Oceanographic Magazine / Issue One

ISSUE 01

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Conservation • Exploration • Adventure

S AV I N G THE ARCTIC O N E M A N ’ S M I S S I O N T O P R O T E C T T H E A R C T I C O C E A N B E F O R E I T ’ S T O O L AT E

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WELCOME

Editor’s Letter Th a n k yo u .

B y re a d i n g O c e a n o g ra p h i c yo u ’ re d i re c t l y contributing to the fight for i m p ro ve d o c e a n health.

The Oceanographic project started a little over a year ago. The concept was simple: a beautiful magazine that brings our fascinating but ailing blue planet to life. The focus would be on human connectedness with our wild blue spaces - inspiring people with fascinating stories, such as ocean explorers, conservationists and adventurers. Content would span all ocean disciplines, from surfing to diving, via sailing and kayaking, creating a nonhobbyist magazine that unified our disparate ocean communities. Why? Because we all care about the same thing: the ocean.

We’re a small team with big ambitions, determined to highlight both the wonders of our ocean and the plights it is facing. We want to be an active part of that change, rather than a media outlet that simply champions it. To achieve this, we have committed 20% of profits to ocean conservation charities Project AWARE, Blue Sphere Foundation and Wildcoast. We also hope to create a new wave of ocean conservationists by offering free digital subscriptions to anyone who signs-up to support Project AWARE. The print product is also available in High Street retailer Crew Clothing Company, with £2 from each sale going to the ocean.

Will Harrison Editor

The voyage from inception to this launch issue has been an exciting one. Characterised by inspirational people and progressive organisations - from seed money funders to our amazing brand partners - it has been a process that has given us great hope that the appetite for engagement and change is out there.

Central to that is you.

Thank you for reading.

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Contents FEATURES

P E N HA DOW

TAV IS H C A MPBE L L

Polar Explorer Pen Hadow, one of the world’s foremost Arctic experts, writes exclusively for Oceanographic about his ambition to have the international waters of the Arctic Ocean designated a marine reserve.

Investigative journalist and Sea Legacy photographer Tavish Campbell brings to life the natural beauty of British Columbia and the importance of wild salmon to the ecosystem an ancient equilibrium of fish and forest that is now under threat.

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YOUR OCEAN IMAGES

BEHIND THE LENS

Get in touch ED I TO R Will Harrison S U B - E D I TO R

Georgina Fuller

CR EATI V E D I R E C TO R

Amelia Costley

D ES I G N A S S I S TA N T

Joanna Kilgour

PA RT N E R S H I P S D I R E C TOR

Chris Anson

B R A N D M A N AG E R

Gemma Onslow

I N S U P P O RT O F

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A S S TO C K E D I N

S C OT T P O RTE L L I

For all enquiries regarding stockists, submissions, or just to say hello, please email info@oceanographicmagazine.com or call (+44) 20 3637 8680. Published in the UK by Atlas Publishing Ltd. © 2018 Atlas Publishing Ltd. All right reserved. Nothing in whole or in part may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher.

A collection of some of the most captivating ocean images shared on social media, both beautiful and arresting. Tag us or use #MYOCEAN for the opportunity to be featured.

Each issue, we chat with one of the world’s leading ocean photographers and showcase a selection of their work. For the inaugural edition, we meet Scott Portelli, a Wildlife Photographer of the Year winner.

Printed by Warners Midlands Plc ISSN: 2516-595X

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CONTENTS

MIK E COOTS

CH R I S JO R DA N

C R A IG F O S T E R

L UC Y W O O DA L L

S IMO N PIE RC E

After losing his leg in a shark attack, Mike Coots did what few expected - he became a shark conservationist. Mike speaks to Oceanographic about the years since the attack, the projects he is involved in and returning to the water with tiger sharks.

On a remote island in the North Pacific Ocean thousands of albatross chicks die every year as a consequence of ingesting plastic. Photographer Chris Jordan reveals what it was like to witness such horrors and why he felt compelled to make his first film.

The sight of an octopus camouflaging itself with shells and rocks to avoid predation dazzled viewers of the BBC’s Blue Planet II. Pippa Ehrlich meets Craig Foster, the man who discovered that behaviour, who dives every day in his local kelp forest in a bid to reconnect with nature.

