nets like this scour the planet this was
a small one that I photographed but you
can see the method basically it’s a big
net that has buoys on top of it and a
lead line on the bottom to keep it down
the buoy keeps the mouth open and these
two big steel doors are towed by a boat
through the water and they meet
resistance with the ocean and their fort
helped to open that that MA that giant
net and as it scrapes along the bottom
this was catching shrimp as it scrapes
along the bottom to catch a few shrimp
it’s catching everything else in its
path and also destroying the benthic
habitats at the bottom it’s scraping up
all this valuable habitat for other
animals this is a picture I made in that
same situation where the the fishermen
had towed his note his nets for one hour
and after one hour he had a handful of
shrimp maybe seven or eight shrimp and
all those other fish all those other
animals died in the process none of
which would be used that all be thrown
back into the sea is bycatch or trash so
this is the true cost of a shrimp dinner
about seven or eight shrimp and maybe 20
pounds of other fish that’ll be killed
and as an underwater photographer I
wanted to go below the boat and show
that that cascade of death raining down
all these beautiful animals that are
alive on the bottom just an hour before
have been killed to satisfy our desire
for shrimp so those are the things that
I thought this story might be able to do
and to look at gill nets also a very
common method of fishing around the
world this in this case I focused on the
shark fishing industry a hundred million
sharks were killed on our planet
every single year that’s an
unsustainable rate these are the apex
predators in the sea
and you can’t remove that without the
house of cards coming down and this
picture I thought would ended up being
the lead picture in the story because it
almost looked like a crucifixion you
know it had this this personality to it
and maybe spoke to the the notion of a
hundred million sharks being killed
around the planet another story that
appeared in the magazine last year was a
story we did called an Eden for sharks I
love sharks I love swimming with sharks
and I wanted to do a story about sharks
and it occurred to me that to maybe get
at the environmental angle of the
conservation angle we should look at a
place in the world where sharks are
still doing well because there are very
few such places left on earth so I went
to the Bahamas a place that I had done a
lot of diving and it seemed to me that
this was one of the few places in the
world where sharks were still doing
pretty well largely that that was
because of two things really it was
because of the geography the Bahamas
this is an aerial picture that I made
showing kind of a typical stretch of
real estate in the Bahamas where you’ve
got you know shallow sandy beaches and
you’ve got mangrove nurseries and coral
reefs and in the deep blue water the
pelagic zone for different species so
the geography lends itself to great
shark habitat but the other reason the
Sharks are doing well here is because
the Bahamas the government has outlawed
long lining they don’t allow long lining
which is the the most common method for
killing sharks around the planet so
although it’s not perfect they seem to
be doing a little bit better here and
for this story I wanted to highlight a
few of the key species some of the
species that really hadn’t been
photographed much before certainly not
for the geographic a friend of mine who
runs a dive business out of Florida had
identified a few new locations in the
last few few years where we could get
close to animals like a tiger shark I
mean for years but 20 years I try to get
close to tiger sharks and never really
could but we found this place so he
found this place that he calls tiger
beach and this is a picture I made with
a National Geographic blimp looking down
at our dive boat and you can see about a
dozen or fourteen big tiger sharks
swimming over this sandy bottom in about
20 feet of water just a very warm
tropical sandy location just brilliant
and once you got underwater the sand and
turtle grass was a great backdrop with
his deep Bahamian blue water and the
Sharks were extremely friendly I mean
they would come right up to you I kept
reminding myself that you know this was
real because as I
I spent so many years trying to get
close to tiger sharks with no success
and on any given day I’d have a dozen of
them around me some days it got so crazy
I was using a macro lens I was using a
sixty millimeter macro lens to make
pictures of the teeth and the little
nerve endings of the ampullae of
Lorenzini on the Sharks snout
I mean sometimes they got a little too
close but that was just curiosity I’m
sure but but the truth is for this story
I really resisted the urge and the
temptation to make sharks look dangerous
I think there is a temptation for
photographers to go down that route
because it’s not hard it’s not hard to
portray sharks in in a threatening
fashion but I wanted them to just be
something beautiful just something that
was part of an ecosystem that they
happened to inhabit and this this series
actually kind of exemplified that for me
there was one day where I saw this
female tiger shark she was about 12 feet
in length and she was swimming on the
bottom and then lifted up off the bottom
and she had these three beautiful little
silver fish these bar jacks on her nose
so I sort of left the bottom in unison
and you know you never quite know I mean
they’re they’re considered the most
dangerous shark in tropical waters the
second mode dangerous in the world so
you never know how they’re going to
behave but as I sort of got closer and
closer she finally just turned and I
made this picture that just showed you
know these three fish with sort of a
shadow almost a little fish tattoo on
her face if you will but a more gentle
look at a tiger shark this allegedly
very dangerous animal which is of course
dangerous but that’s that’s not all that
they’re cracked up to be
I also wanted to focus on shark
nurseries for this story and I went to
the island of Bimini in the northern
Bahamas where I could look at lemon
shark pups here we see a lemon shark pup
in one of these mangrove nurseries on
Bimini I worked with a scientist there
named doc Gruber who has been studying
lemon sharks for about 25 or 30 years
there he has an amazing set of data and
this is doc and a pair of waders is his
torsos out of the water is his lower
half is in the water here holding on one
of these lemon shark pups and he’s
holding it upside down and what’s called
tonic immobility where you can turn
certain species of sharks upside down
and they go to sleep but the Sharks not
hurt but each year in June for about two
weeks they conduct research out there
where they put
gill nets out to catch the baby sharks
at night they worked from about nine
o’clock at night till about nine o’clock
in the morning and they capture the
Sharks and then the the PhD students
will weigh them and through DNA samples
and then put them in this little
makeshift pen that they create and they
keep all the Sharks in there for about a
week or two and then release them all at
the end they keep them there because
they don’t want to recapture the same
one and that was interesting for the
story I wanted to have some of the
science in there but was what was more
interesting I think to me was to hike up
into the mangroves and get out into the
wild you know to actually see some of
the sharks in their natural habitat so
this is a picture of me that my
assistant made just laying in these
mangroves it was you know god awful hot
110 degrees maybe in mosquitoes all
kinds of bugs but I just laid there no
scuba gear just math snorkel and fins in
my wetsuit
day after day trying to let the animals
acclimate to me and get used to me and
eventually you know they did and they
would come close and I was able to make
this picture that appeared in the in the
magazine of this beautiful little lemon
shark pup maybe only a foot in length
tiny little shark and maybe only a foot
of water and just in this very different
shark habitat than my I think we’re used
to saying and I also wanted to focus on
the great hammerhead shark a species
that up until may be less than ten years
ago no photos existed of these animals
but we found a location where in winter
time you might be able to get close and
I spent 18 days out there trying to get
close to these and only had two days
where the weather was good enough that
allowed me to get in but here you can
see this exotic almost prehistoric
looking head where their nostrils have
actually separated out to both sides of
their their head there to give it
stereoscopic sensory perception in the
ocean they’re actually more advanced
than most other species of sharks it’s
difficult to make these animals look
graceful with the big kind of dorsal fin