The deep ocean is the beating heart of our planet, but we know precious little about it, including how healthy it is. Dr Lucy Woodall, Principle Scientist at Nekton Mission, reveals what it’s like to visit the deep, and why it is so important that we do.

The whale sharks of Mafia Island fascinate marine biologists. Unlike other populations around the world, which travel huge distances every year, these congregate around the island. Whale shark expert Simon Pierce explains why.

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C O L U MN S

TH E ADVE N TUR I ST

THE ENVIRONMENTALIST

THE E T HO L O G IS T

T HE B IO L O G IS T

P R O J E C T AWARE

Underwater photographer Matt Draper, whose mantra is to ‘replace fear with fascination’ reveals what it is like to make eye contact with one of the ocean’s greatest and most imposing creatures.

Big wave surf champion, environmentalist and social change advocate Dr Easkey Britton discusses the power of our wild blue spaces to empower, heal and promote wellness.

Shark advocate and ethologist Ocean Ramsey reveals what it is like to freedive with tiger sharks and offers a few tips on how to deal with unwanted attention.

Dr Simon Pierce, Principal Scientist at the Marine Megafauna Foundation, offers an insight into the surprising behaviour of whales eating sharks.

The team at Project AWARE, Oceanographic’s primary charity partner, offer an update on the amazing work they do for our beautiful blue planet.

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George Stoyle Outer Hebrides Beneath the wind- and wavebeaten coastlines of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides lies a vibrant underwater world full of wonder, colour and life, including creatures such as these jewel anemones.

SPONSORED BY

BEHIND THE LENS

#MYOCEAN

Sean Scott Great Barrier Reef The Great Barrier Reef is home to six of the world’s seven species of sea turtles, including this green turtle photographed off the coast of Lady Elliot Island, the reef ’s southernmost coral cay.

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Florian Ledoux Greenland Walruses gather at the edge of the Greenland Sea, where vivid - and frigid - waters meet shingle beaches.

The species is listed as ‘Vulnerable’ on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List.

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#MYOCEAN

Sacha Specker Hawaii Placing a hand for balance, a surfer inadvertently waves to the world below while catching a wave on the North Shore of Oahu in the winter of 2017/18.

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#MYOCEAN

Brook Peterson California California’s kelp forests are beautiful but delicate ecosystems.

Following decades of decline, they are thriving once again - though proliferating kelp-consuming urchins still pose a threat.

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Zach Levitetz Florida A leatherback turtle hatchling makes its way to the water for the very first time, the beginning of an againstthe-odds journey - if it survives to adulthood. Leatherbacks are listed as ‘Vulnerable’ on the IUCN Red List.

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#MYOCEAN

Ethan Daniels Palau A thick school of Yellowtail fusiliers gathers just under the waterline in the Republic of Palau. This remote Micronesian nation harbours extraordinary marine biodiversity.

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Saving the Arctic Ocean

One of the world’s most accomplished Arctic explorers, Pen Hadow, reveals the experiences and motivations behind his mission to have the international waters of the Arctic Ocean designated a protected marine reserve.

Wo rd s b y Pe n H a d o w P h o t o g ra p h s b y M a r t i n H a r t l e y a n d F l o r i a n L e d o u x

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ABOVE: Pen Hadow crests a newly-formed first-year ‘pressure ridge’, formed when the edges of two ice-floes break up under compression.

OPPOSITE: The Arctic Ocean is a dramatic and beautiful place filled with roving icebergs and varied wildlife, including numerous seabird species.

PREVIOUS PAGE: The Arctic’s sea ice is constantly shape-shifting. While the freeze-thaw process is natural, climate change is reducing the amount of seawater that refreezes each year.

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s the sea ice bent and sagged I braced myself for the inevitable. Within a fraction of a second I would drop through to be enveloped by the ink-black waters of the Arctic Ocean. But I was prepared.

Immersion was an expected consequence of the uniquely direct route I was taking to our planet’s northernmost point, the North Geographic Pole. I had already climbed into my one-piece immersion suit and inflated my sledge’s Zodiac-like rubber outer skin. This thinly refrozen waterway, between two ice floes that had recently pulled apart, had looked suspiciously thin; the familiar ‘trapdoor effect’ of breaking ice did not, therefore, come as a surprise. The frigid waters rose rapidly around me as my view of the surrounding icescape closed down from a kilometre to a few metres directly ahead.