and pectorals in that head but this one
evening just before sunset on our last
day the shark came in and kind of
swirled around just before the sunset
and this kind of a very pretty setting
well the last species I wanted to focus
on for this story was the oceanic
whitetip shark which is considered the
fourth the most dangerous species of
shark in the ocean but unfortunately
it’s 98% in decline throughout most of
its range just a very sad story I went
to a place in the Bahamas
where we had heard rumors that they were
finding these animals fishermen were
catching tuna and they were having them
taken off their lines by what they said
were oceanic whitetips so in 16 days I
only had one day where we had this
beautiful nine-foot female that that
came in and and stayed around for about
two hours because they’re considered a
very dangerous species of shark and
because we weren’t working on the bottom
we were working up in the water column I
brought along a shark cage and this is
my buddy Wes Pratt a shark biologist
with Mote Marine Lab in Florida who’s in
the cage you can see the biologist has
indicated a photographer is not of
course and then this last frame here is
the Sun began to go down a little bit of
this portrait of this beautiful animal
that could very well go extinct in our
lifetime maybe in the next few years
since there’s so few remaining we took a
different approach to tell the story of
right whales which appeared in the
October issue of National Geographic
magazine
now right whales are an interesting
story in that about a million years ago
there was one species of right whale on
the planet and as oceans kind of got
separated and land masses moved around
they became isolated and essentially
today there’s two main distinct species
there’s the southern right whale which
we see here and there’s the North
Atlantic right whale which we see here a
mom and calf the both species were
hunted to the brink of extinction by
early whalers but the southern right
whale has come back much better than the
North Atlantic which we see here has not
and the reason that the North Atlantic
right whale has not come back is because
they are an urban whale they live along
the east coast of the United States and
Canada where they’re plagued with all
kinds of human activity these are
amazing animals they very hard to read
from the surface you know this is a
picture made in the Bay of Fundy in
Canada of an adult right whale coming at
you and they have this rough patch of
skin roughly where we have hair on the
top of their head on their chin and over
their eyebrows they’re called
callosities and they get occupied by
barnacles and these little parasite crab
things called Siam it’s very interesting
animal from the surface this is often
all you see it looks kind of like a
muddy boot just floating on the surface
but there’s a you know great animal
underneath
and they have this very distinct
v-shaped blow unlike any other whale so
this is what we look for when we’re
looking for right whales out at sea they
also feed using a method of feeding
called skim feeding this was taken in
Cape Cod Bay where they actually stick
their head out of the water and have
these baleen plates they sift the
copepods that they eat and then swallow
them so the pilgrims actually when they
came to Massachusetts in 1620 reported
seeing sea monsters and you can see why
because they are very bizarre but as I
mentioned they’re threatened the North
Atlantic right well there’s only about
three hundred and fifty of them left on
the planet they are the most endangered
species of whale on earth and part of
the reason is because as I said they
live very close to the coast this
picture was made off the coast of
Florida just one evening as a sub-adult
stuck his head out of the water but you
can see this coal smokestack in the
background and pollution is a big reason
they think as to why their reproduction
isn’t what it should be they’re not
having as many calves as the southern
right whales and they get entangled in
fishing gear about 72% of the population
has entanglement scars which we see on
this tail those white marks are not
natural markings those are entanglement
scars from fishing gear this one got
away but many of them don’t and they
died because of that and they do die
also because they get struck by ships
ship strikes or the leading cause of
death I believe for for North Atlantic
right whales this is one that was struck
off of Canada and towed into Nova Scotia
and all the skin had had sort of burned
off and Sheba the white body became
sunburned and what they typically do
when they tell a right whale in like
this they do a necropsy it’s like a type
of autopsy to determine the cause of
death so with this one they they
actually have to use like heavy
equipment this big backhoe to to tow it
up on the beach and then the scientist
from Woods Hole began the process of
cutting off the head and flexing it and
getting it down to the skeletal remains
to see exactly what caused the animal to
die and in this case they reassembled
the skeleton here the the vertebrae and
those pieces on the grass are the
transverse processes there were eight of
them that were supposed to be part of
that spinal column there all of them
were snapped off in a very blunt trauma
which clearly was a ship strike so
there’s no doubt about what caused this
animal to die it was a collision with a
ship
and it was the worst of all cases
because this was an adult female that we
don’t want to lose not that we would
want to lose any but the females of
course of the the worst they say that if
we can just save two right whales a year
in the North Atlantic the population
will continue to grow and they’ll be
okay but right now they’re on a downward
spiral and to contrast the the
beleaguered North Atlantic right well I
wanted to show a population of southern
right whales that were doing much better
because they live much further away from
industrialized civilization like we have
here so I went to a population in New
Zealand in the sub-antarctic that was
only discovered about ten years ago it
was a bit of a speculative trip we
didn’t know what we would find they
hadn’t really been photographed before
so I went down there for three weeks on
a sailboat in wintertime as I said in
the sub-antarctic so the weather was
tough but I got in the water and was
just amazed at what I saw there were
these beautiful whales that were highly
curious and just wanted to to come close
and see me I was reluctant to have
anybody else get in the water with me
initially because I thought these
animals might be spooked by me so I
adil the lone most of the time some days
the visibility was not so good but it
still was amazing I mean these are forty
five foot animals seventy tons and they
were coming close enough this one
kicking up some sand as it swam over the
bottom and on the days when the
visibility was really bad I would go
below and shoot silhouettes
this was courtship kind of a pre mating
event that these whales do these are two
giant whales doing this courtship ballet
if you will in this very remote part of
the world and then one day I asked my
assistant to join me in the bottom I
wanted to see if the whales would be
curious curious enough to to visit us
one more time when we had clear water so
we went down to about 70 feet of water
wearing our dry suits very cold water
and sure enough this this City bus just
swam up unbelievable I spent about two
hours that day with this whale it was
one of the most extraordinary
experiences if not the most
extraordinary I’ve had in my career I
mean this was an animal that chose to be
with us I remember that day you know
you’ve got all this equipment on you’ve
probably got about 80 pounds of gear in
this dry suit and a tight neck seal and
you’re down in 70 feet of water and
you’re breathing heavy and I was
swimming over the bottom to try to keep
up with the whale at one
point photographing it as I moved and
finally you know you just can’t keep up
anymore so I knelt down on the bottom to
catch my breath and thinking the wheel
would just keep going and the wheel
stopped it turned and came back and just
looked at me with that big eye and sort
of was waiting for me to catch my breath
and go so um it’s extraordinary when you
can have those kinds of encounters a
different story that appeared in the
July issue this year was a story I did
on Kingman reef it’s this amazing coral
at all about twelve or thirteen hundred
miles south of Hawaii I was working with
a team of scientists led by a National
Geographic fellow and reek Saleh who has
been studying some of these pristine
coral reefs and the most remote part of
the Pacific and out in the Central
Pacific as a way of determining what a
truly healthy coral reef should be
traditionally scientists determined that
a healthy coral reef consisted of a
biomass that was mostly reef fish mostly
big schools of fish and very few
predators like sharks like this but what
an reek and his team has discovered by
looking at some of the truly pristine
reefs left on the planet is that a real
healthy coral reef has just the opposite
it’s got 85% predators like sharks and
snapper these big aggressive predatory
fish and about 15% reef fish it’s a it’s
a complete reversal of a paradigm of
what traditionally was thought of he has
a new scientific paper that was just
published on this so we went there and I
was there to document this this
environment here we see one of those
snapper very ferocious fish these were
far more dangerous and intimidating than
the sharks one of these guys actually
bit my ear took a chunk out of my ear
one day when I was trying to make a
picture of a little shrimp or something
on the reef but and reek describes these
reefs as a landscape of fear or perhaps
a seascape of fear where the animals are
hiding in the reef these little fish
like this blenny
tucked down inside a coral head or this
hawk fish just kind of you know peeking
out a little bit photographically it was
a real challenge because I got there and
I sort of knew what I was getting into
but you know you’re still expecting to
see lots of fish you expecting to see
big schools of fish which just weren’t
existent the fish were there but they
were all hiding they were tucked down in
the reef so it was difficult to
photograph them I
I began to train myself to see this
place in more of a landscape way or
fashion as opposed to just the wildlife
because the wildlife was hiding this is
actually a new species of coral that we
discovered while we were on this trip
it’s undescribed to science we first
found it and referred to it as the
Flying Saucer it was this massive piece
of coral that’s dr. Salah right up there
examining it this is another picture of
him looking at it it’s a very exotic
piece but the new species of coral in
this remote part of the world they
estimate that this one coral head is
about 500 years old so it’s amazing to
still find pristine places like that on
the planet but as I mentioned this
landscape I described it as a galaxy or
a universe of hard corals there were no
soft corals per se but it was this
amazingly healthy hard coral reefs of
all different kinds and shapes I mean it
was just spectacular
this picture shows predation on a coral
reef it shows the only natural predator
that a coral reef has which is the crown
of thorns starfish and even though over
the years I’ve seen ones or twos of
these I’ve never seen what’s described
as a front of crown of thorns which is
what we see here this is an entire front
many of them moving along a coral reef
and everything to the right of the frame
is dead they’ve already eaten that coral
and they’re moving ahead to the to the
green or brown part here which they will
eventually eat but the truth is that
this is okay this is natural behavior
it’s it’s natural predation it’s like
lions and wildebeests in Africa perhaps
it’s it’s what’s expected and a healthy
coral reef is resilient it can come back
from that a healthy coral reef has
things like parrotfish
crunching away at the the algae and
keeping it clean not choking the the
coral removing that algae it has little
fish as I described like this damsel
fish hiding in the coral this one hiding
in some finger coral and it of course
has the Predators the Sharks and the
snapper here we see two different
species of sharks a gray reef shark and
a white tip reef shark here both
patrolling over this very healthy coral
reef environment so there are still
jewels like this and the science that’s
being done will use places like this as
a baseline for conservation elsewhere in
the world where we need to know how to
protect coral reefs and I wanted to
close this
evening with another story that I did on
New Zealand’s marine reserves I think
that one of the the real solutions that
we need in the world’s oceans to
particularly to the problem of
overfishing
is to create more marine protected areas
right now in the world there’s less than
1/10 of 1% of the world’s oceans that
are off-limits to commercial fishing
think about that number for a second
just named less than 1/10 of 1% of the
world’s oceans are off-limits to
commercial fishing that’s almost nothing
if you compare you know on land we have
many national parks and places they’re
off-limits to hunting or you know
destruction but the oceans we can get
away with it so we need more places in
the ocean we’re officially given a break
and New Zealand is actually a very
progressive country in that regard
they’re trying to protect 10% of their
EEZ the exclusive economic zone by the
year 2010 in two years and the reason
that this all began was in the early
1970s with this gentleman right here dr.
bill Ballantine who’s the father of
marine protected areas certainly in New
Zealand
he’s a mollusc scientist he’s not a
diver and even in his late 60s he still
goes down to the beach every day to do
his transects and study his mollusks but
in the early 1970s he picked a place
that was just an ordinary part of the
New Zealand coastline was a place called
Goat Island it wasn’t really an island
just the little rocks off the coast but
he argued that we needed to protect that
and he had to fight sport fishermen he
had to fight commercial fishermen and he
had a fight scientist because scientists
from the University of Auckland we’re
doing a lot of collecting out there but
ultimately he prevailed and they
protected this place about 30 years ago
and what bill told me was he he hoped
that by protecting Goat Island certain
species of fish would come back species
like the New Zealand snapper we see here
that was highly overfished and they did
come back but what he couldn’t
anticipate what nobody could anticipate
was that certain other things would
happen for example in shallow water near
Goat Island like 20 or 30 feet deep all
they ever saw before was sea urchins
lining the bottom just sea urchins
everywhere covering the the boulders but
what they didn’t know was that when the
snapper returned these
that snapper predate on on sea urchins
they eat sea urchins so by controlling
the sea urchin populations when the fish
came back kelp forests returned to
shallow water nobody ever knew that kelp
grew in 20 or 25 feet of water but today
there are these healthy lush kelp
forests in 20 or 30 feet of water
because the snapper came back and
controlled the origin population and
this is how it was this is maybe how the
ocean was one or two hundred years ago
but nobody’s around to tell us so by
protecting places in the ocean we now
have a baseline we know what it’s
supposed to be and the thing that I saw
when I was there that struck me as much
as the underwater was that the people
came to this place I watched kids every
day like these two little boys that were
in a tidal pool just exploring you know
maybe future biologists maybe future
photographers but they were just engaged
they wanted to be there
I watched you know young girls these two
sisters that drove all the way from
Oakland about an hour and a half drive
with their parents and they rented masks
and fins on the beach what you can do
there and just wanted to see fish you
know Ballantine told me a story he said
that in 1970 before they protected Goat
Island as a marine reserve about 3,000
people would come there every year to go
fishing off the rocks they just line the
hook in line and sports fish off the
rocks and after they passed the
legislation to make it a marine reserve
all the newspapers in New Zealand had
huge headlines that said nothing left to
do at Goat Island because you couldn’t
fish there anymore nothing left to do
fast-forward 30 years now to where we
are today not 3,000 people a year 300
thousand people a year go to go to
Island and they go there not to go
fishing off the rocks they go there to
see fish just to stand on the rocks or
to swim with them and I think that’s
that’s what it’s about I worked in other
places in New Zealand as well there’s a
picture me up on a mountaintop we have
to set down our helicopter because the
weather was getting bad but I wanted to
make an aerial picture of a place called
Fiordland which is a very Lord of the
Rings kind of an environment it’s this
beautiful mountainous region with fjords
and freshwater rivers that are stained
with tannin lead into the ocean and
create a permanent layer of freshwater
about 25 feet thick sitting on top of
the salt water so when you
dive in it’s like diving in an old dirty
river but you go through about 25 feet
of this dirty fresh water that’s sitting
on top of the salt water and you break
into this crystal-clear dark
saltwater below it’s like Dorothy
emerging into Oz you know and this is a
picture of some of the animals that live
there it’s a very fragile habitat this
is some animal called black coral which
actually appears white under water it’s
only black after you break it off and