Climbing out the other side, heaving the sledge out behind me, and dripping with sweat from the exertion of swimming and smashing my way through 50 metres of ice not quite thick enough to leopard-crawl up onto, I stripped off my immersion suit as quickly as possible. The seawater attached to its outer surface froze within seconds

and tumbled off like shattered toffee. My accumulated sweat inside the suit froze too, but by turning the suit inside-out could be immediately shaken out. I struck off northwards, the maintenance of my body’s core temperature now critical, particularly when wearing clothing drenched in sweat that could turn my current situation from dangerous to fatal.

I broke through the sea ice numerous times on my unsupported solo journey to the North Pole. When possible, I clambered onto my sledge and paddled it like a surfboard across the stretches of ice-free open water.

On one occasion I spent four hours in the water, unable to find an exit point. On other occasions I lowered myself off the edge of ice floes into the water, unable to see the far side obscured by ground-storms, fog or descending darkness. While the distances were rarely measured in kilometres, they could be extensive and exhausting. They were always nerve-wracking.

My ‘Amphibious Option’, as I called my sledge-boat and immersion suit, was an equipment innovation to enable the shortest route to be taken between my

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“I broke through the sea ice numerous times on my unsupported solo journey to the North Pole. When possible, I clambered onto my sledge and paddled it like a surfboard across the stretches of ice-free open water.”

journey’s start and finish points in a melting polar marine environment. Prior to this successful attempt on the Pole, which took place in 2003, I had tried and ‘failed’ twice before, in 1994 and 1998, learning things on both occasions that enabled my future success. From those previous attempts, and after much wide-ranging research, including analysis of sea-ice satellite imagery, and discussions with oceanographers, it became clear that the traditional route to the Pole was getting longer due to the necessary zig-zagging required to avoid the increasing amount of open water between the floes all a direct result of global atmospheric warming and associated changing wind patterns and ocean water temperatures. Ice that had been only just thick enough on previous attempts, was now too thin to walk on; the ice that had been too thin to walk on was now open water; and the open water of the past was increasingly less likely to re-freeze in the warming atmosphere and upper ocean waters. I was the first person to set off with such a comprehensive amphibious option. The changing Arctic Ocean environment necessitated it and, as a solo and unsupported expeditioner, the ability to go direct would save me precious time, given it was limited by the 75 days’ worth of food and fuel I could haul. I actually reached the Pole in 64 days, having pulled my sledge across ice for a total of 850 hours. But, significantly, forty of those hours cumulatively were spent swimming in the 0ºC to -1.8ºC super-saline water between the floes.

According to NASA, Arctic sea ice has declined at a rate of 13.2% a decade since the 1970s, based on each year’s minimum coverage (recorded each September).

In the nine years between my first and last attempts on the Pole - 1994 and 2003 - the sea-ice cover had declined by one million square kilometres. Since 2003, it has declined a further 1.4 million sq km, resulting in total summertime area loss equivalent to ten times the area of the United Kingdom. The retreat is all too evident, both from the satellite-derived images and from my personal experience travelling on the Arctic Ocean.

Pen Hadow commits to practising an open water crossing in the frozen Arctic waters of the Northwest Passage, wearing an immersion suit over his polar clothing, and inflating a flotation device around his sledge to create his now famous ‘Amphibious Option’.

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In 2016, NASA’s September imagery revealed a fingershaped stretch of water open up in a previously frozen region of the Arctic Ocean. It practically reached the North Pole itself at 90º North. Having spent so much time on the Arctic Ocean, both on my own and as an expedition guide, it was distressing to see this unique marine environment losing its habitat-defining feature, the sea ice, so swiftly.

A big part of my work as an explorer is about committing to challenging endeavours to discover information about our natural world, and using the resulting stories to engage the public and policy-makers in the environmental issues of our time. This ‘finger of sea’ offered an opportunity to reveal the emerging conflicting interests between commercial exploitation and wildlife conservation.