bring it up and polish it but this this
beautiful black coral like a Christmas
tree almost in this emerald green world
that you’re looking straight up but if
you were looking horizontally it’s it’s
there’s no ambient light it’s pretty
dark there’s another picture made in
fjord land of some animals called sea
pens which a reminiscent of the old
quill pens but these are like a type of
soft coral this picture was made at
about 70 feet where there’s no ambient
light but these animals like black coral
and sea pens are tricked into thinking
that they’re in deeper water they
typically live in very deep water but
because it’s dark here they kind of
emerge into the shallower water and as I
was setting up to make this picture a
blue cod just kind of swim in
serendipity is is often one of the
greatest things in photography you just
get these moments but everywhere I went
in New Zealand and all these marine
reserves I saw extraordinary things
playing peek-a-boo with a little new
zealand fur seal pup one day in fronds
of kelp and tiny little blennies hiding
out in invertebrate bottoms here are
these strawberry Halla therians as
they’re called I went to the North
Island where the water is bluer to a
place called Poor Knights Island and saw
all kinds of interesting relationships
this little trevally Jack having some
symbiotic relationship maybe as a
cleaner fish with this New Zealand
snapper I watched every level of the the
ecosystem looking very healthy this
beautiful nudibranch crawling over some
orange and crusting sponge an octopus
emerging from its den just around the
sunset time about to go out and forage
about to go out and hunt a leather
jacket a type of triggerfish grazing on
the bottom swimming over this beautiful
green bottom and I wanted to close with
this picture which is a picture that I
hope to make for this story a picture
that I think represents how the oceans
might have looked one or two
years ago a primal ocean if you will a
primal ocean of life I think that you
know with an increased awareness we can
begin to understand the problems of our
oceans and by taking ownership of our
planet and giving it the protection it
deserves scenes like this will not be
the exception but they’ll be the rule
thanks very much
you
oprah likes to call me the wet one you
know i love photography and and always
have but i think my passion for
photography is a passion for animals and
wildlife and particularly in the ocean
there is just a host of problems and
threats facing our world’s oceans today
i’ve had the privilege of being a
National Geographic photographer for the
magazine for over 10 years now and I
guess in the beginning when I began I
started to just want to make beautiful
pictures and tell celebratory stories if
you will but in more recent times I’ve
sort of shifted my focus to stories
about these problems stories that I hope
to bring readers that bring and raise
awareness to some of these issues
I think photography has a history of
showing that it can change the world we
hope I suppose as photographers to be
able to do stories that make a
difference
as we all know there’s an incredible
amount of beauty in the world’s oceans
but the business of underwater
photography on the other hand is
anything but pretty I mean this is me of
course prepping one of my underwater
cameras before a dive I can always count
on my assistant to to be there with his
camera and capture that decisive moment
making me look good but you know of
course if you actually get underwater
things improve dramatically the oceans
are spectacular
there’s many beautiful things to see and
a family over the years I’ve often been
asked by people you know what it’s like
to be an underwater photographer and I
often tell them that you know it’s not
that different than being a terrestrial
wildlife photographer you know we have
to spend weeks and months sometimes
waiting for the weather waiting for
animals to show up and for things to
just be right and the only difference is
instead of being cramped up in some
blind in a desert or jungle somewhere
I’m usually on some cold wet stinky boat
in some godforsaken part of the world
well it’s not always stinky I guess
anyway the business of making pictures
underwater is kind of a unique pursuit
within the world of wildlife photography
first of all it requires a great deal of
equipment it’s very equipment intensive
we have to have life-support equipment
like scuba gear and we put our cameras
and housings and have these lights and
strobes and so forth we have to get very
close to our subjects we don’t have the
luxury of using telephoto lenses we have
to get close to those whales or sharks
which i think is a testimony to the
animals themselves but I’ll never
complain with all the problems that are
the things we have to contend with
because once you get under the water
it’s just an incredible world I’ve had
the privilege of swimming with giant
animals like a whale shark to tiny
animals like this tiny little shrimp
living in a sea anemone this guy about
half the size of a grain of rice so from
one extreme to the other but each
equally amazing
I’ve often remarked that I sometimes
think of my career is just one string of
extraordinary encounters with animals
after another I’ve swam with giant
stingrays and underwater canyons and you
and and spent the wee hours of the
morning at night in the Sea of Cortez
with giant Humboldt squid like this one
a real sea monster if ever there was one
is expelling ink here and the and the
Sea of Cortez one night and I’ve spent
countless hours on coral reefs just
looking at one square foot or one square
meter of territory watching this micro
world of little fish down there this one
stopping long enough just to smile for
the camera I guess no matter how long
I’ve been in the field it seems like
whenever I’m home and feel like I need a
rest for a period of time I find myself
pacing the floors and chomping at the
bit to get back out on the ocean because
I know that if I spend time out there
I’ll see extraordinary things but
throughout the 30 years that I’ve been
doing this I’ve also seen some terrible
things as well which is as I mentioned
one of the reasons I’ve sort of shifted
my focus to begin doing some of these
more environmental stories the question
of course is how do you tell the story
and this is what I wrestle with as to
how exactly journalistically you want to
approach some of these subjects one of
the first big Natural History stories
that I did for National Geographic was a
story about harp seals these beautiful
little animals that live up in the Gulf
of st. Lawrence and Canada and initially
when I proposed the story I just wanted
to do a story about the few weeks a year
that they come to this place live on
this transient pack ice and sort of tell
a life cycle story I wanted to show the
pups like this one making its very first
solo swim beneath the the ice shelf and
the mother proudly watching and you know
the the evolution that happens to these
animals getting fat over the few weeks
or a few days actually that before
they’re weaned and ready to go into the
ocean and as an underwater photographer
to show that contrast between surface
and and underwater as well but as I
began to research the story and get more
involved in it I realized that there
were environmental issues that I
couldn’t then I couldn’t ignore
for example the seal hunt was continuing
to go on I don’t know
that many Americans are aware of this
but it’s still the the biggest mass
slaughter of marine mammals on the
planet where they kill they Club these
baby seals at just maybe two weeks old
or so and for the pelts not for the meat
but perhaps the bigger environmental
threat that I recognized was global
warming which I didn’t really know going
into this story but it turns out that
global warming is having a dramatic
impact on these animals this is a
picture I made from a helicopter that
shows the Gulf of st. Lawrence in
wintertime and even though there’s a lot
of ice here traditionally this would be
frozen solid in years past that would
have been solid block ice and as you can
see there’s a lot of open water and what
that creates is a problem for the seals
where the seals need 12 days to become
fully weaned before they can go off on
their own but this is a picture showing
a puppet maybe five or seven days old
still has the umbilical cord on its
belly there and the mother frantically
pushing it back up to breathe here this
animal had fallen into the water because
the ice was so thin it broke up due to
this climactic change that’s occurring
so you know that particular animal
survived and crawled out and made it but
many do not in the last couple years
there’s been an extraordinarily high
mortality rate for these harp seal pups
so I think it was a story like this that
kind of opened my eyes to the the power
of photography form from an
environmental standpoint and what it