In the summer of 2017 I led Arctic Mission, an ecosystem research and public engagement-focused expedition. Our intention was to reach as far north as the Arctic Ocean’s sea-ice cover allowed. Much of the seaice cover, comprising millions of ice floes, is constantly shifting - all day, every day, year round. So it is impossible to forecast accurately year-to-year, yet alone a month ahead, where the open water, low ice concentrations, and impenetrably thick ice will be. One has to largely go and find out on the day! Our expedition involved two 50-foot sea-ice specialist sailboats, Bagheera and Snow Dragon II, each designed, built and owned by their skippers, respectively Dutch sailing legend, Erik de Jong, and American high-latitude yachtswoman, Frances Brann. In the event our vessels became the first in history to enter the North Pole’s international waters without ice-breakers (a region also known as the Central Arctic

Ocean [CAO]). Such was the retreat of the sea-ice that summer that we were able to continue a further 300 miles northwards to reach 80 degrees 10 minutes North. While we were not the sailboat to have gotten closest to the Pole, Arctic Mission’s yachts were the first to sail north beyond the 200 nautical mile territorial waters of any of the countries surrounding the Arctic Ocean. The voyage by such small boats also proved the emerging accessibility of the CAO to commercial shipping from the Bering Strait side of the Arctic Ocean.

Our scientific programme, led by marine biologist Tim Gordon of the University of Exeter (UK), studied plastics pollution, seabirds and mammals, acoustic soundscapes, animal and plant plankton, marine microbes, water chemistry and ocean currents. Interestingly, US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse referenced Arctic Mission’s work in the US Senate in the Autumn of last year during a ‘Save Our Seas Act’ debate in which he successfully recovered funds recently withdrawn from the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration’s marine debris research programme.

Up to 40% of the summertime sea-ice cover in the CAO has been lost in recent summers, creating a new summertime open ocean. My primary long-term concern is that, because the CAO is part of the international community’s ‘high seas’, which is in effect unregulated, commercial fishing vessels can access it without catch limits, regulation or enforcement.

The good news is that a 16-year (to 2032) voluntary ban on commercial fishing in the CAO area has been signed by the five countries bordering the Arctic Ocean - Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia and the USA - as well as other nation states and blocs with sizeable fishing fleets, including the European Union, China and Japan.

It is envisaged by the signatories that in the 16 years the CAO remains trawler-free, they will conduct research into the area’s marine ecology and the likely effects commercial fishing, cargo shipping, cruise tourism and mineral extraction activities could have on this delicately balanced system.

Polar bears, the world’s largest land carnivore, are at risk from retreating sea ice, an environment on which they depend.

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TOP: Pen Hadow switches on an ice-penetrating radar device towed behind his sledge. It sought to measure the thickness and structure of the sea ice. It was how he started every day of the first of three 90-day Catlin Arctic Surveys he led on the Arctic Ocean.

BOTTOM: Arctic Mission’s 50ft steel-hulled yacht, Bagheera, heads home to Alaska having been the first vessel in history (accompanied by its sister yacht Snow Dragon II) to have sailed into the international waters surrounding the North Pole without icebreaker support. Photograph by Conor McDonnell.

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“It has, due to its receding sea-ice over the last 40 years, gone from being a part of the world most saw as irrelevant, lifeless and pointless to becoming one of our planet’s most interesting and geopolitically active regions.”

On the face of it, it is an encouraging deal. The protection of 2.8 million sq km (an area equivalent in size to the Mediterranean Sea) encompassing the entire body of international waters around the North Pole, for scientific research before commercial fleets have descended upon it has never happened before. However, the agreement is voluntary and any signatory country can withdraw from it, and any non-signatory country may fish as they please. But of greater concern is that while the collection of data to determine appropriate fisheries quotas is a good idea in principle, with the environmentalists’ ‘precautionary principle’ made explicit in the agreement, logistically it is still very difficult to access 60% of the region, given the remaining sea-ice cover. Arguably only China, for example, has a suitable ice-breaker fleet to deliver on-going and valuable marine ecosystem research, and even then, to-date such research has been almost exclusively limited to the summer season. Almost nothing is known about this polar marine ecosystem in the autumn, winter and spring. Year-round research is prohibitively expensive for most non-government funded organisations. So, you have to ask: How much are we really going to learn by 2032? It is a real concern as science is ultimately what informs, supports and shapes policy-makers’ thinking, as well as the resulting legislation and agreements.