could do to tell stories and raise
awareness on the heels of that story
shortly after within a year so I
proposed this story about the global
fish crisis I’ve been diving for about
30 years and I’ve personally witnessed
the decline of fish I see less fish in
the places I used to see fish on reefs
and less sharks in the places I used to
see sharks but it was a few years ago I
read a scientific paper in the british
journal Nature that declared that ninety
percent of the big fish in the ocean
have disappeared in the last 50 years
these are the tunas the bill fish and
the Sharks and I was just devastated I
thought that you know with a statistic
like that 90% of the fish in the ocean
gone it would be on every news outlet in
the world but it really wasn’t so I
proposed the idea of doing this story
and I actually worked with a colleague
of mine Randy Olson a brilliant social
documentary photographer and and tried
to tackle this
big story of the global fisheries issues
and and and when I proposed the story I
wanted it to be a really hard hitting
story I didn’t want it to be a pretty
picture story necessarily I wanted it to
really tackle these issues and show
readers a lot of things about the whole
commercial fishing world that maybe they
didn’t know but the first component of
the story I thought that was important
was to show fish as wildlife and to get
some appreciation from readers consumers
if you will as to what it is they’re
eating you know I think when we go to a
restaurant and of course order a
hamburger you know that it comes from a
cow or you order a piece of chicken and
you know what a chicken is but when you
order a yellowfin tuna steak and you see
a square piece of meat in your plate
next to some vegetables do you really
know the magnificence of that animal
that you’re eating I think most people
don’t so I wanted to go in and make
pictures of yellowfin tuna like this or
bluefin tuna you know when we eat sushi
this is the most highly regarded type of
sushi this is a bluefin tuna but yet
these animals have been decimated their
stocks have declined in excess of 90% in
the Atlantic and Mediterranean they’re
almost on the verge of extinction yet we
continue to eat sushi not realizing that
this is an animal that has no
terrestrial counterpart there’s nothing
like this on the planet this is an
animal the bluefin tuna that continues
to grow its entire life if we weren’t so
good at catching them there’d be 30
year-old bluefin out there weighing over
a ton they crisscross entire oceans
during the course of the year they have
the ability to swim from the equator to
the poles because they can generate heat
they’re faster than a torpedo under
water we would never allow the slaughter
of that on the pond on land but because
it’s underwater it’s it’s allowed I
wanted to show things like the mako
shark which you can go into a lot of
seafood restaurants and order a Mako
steak which is wonderful to eat but
again we’re wiping these animals out and
also with this story I wanted to do it
in a way that drew a contrast to show
the animal in its realm as it should be
seen this magnificent creature the lions
and tigers of the sea if you will and
then to show it on the beach you know
being thinned here that this this was
about a 600 pound female mako that was
caught and you know they’re going for
the fins first because those fetch the
highest price I also wanted to show with
this story the method in which seafood
is harvested
you know I think again most people just
sort of group seafood in with all other
forms of Al Gore a gray culture and we
think it’s just another food but the
truth is its wildlife it’s the biggest
mass harvest or slaughter of wildlife on
the planet and I wanted to show things
like a long line this is an illegal long
line actually that was in the Sea of
Cortez Mexico that was catching Dorado
like this fish catching seven hundred
tons of Dorado a day illegally that
ended up in restaurants in Mexico in the
United States I wanted people to know
what a long line looked like I wanted
them to see the most common method of
fishing in the world which is a bottom
trawler as its called
nets like this scour the planet this was
a small one that I photographed but you
can see the method basically it’s a big
net that has buoys on top of it and a
lead line on the bottom to keep it down
the buoy keeps the mouth open and these
two big steel doors are towed by a boat
through the water and they meet
resistance with the ocean and their fort
helped to open that that MA that giant
net and as it scrapes along the bottom
this was catching shrimp as it scrapes
along the bottom to catch a few shrimp
it’s catching everything else in its
path and also destroying the benthic
habitats at the bottom it’s scraping up
all this valuable habitat for other
animals this is a picture I made in that
same situation where the the fishermen
had towed his note his nets for one hour
and after one hour he had a handful of
shrimp maybe seven or eight shrimp and
all those other fish all those other
animals died in the process none of
which would be used that all be thrown
back into the sea is bycatch or trash so
this is the true cost of a shrimp dinner
about seven or eight shrimp and maybe 20
pounds of other fish that’ll be killed
and as an underwater photographer I
wanted to go below the boat and show
that that cascade of death raining down
all these beautiful animals that are
alive on the bottom just an hour before
have been killed to satisfy our desire
for shrimp so those are the things that
I thought this story might be able to do
and to look at gill nets also a very
common method of fishing around the
world this in this case I focused on the
shark fishing industry a hundred million
sharks were killed on our planet
every single year that’s an
unsustainable rate these are the apex
predators in the sea
and you can’t remove that without the
house of cards coming down and this
picture I thought would ended up being
the lead picture in the story because it
almost looked like a crucifixion you
know it had this this personality to it
and maybe spoke to the the notion of a
hundred million sharks being killed
around the planet another story that
appeared in the magazine last year was a
story we did called an Eden for sharks I
love sharks I love swimming with sharks
and I wanted to do a story about sharks
and it occurred to me that to maybe get
at the environmental angle of the
conservation angle we should look at a
place in the world where sharks are
still doing well because there are very
few such places left on earth so I went
to the Bahamas a place that I had done a
lot of diving and it seemed to me that
this was one of the few places in the
world where sharks were still doing
pretty well largely that that was
because of two things really it was
because of the geography the Bahamas
this is an aerial picture that I made
showing kind of a typical stretch of
real estate in the Bahamas where you’ve
got you know shallow sandy beaches and
you’ve got mangrove nurseries and coral
reefs and in the deep blue water the
pelagic zone for different species so
the geography lends itself to great
shark habitat but the other reason the
Sharks are doing well here is because
the Bahamas the government has outlawed
long lining they don’t allow long lining
which is the the most common method for
killing sharks around the planet so
although it’s not perfect they seem to
be doing a little bit better here and
for this story I wanted to highlight a
few of the key species some of the
species that really hadn’t been
photographed much before certainly not
for the geographic a friend of mine who
runs a dive business out of Florida had
identified a few new locations in the
last few few years where we could get
close to animals like a tiger shark I
mean for years but 20 years I try to get
close to tiger sharks and never really
could but we found this place so he
found this place that he calls tiger
beach and this is a picture I made with
a National Geographic blimp looking down
at our dive boat and you can see about a
dozen or fourteen big tiger sharks
swimming over this sandy bottom in about
20 feet of water just a very warm
tropical sandy location just brilliant
and once you got underwater the sand and
turtle grass was a great backdrop with
his deep Bahamian blue water and the
Sharks were extremely friendly I mean
they would come right up to you I kept
reminding myself that you know this was
real because as I
I spent so many years trying to get
close to tiger sharks with no success
and on any given day I’d have a dozen of
them around me some days it got so crazy
I was using a macro lens I was using a
sixty millimeter macro lens to make
pictures of the teeth and the little
nerve endings of the ampullae of
Lorenzini on the Sharks snout
I mean sometimes they got a little too
close but that was just curiosity I’m
sure but but the truth is for this story
I really resisted the urge and the
temptation to make sharks look dangerous
I think there is a temptation for
photographers to go down that route
because it’s not hard it’s not hard to
portray sharks in in a threatening
fashion but I wanted them to just be
something beautiful just something that
was part of an ecosystem that they
happened to inhabit and this this series
actually kind of exemplified that for me
there was one day where I saw this
female tiger shark she was about 12 feet
in length and she was swimming on the
bottom and then lifted up off the bottom
and she had these three beautiful little
silver fish these bar jacks on her nose
so I sort of left the bottom in unison
and you know you never quite know I mean
they’re they’re considered the most
dangerous shark in tropical waters the
second mode dangerous in the world so
you never know how they’re going to
behave but as I sort of got closer and
closer she finally just turned and I
made this picture that just showed you
know these three fish with sort of a
shadow almost a little fish tattoo on
her face if you will but a more gentle
look at a tiger shark this allegedly
very dangerous animal which is of course
dangerous but that’s that’s not all that
they’re cracked up to be
I also wanted to focus on shark
nurseries for this story and I went to
the island of Bimini in the northern
Bahamas where I could look at lemon
shark pups here we see a lemon shark pup
in one of these mangrove nurseries on
Bimini I worked with a scientist there
named doc Gruber who has been studying
lemon sharks for about 25 or 30 years
there he has an amazing set of data and
this is doc and a pair of waders is his
torsos out of the water is his lower
half is in the water here holding on one
of these lemon shark pups and he’s
holding it upside down and what’s called
tonic immobility where you can turn
certain species of sharks upside down
and they go to sleep but the Sharks not
hurt but each year in June for about two
weeks they conduct research out there
where they put
gill nets out to catch the baby sharks
at night they worked from about nine
o’clock at night till about nine o’clock
in the morning and they capture the
Sharks and then the the PhD students
will weigh them and through DNA samples
and then put them in this little
makeshift pen that they create and they
keep all the Sharks in there for about a
week or two and then release them all at
the end they keep them there because
they don’t want to recapture the same
one and that was interesting for the
story I wanted to have some of the
science in there but was what was more
interesting I think to me was to hike up
into the mangroves and get out into the
wild you know to actually see some of
the sharks in their natural habitat so
this is a picture of me that my
assistant made just laying in these
mangroves it was you know god awful hot
110 degrees maybe in mosquitoes all
kinds of bugs but I just laid there no
scuba gear just math snorkel and fins in
my wetsuit
day after day trying to let the animals
acclimate to me and get used to me and
eventually you know they did and they
would come close and I was able to make
this picture that appeared in the in the
magazine of this beautiful little lemon
shark pup maybe only a foot in length
tiny little shark and maybe only a foot
of water and just in this very different
shark habitat than my I think we’re used
to saying and I also wanted to focus on
the great hammerhead shark a species
that up until may be less than ten years
ago no photos existed of these animals
but we found a location where in winter
time you might be able to get close and
I spent 18 days out there trying to get
close to these and only had two days
where the weather was good enough that
allowed me to get in but here you can
see this exotic almost prehistoric
looking head where their nostrils have
actually separated out to both sides of
their their head there to give it
stereoscopic sensory perception in the
ocean they’re actually more advanced
than most other species of sharks it’s
difficult to make these animals look
graceful with the big kind of dorsal fin
and pectorals in that head but this one
evening just before sunset on our last
day the shark came in and kind of
swirled around just before the sunset
and this kind of a very pretty setting
well the last species I wanted to focus
on for this story was the oceanic
whitetip shark which is considered the
fourth the most dangerous species of
shark in the ocean but unfortunately
it’s 98% in decline throughout most of
its range just a very sad story I went
to a place in the Bahamas
where we had heard rumors that they were
finding these animals fishermen were
catching tuna and they were having them
taken off their lines by what they said
were oceanic whitetips so in 16 days I
only had one day where we had this
beautiful nine-foot female that that
came in and and stayed around for about
two hours because they’re considered a
very dangerous species of shark and
because we weren’t working on the bottom
we were working up in the water column I
brought along a shark cage and this is
my buddy Wes Pratt a shark biologist
with Mote Marine Lab in Florida who’s in
the cage you can see the biologist has
indicated a photographer is not of
course and then this last frame here is
the Sun began to go down a little bit of
this portrait of this beautiful animal
that could very well go extinct in our
lifetime maybe in the next few years
since there’s so few remaining we took a
different approach to tell the story of
right whales which appeared in the
October issue of National Geographic
magazine
now right whales are an interesting
story in that about a million years ago
there was one species of right whale on
the planet and as oceans kind of got
separated and land masses moved around
they became isolated and essentially
today there’s two main distinct species
there’s the southern right whale which
we see here and there’s the North
Atlantic right whale which we see here a
mom and calf the both species were
hunted to the brink of extinction by
early whalers but the southern right
whale has come back much better than the
North Atlantic which we see here has not
and the reason that the North Atlantic
right whale has not come back is because
they are an urban whale they live along
the east coast of the United States and
Canada where they’re plagued with all
kinds of human activity these are
amazing animals they very hard to read
from the surface you know this is a
picture made in the Bay of Fundy in
Canada of an adult right whale coming at
you and they have this rough patch of
skin roughly where we have hair on the
top of their head on their chin and over
their eyebrows they’re called
callosities and they get occupied by
barnacles and these little parasite crab
things called Siam it’s very interesting
animal from the surface this is often
all you see it looks kind of like a
muddy boot just floating on the surface
but there’s a you know great animal
underneath
and they have this very distinct
v-shaped blow unlike any other whale so
this is what we look for when we’re
looking for right whales out at sea they
also feed using a method of feeding
called skim feeding this was taken in
Cape Cod Bay where they actually stick
their head out of the water and have
these baleen plates they sift the
copepods that they eat and then swallow
them so the pilgrims actually when they
came to Massachusetts in 1620 reported
seeing sea monsters and you can see why
because they are very bizarre but as I
mentioned they’re threatened the North
Atlantic right well there’s only about
three hundred and fifty of them left on
the planet they are the most endangered
species of whale on earth and part of
the reason is because as I said they
live very close to the coast this
picture was made off the coast of
Florida just one evening as a sub-adult
stuck his head out of the water but you
can see this coal smokestack in the
background and pollution is a big reason
they think as to why their reproduction
isn’t what it should be they’re not
having as many calves as the southern
right whales and they get entangled in
fishing gear about 72% of the population
has entanglement scars which we see on
this tail those white marks are not
natural markings those are entanglement
scars from fishing gear this one got
away but many of them don’t and they
died because of that and they do die
also because they get struck by ships
ship strikes or the leading cause of
death I believe for for North Atlantic
right whales this is one that was struck
off of Canada and towed into Nova Scotia
and all the skin had had sort of burned
off and Sheba the white body became
sunburned and what they typically do
when they tell a right whale in like
this they do a necropsy it’s like a type
of autopsy to determine the cause of
death so with this one they they
actually have to use like heavy