The risks here for the global community go well beyond fish stocks. The opening up of the Arctic Ocean could also see shipping’s trade routes change dramatically with, for example, the cargo ships of the Pacific Rim nations taking the quicker and cheaper northerly routes ‘over the top’ via the North Pole rather than using the longer, traditional trade routes through the Suez and Panama canals. Such traffic would bring with it prodigious subsurface noise pollution to an environment that has been free from such pollution, and it really is a highly disruptive, destructive (and sometimes fatal) form of pollution. How that would impact this marine ecosystem, we just don’t know. Again, year-round, long-term, multi-disciplinary marine research is key and should now be our highest priority.

While I am cynical about the volume of science likely to accrue over the next decade and a half, there is cause for genuine optimism. A United Nations consultation is looking to broaden the scope of the existing High Seas Treaty to include a biodiversity dimension that will enable legally protected areas to be established within international waters. Such protection capability would have a huge impact on the global community’s international waters, both environmentally and economically. Environmentally, restricting international commercial fishing, for example, will allow high seas stocks to regenerate and thereby re-stock adjacent national territorial waters. Economically, regulated high seas would result in the redistribution of catch currently, just ten wealthy countries account for 70% of all the fish taken from the world’s high seas.

My mission, through the not-for-profit advocacy work undertaken by our 90ºNorth Unit, is to provide the leadership required to catalyse the process by which the international community agrees to create a marine reserve to cover the entire high seas area around the North Pole by 2032.

I am hopeful. The CAO, as far as the high seas are concerned, can be seen as the flag-bearer for the merit of legally protected areas being created in the world’s oceans. It has, due to its receding sea-ice over the last 40 years, gone from being a part of the world most saw as irrelevant, lifeless and pointless to becoming one of our planet’s most interesting and geopolitically active regions. It is full of life, home to an array of iconic species including the world’s second largest animal (bowhead whale), the world’s only white whale (beluga), the world’s longest lifespan animals (Greenland shark), the world’s largest surface carnivore (polar bear), the world’s largest dolphin (orca), an offshore-living ‘land-mammal’ (Arctic fox), the double-tusked walrus, and the single-tusked ‘unicorn-of-the-sea’ (narwhal). And these can only exist because of the prodigious plant and animal life below them in the food-chain. And ‘pointless’? I don’t think so! It surrounds one of the two most famous points on Earth - the North Geographic Pole!

The North Pole Marine Reserve - for Science Only. And the generations who follow us.

Pe n H a d o w

Martin Hartley

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Florian Ledoux

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Sockeye salmon are incredible athletes, pushing far inland against strong currents to reach their spawning grounds.

T H E F I S H T H AT

feeds the forest Investigative photojournalist Tavish Campbell reveals the impact Atlantic salmon farms are having on local Pacific populations in the wilds of British Columbia - an ecosystem built upon the flesh and bones of fish.

Wo rd s a n d p h o t o g ra p h s b y Ta v i s h C a m p b e l l

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ABOVE: In the fall, chum salmon becomes a staple food source for the Steller sea lion, the largest sea lion in the world.

OPPOSITE: Coastal estuaries are a meshing of two worlds; fresh and salt water. Countless species will gather at this intersection to feed on the salmon, from diving birds and otters when the young salmon are leaving to wolves and bears when the adults return.

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he ambient light dimmed as I kicked away from the surface. Zipped tightly into my drysuit with a cylinder of compressed air strapped to my back, nothing but the grainy sound of my own inhalations accompanied me downwards into the ocean.

Twenty, 25, 30 metres deep and I was forced to brighten my underwater lights to identify a large pipe leading away from the industrial farmed salmon processing plant I was investigating. As I neared the end of the pipe the lights illuminated a massive plume of billowing red blood, dispersing directly into Canada’s largest wild salmon migration route. It was a sickening sight; I struggled not to choke on my regulator. This blood water had come from farmed Atlantic salmon grown in open net-pens in British Columbia’s cold seas, but I was not diving for them. I was there for the Pacific salmon who belong on this coast and are now forced to swim through these same waters. I was there because I love wild salmon.

Growing up on a small remote island in the wilderness of British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest, I was introduced early to the creatures that swam past my home. The five main species of salmon that live on Canada’s west coast have been a source of endless intrigue for me; sockeye, chinook, coho, chum and pink.