equipment this big backhoe to to tow it
up on the beach and then the scientist
from Woods Hole began the process of
cutting off the head and flexing it and
getting it down to the skeletal remains
to see exactly what caused the animal to
die and in this case they reassembled
the skeleton here the the vertebrae and
those pieces on the grass are the
transverse processes there were eight of
them that were supposed to be part of
that spinal column there all of them
were snapped off in a very blunt trauma
which clearly was a ship strike so
there’s no doubt about what caused this
animal to die it was a collision with a
ship
and it was the worst of all cases
because this was an adult female that we
don’t want to lose not that we would
want to lose any but the females of
course of the the worst they say that if
we can just save two right whales a year
in the North Atlantic the population
will continue to grow and they’ll be
okay but right now they’re on a downward
spiral and to contrast the the
beleaguered North Atlantic right well I
wanted to show a population of southern
right whales that were doing much better
because they live much further away from
industrialized civilization like we have
here so I went to a population in New
Zealand in the sub-antarctic that was
only discovered about ten years ago it
was a bit of a speculative trip we
didn’t know what we would find they
hadn’t really been photographed before
so I went down there for three weeks on
a sailboat in wintertime as I said in
the sub-antarctic so the weather was
tough but I got in the water and was
just amazed at what I saw there were
these beautiful whales that were highly
curious and just wanted to to come close
and see me I was reluctant to have
anybody else get in the water with me
initially because I thought these
animals might be spooked by me so I
adil the lone most of the time some days
the visibility was not so good but it
still was amazing I mean these are forty
five foot animals seventy tons and they
were coming close enough this one
kicking up some sand as it swam over the
bottom and on the days when the
visibility was really bad I would go
below and shoot silhouettes
this was courtship kind of a pre mating
event that these whales do these are two
giant whales doing this courtship ballet
if you will in this very remote part of
the world and then one day I asked my
assistant to join me in the bottom I
wanted to see if the whales would be
curious curious enough to to visit us
one more time when we had clear water so
we went down to about 70 feet of water
wearing our dry suits very cold water
and sure enough this this City bus just
swam up unbelievable I spent about two
hours that day with this whale it was
one of the most extraordinary
experiences if not the most
extraordinary I’ve had in my career I
mean this was an animal that chose to be
with us I remember that day you know
you’ve got all this equipment on you’ve
probably got about 80 pounds of gear in
this dry suit and a tight neck seal and
you’re down in 70 feet of water and
you’re breathing heavy and I was
swimming over the bottom to try to keep
up with the whale at one
point photographing it as I moved and
finally you know you just can’t keep up
anymore so I knelt down on the bottom to
catch my breath and thinking the wheel
would just keep going and the wheel
stopped it turned and came back and just
looked at me with that big eye and sort
of was waiting for me to catch my breath
and go so um it’s extraordinary when you
can have those kinds of encounters a
different story that appeared in the
July issue this year was a story I did
on Kingman reef it’s this amazing coral
at all about twelve or thirteen hundred
miles south of Hawaii I was working with
a team of scientists led by a National
Geographic fellow and reek Saleh who has
been studying some of these pristine
coral reefs and the most remote part of
the Pacific and out in the Central
Pacific as a way of determining what a
truly healthy coral reef should be
traditionally scientists determined that
a healthy coral reef consisted of a
biomass that was mostly reef fish mostly
big schools of fish and very few
predators like sharks like this but what
an reek and his team has discovered by
looking at some of the truly pristine
reefs left on the planet is that a real
healthy coral reef has just the opposite
it’s got 85% predators like sharks and
snapper these big aggressive predatory
fish and about 15% reef fish it’s a it’s
a complete reversal of a paradigm of
what traditionally was thought of he has
a new scientific paper that was just
published on this so we went there and I
was there to document this this
environment here we see one of those
snapper very ferocious fish these were
far more dangerous and intimidating than
the sharks one of these guys actually
bit my ear took a chunk out of my ear
one day when I was trying to make a
picture of a little shrimp or something
on the reef but and reek describes these
reefs as a landscape of fear or perhaps
a seascape of fear where the animals are
hiding in the reef these little fish
like this blenny
tucked down inside a coral head or this
hawk fish just kind of you know peeking
out a little bit photographically it was
a real challenge because I got there and
I sort of knew what I was getting into
but you know you’re still expecting to
see lots of fish you expecting to see
big schools of fish which just weren’t
existent the fish were there but they
were all hiding they were tucked down in
the reef so it was difficult to
photograph them I
I began to train myself to see this
place in more of a landscape way or
fashion as opposed to just the wildlife
because the wildlife was hiding this is
actually a new species of coral that we
discovered while we were on this trip
it’s undescribed to science we first
found it and referred to it as the
Flying Saucer it was this massive piece
of coral that’s dr. Salah right up there
examining it this is another picture of
him looking at it it’s a very exotic
piece but the new species of coral in
this remote part of the world they
estimate that this one coral head is
about 500 years old so it’s amazing to
still find pristine places like that on
the planet but as I mentioned this
landscape I described it as a galaxy or
a universe of hard corals there were no
soft corals per se but it was this
amazingly healthy hard coral reefs of
all different kinds and shapes I mean it
was just spectacular
this picture shows predation on a coral
reef it shows the only natural predator
that a coral reef has which is the crown
of thorns starfish and even though over
the years I’ve seen ones or twos of
these I’ve never seen what’s described
as a front of crown of thorns which is
what we see here this is an entire front
many of them moving along a coral reef
and everything to the right of the frame
is dead they’ve already eaten that coral
and they’re moving ahead to the to the
green or brown part here which they will
eventually eat but the truth is that
this is okay this is natural behavior
it’s it’s natural predation it’s like
lions and wildebeests in Africa perhaps
it’s it’s what’s expected and a healthy
coral reef is resilient it can come back
from that a healthy coral reef has
things like parrotfish
crunching away at the the algae and
keeping it clean not choking the the
coral removing that algae it has little
fish as I described like this damsel
fish hiding in the coral this one hiding
in some finger coral and it of course
has the Predators the Sharks and the
snapper here we see two different
species of sharks a gray reef shark and
a white tip reef shark here both
patrolling over this very healthy coral
reef environment so there are still
jewels like this and the science that’s
being done will use places like this as
a baseline for conservation elsewhere in
the world where we need to know how to
protect coral reefs and I wanted to
close this
evening with another story that I did on
New Zealand’s marine reserves I think
that one of the the real solutions that
we need in the world’s oceans to
particularly to the problem of
overfishing
is to create more marine protected areas
right now in the world there’s less than
1/10 of 1% of the world’s oceans that
are off-limits to commercial fishing
think about that number for a second
just named less than 1/10 of 1% of the
world’s oceans are off-limits to
commercial fishing that’s almost nothing
if you compare you know on land we have
many national parks and places they’re
off-limits to hunting or you know
destruction but the oceans we can get
away with it so we need more places in
the ocean we’re officially given a break
and New Zealand is actually a very
progressive country in that regard
they’re trying to protect 10% of their
EEZ the exclusive economic zone by the
year 2010 in two years and the reason
that this all began was in the early
1970s with this gentleman right here dr.
bill Ballantine who’s the father of
marine protected areas certainly in New
Zealand
he’s a mollusc scientist he’s not a
diver and even in his late 60s he still
goes down to the beach every day to do
his transects and study his mollusks but
in the early 1970s he picked a place
that was just an ordinary part of the
New Zealand coastline was a place called
Goat Island it wasn’t really an island
just the little rocks off the coast but
he argued that we needed to protect that
and he had to fight sport fishermen he
had to fight commercial fishermen and he
had a fight scientist because scientists
from the University of Auckland we’re
doing a lot of collecting out there but
ultimately he prevailed and they
protected this place about 30 years ago
and what bill told me was he he hoped
that by protecting Goat Island certain
species of fish would come back species
like the New Zealand snapper we see here
that was highly overfished and they did
come back but what he couldn’t
anticipate what nobody could anticipate
was that certain other things would
happen for example in shallow water near
Goat Island like 20 or 30 feet deep all
they ever saw before was sea urchins
lining the bottom just sea urchins
everywhere covering the the boulders but
what they didn’t know was that when the
snapper returned these
that snapper predate on on sea urchins
they eat sea urchins so by controlling
the sea urchin populations when the fish
came back kelp forests returned to
shallow water nobody ever knew that kelp
grew in 20 or 25 feet of water but today
there are these healthy lush kelp
forests in 20 or 30 feet of water
because the snapper came back and
controlled the origin population and
this is how it was this is maybe how the
ocean was one or two hundred years ago
but nobody’s around to tell us so by
protecting places in the ocean we now
have a baseline we know what it’s
supposed to be and the thing that I saw
when I was there that struck me as much
as the underwater was that the people
came to this place I watched kids every
day like these two little boys that were
in a tidal pool just exploring you know
maybe future biologists maybe future
photographers but they were just engaged
they wanted to be there
I watched you know young girls these two
sisters that drove all the way from
Oakland about an hour and a half drive
with their parents and they rented masks
and fins on the beach what you can do
there and just wanted to see fish you
know Ballantine told me a story he said
that in 1970 before they protected Goat
Island as a marine reserve about 3,000
people would come there every year to go
fishing off the rocks they just line the
hook in line and sports fish off the
rocks and after they passed the
legislation to make it a marine reserve
all the newspapers in New Zealand had
huge headlines that said nothing left to
do at Goat Island because you couldn’t
fish there anymore nothing left to do
fast-forward 30 years now to where we
are today not 3,000 people a year 300
thousand people a year go to go to
Island and they go there not to go
fishing off the rocks they go there to
see fish just to stand on the rocks or
to swim with them and I think that’s
that’s what it’s about I worked in other
places in New Zealand as well there’s a
picture me up on a mountaintop we have
to set down our helicopter because the
weather was getting bad but I wanted to
make an aerial picture of a place called
Fiordland which is a very Lord of the
Rings kind of an environment it’s this
beautiful mountainous region with fjords
and freshwater rivers that are stained
with tannin lead into the ocean and
create a permanent layer of freshwater
about 25 feet thick sitting on top of
the salt water so when you
dive in it’s like diving in an old dirty
river but you go through about 25 feet
of this dirty fresh water that’s sitting
on top of the salt water and you break
into this crystal-clear dark
saltwater below it’s like Dorothy
emerging into Oz you know and this is a
picture of some of the animals that live
there it’s a very fragile habitat this
is some animal called black coral which
actually appears white under water it’s
only black after you break it off and
bring it up and polish it but this this
beautiful black coral like a Christmas
tree almost in this emerald green world
that you’re looking straight up but if
you were looking horizontally it’s it’s
there’s no ambient light it’s pretty
dark there’s another picture made in
fjord land of some animals called sea
pens which a reminiscent of the old
quill pens but these are like a type of
soft coral this picture was made at
about 70 feet where there’s no ambient
light but these animals like black coral
and sea pens are tricked into thinking
that they’re in deeper water they
typically live in very deep water but
because it’s dark here they kind of
emerge into the shallower water and as I
was setting up to make this picture a
blue cod just kind of swim in
serendipity is is often one of the
greatest things in photography you just
get these moments but everywhere I went
in New Zealand and all these marine
reserves I saw extraordinary things
playing peek-a-boo with a little new
zealand fur seal pup one day in fronds
of kelp and tiny little blennies hiding
out in invertebrate bottoms here are
these strawberry Halla therians as
they’re called I went to the North
Island where the water is bluer to a
place called Poor Knights Island and saw
all kinds of interesting relationships
this little trevally Jack having some
symbiotic relationship maybe as a
cleaner fish with this New Zealand
snapper I watched every level of the the
ecosystem looking very healthy this
beautiful nudibranch crawling over some
orange and crusting sponge an octopus
emerging from its den just around the
sunset time about to go out and forage
about to go out and hunt a leather
jacket a type of triggerfish grazing on
the bottom swimming over this beautiful
green bottom and I wanted to close with
this picture which is a picture that I
hope to make for this story a picture
that I think represents how the oceans
might have looked one or two
years ago a primal ocean if you will a
primal ocean of life I think that you
know with an increased awareness we can
begin to understand the problems of our
oceans and by taking ownership of our
planet and giving it the protection it
deserves scenes like this will not be
the exception but they’ll be the rule
thanks very much
you
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