Salmon and humans have co-evolved in the North Pacific for thousands of years, the fish’s nutrient-rich bodies providing the building blocks for life on a land left barren by receding ice sheets. If one looks at a map of the salmon-bearing watersheds of the Pacific rim, you see an ever branching network of arteries reaching hundreds of miles inland, delivering critical marine nutrients

to ecosystems seemingly disconnected from the open ocean. First Nation cultures, both coastal and inland, are entwined with these fish in a relationship dating back through legend and archaeology for more than ten thousand years of spawning cycles.

Early in the spring, tiny juveniles called alevin emerge from their eggs in freshwater rivers and wriggle free of the gravel nests that have held them safely through winter. They are swept steadily downstream, sometimes holding in lakes before seeking saltwater and heading to sea. At night, I would lay in bed listening for the delicate flip of the juveniles, called smolts, as they continually dimpled the ocean surface, pouring past my house on their epic journey. Once at sea they spend two to seven years flashing through the north Pacific Ocean between British Columbia and Japan, feeding voraciously and building up energy for their long migration home.

Some runs of chinook, the largest of the five species, can grow into 35kg of quicksilver muscle. In summertime as the mature fish returned to the coast in the endlessly revolving cycle of generations, my family would fish to preserve them in jars for the winter; their flesh and bones literally building mine.

Upon nearing their natal river mouths they undergo massive physiological changes in preparation for transitioning from salt water to fresh on the final leg of their journey. Not only do these fish return to the very rivers where they were born, they can sense their way to the exact section of riverbed from which they emerged as tiny juveniles, years prior. In autumn, my sisters and I would await their return to our local streams,

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overwhelmed with excitement. With notebooks in hand for counting, the first strong fins pushing upwards into shallow pools would be met with cheers of relief for a safe return. Once in the river, their bright silver scales transform into dramatic spawning colours of deep red and purple. Mates are selected to dig shallow nests in the river bottom and after the eggs are laid, the pair will both die to complete the cycle. Their rotting bodies fertilize the rivers and feed the very insects their unborn young will eat the following spring when they emerge from the gravel riverbed.

We loved these fish with a sense of awe often forgotten past childhood, and it was this connection that prompted me to pick up a camera and housing in an attempt to share my enthusiasm for these beautiful swimmers. I find myself constantly drawn to bodies of water which might possibly hold salmon, ocean included, and feel claustrophobic when this connection is absent. It’s hard to imagine a place I would rather be than floating through a kelp bed pursuing wary smolts with my camera, or watching mature spawners jump laboriously upstream attempting to avoid the countless predators they so generously support.

This fish truly feeds the coast. They nourish the killer whales, sea lions, bears, eagles, wolves and they also quite literally feed the forest. Scientists are able to detect marine-derived nitrogen high in the canopy of salmon-bearing watersheds. Predators such as bears often drag salmon deep into the forest to eat them, leaving the carcasses to decompose into rich fertilizer.

In fact, the influence of salmon on the temperate rainforest is so strong that larger growth rings in the trees can be correlated to years with larger returns of salmon. In turn, these massive trees stand watchfully over the spawning beds, as much a part of the river as the water itself.

For all the life salmon have generously sustained over the ages, their own survival is now becoming increasingly tenuous. They have faced an onslaught of human impacts over the last century, ranging from habitat destruction to overfishing. Most notably though, is their serious decline since the late 1980s, which coincides startlingly with the introduction of open net-pen salmon aquaculture in British Columbia. This controversial industry originated in Norway and now profits from more than 150 sites along British Columbia’s coast. Each site contains more than 500,000 non-native Atlantic salmon which are raised in large net-pens floating in the water. Similar to other industrial animal agriculture, crowded living conditions lead to the amplification of an array of diseases, plus parasites such as sea-lice. Unfortunately, there is no barrier to prevent the spread of these infectious pathogens to wild salmon as they are forced to pass the industrial sites situated in narrow migratory channels.

Marine-derived nitrogen can be found high in the rainforest canopy near salmon bearing streams. The fish literally feed the trees.

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“This fish truly feeds the coast. Scientists are able to detect marinederived nitrogen high in the canopy of salmonbearing watersheds, and larger growth rings in the trees can be correlated to years with larger returns of salmon.�

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“80% of farmed salmon on British Columbia’s coast are infected with a virus called Piscine reovirus (PRV), brought to Canada from Norway via Atlantic salmon egg imports. The spread of this disease, among many others the farmed salmon are carrying, is the ‘smoking gun’ in the collapse of wild salmon stocks.”

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THIS PAGE: A school of wild salmon smolts pass an open-net pen facility containing Atlantic salmon in the Discovery Islands.

OPPOSITE TOP: An open-net pen facility containing over half a million Atlantic salmon sits in Okisollo Channel, near Vancouver Island.

BOTTOM LEFT: Untreated, infected farmed salmon blood is released from a processing plant near Campbell River, on Vancouver Island.

BOTTOM RIGHT: A pen containing thousands of Atlantic salmon is illuminated by massive underwater lights.

F E AT U R E

Eighty percent of farmed salmon on British Columbia’s coast are infected with a virus called Piscine reovirus (PRV). This virus was brought to Canada from Norway via Atlantic salmon egg imports and has recently been linked to a harmful fish disease called Heart and Skeletal Muscle Inflammation (HSMI) by Fisheries and Oceans Canada. This disease has been known to cause high mortality at infected net-pen sites and mounting scientific evidence suggests the spread of this disease, among many others the farmed salmon are carrying, is the ‘smoking gun’ in the collapse of wild salmon stocks. After 2017 saw the lowest sockeye salmon returns to British Columbia‘s largest river since records began in the late 1800s, the Committee on the Status of

Endangered Wildlife in Canada has recommended that eight populations within the Fraser River watershed be officially listed as endangered. Fisheries and Oceans Canada now find themselves in a severe conflict of interest, mandated to promote open net-pen salmon aquaculture while at the same time being responsible for the health of our wild stocks. It is becoming clear this struggle repeatedly responds to the lobbying dollars of the aquaculture industry while the wild salmon suffer.

The Canadian Minister of Fisheries is currently in court fighting for the right to continue permitting the transfer of infected Atlantic salmon into Canadian waters, arguing the prohibition of this practice would prevent the industry from continuing to operate in the ocean.

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“In a world with a rapidly changing ocean and climate it is crucial we revere and defend the natural systems that keep us alive. �

F E AT U R E

ABOVE: After spawning in the fall, the decomposing bodies of the parents fertilises the creeks, ensuring healthy insect populations which their young will feed on when they emerge from their eggs in the spring.

OPPOSITE: Fish-eating killer whales prey almost exclusively on salmon, their favourite being the largest, chinook salmon. The more experienced whales in the pod will often catch and share these rich fish amongst other family members.

With this backdrop of urgency, I found myself diving into the frigid waters near my home off Vancouver Island to investigate a farmed salmon processing plant. I was not being paid to do this, I simply could not sit idle and watch such blatant harm to our wild salmon, and ultimately my home, unfold around me. The blood water I swam through and recorded that day shocked Canadians and went viral around the world. The processing plant was releasing the infectious blood of thousands of farmed Atlantic salmon into the exact bay where schools of tiny, fragile Fraser River salmon smolts feed during their journey to sea. I collected samples of the blood for analysis, which tested positive for very high levels of PRV. The trajectory is clear; many runs of wild salmon on Canada’s west coast are headed towards extinction. The results from the lab made me feel sick.

The majority of British Columbians and coastal First Nations value healthy wild salmon over this polluting industry and are sending a clear message to government: transition net-pen aquaculture out of the ocean and into closed-containment systems on land to eliminate the spread of waste and pathogens into the surrounding environment. First Nations near north eastern Vancouver Island have recently occupied multiple aquaculture sites for more than 100 days, calling on government to force the facilities from the waters of their unceeded traditional territories. Wild salmon are food for this coast, a simple but powerful point that fuels passionate concern by those who still understand this exchange. The writing is on the wall for this industry and as public opposition grows it is only a matter of time until they will have to transition to land. But will it be soon enough to save the wild salmon?

The health of these fish is indicative of the health of our coast and ourselves. They feed the forests that make a significant proportion of the oxygen we breathe. In a world with a rapidly changing ocean and climate it is crucial we revere and defend the natural systems that keep us alive.

I still slip into the water to spend time with these beautiful fish as often as possible. Sometimes with a camera and sometimes without, cheering silently for every healthy blur that weaves past me. I feel an intense urge to watch these salmon during the moments they allow me, as if the simple act of witnessing pays tribute to their wildly improbable journey to sea and back. It is not an option for me to stand by and watch the destruction of something I love, so I will continue fighting for them with the tools I have: my drysuit and camera. Bringing glimpses of these hidden lives back to the surface feels like a small way to honour a fish that has given so generously.

I am not sure what I will uncover on my next dive for the salmon, but the remarkable story of these fish provides endless motivation to continue fighting for their survival, and all that depends on them.

Ta v i s h C a m p b e l l

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Column

By Matt Draper

The adventurist

REPLACING FEAR WITH FASCINATION

“It shifts your universe.

Just slightly. It changes your perception of yourself, the creatures we co-exist with, and your place on this big blue planet.”

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Oceanographic May 2018

E

ver looked into the eye of a whale? I mean deeply, heavily stared in there? If you have, then you’ll understand what I mean when I say it shifts your universe. Just slightly. It changes your perception of yourself, the creatures we co-exist with, and your place on this big blue planet. Nothing I’ve encountered so far in life could prepare me for that moment, for the way it changed me, changed my view of the world and made me question things.

There is a moment during eye contact when reality kicks in, when your shifted universe re-centres. It dredges up all those fears, reminding you that the animal you’re observing (and who is currently observing you) weighs approximately 36,000kg. Internet stories flood your mind: wasn’t there a guy who was killed by a whale? Or was it a whale shark? Is there a shark here right now? All around me is deep blue ocean. In front of me is one of the largest animals on the planet. My head is a mixture of awe and nervousness.

The fear of the unknown. The strength and power of the behemoth. A moment later, seeing the curiosity, wisdom and intrigue reflected back at me, the sentience of this creature that I’m locking eyes with, my worries vanish, replaced with fascination and wonder.

There are still occasional moments of fear. Humpback pectoral fins are about a third of the length of their body - imagine two and a half refrigerators stuck together end-to-end, coming at you through the water as the whale rolls and dances. That said, time with these gentle giants has taught me they are much more capable in the water than me, and they will generally avoid crushing me with their fins. Typically, they are curious, coming in for a look and enabling me to capture close-ups and details.

Every interaction is different, but generally includes resting, breathing, the occasional twirl and breach.

Adult humpbacks have a breath-hold of up to 45 minutes, but in general return to the surface every 15 minutes or so, the calves even more frequently.

They continue this cycle during sleep, essentially napping on the move. The intriguing and unique nature of these animals is what makes them such a joy to photograph. They have a relatability and are utterly beguiling.

The Kingdom of Tonga is one of the few places in the world where close encounters with humpbacks can be enjoyed. The mothers are there to calve, care for their new-born babies, and find a new mate. The males are there to seduce. No one can definitively explain what role whalesong plays in this, especially since they’re all singing the same evolving song, year after year. All those whales, all those strange sounds, and every male humpback in Tonga singing almost exactly the same melody. It’s a characteristic that only adds to the magic of an encounter.

Singing whales hang suspended in the infinite blue, flukes up and heads down. You can’t see them singing, but you can feel it - a combination of creaks and growls, pops and bloops and trippy Led Zeppelin-esque wails.

The vibration moves through your whole body, shaking muscle and bone.

At home in Byron Bay, they say that vibrations change your frequency, that everything in the universe is made of energy and that our problems are caused by parts of our bodies vibrating out of resonance. When you’re in the water and you feel the shake and pulse of whalesong humming through your fingers, the power of vibration doesn’t seem quite so unbelievable. MD About Matt Matt Draper is an Australia-based underwater photographer who specialises in wide-angle black and white imagery. He spends countless hours in the water, learning to better understand the species he interacts with.

By meticulously studying and patiently moving through each untamed environment, he is able to reveal distinct characteristics and behaviours.

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BEHIND THE LENS

LOSING A LIMB

Finding a purpose

BEHIND THE LENS

The victim of a shark attack when he was a teenager, Mike Coots did what few expected - he became a shark conservationist. It took him 20 years to share the water again with tiger sharks, the species that took his leg. Mike speaks with Oceanographic about his early relationship with the sea, the events of that fateful day and how it felt returning to the water with tigers.

Wo rd s b y H e l e n Tay l o r P h o t o g ra p h s b y M i ke C o o t s a n d Ju a n O l i p h a n t

Mike Coots, who lost his right leg in a shark attack, freedives with the species that took it the tiger shark.

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F E AT U R E

S

hark attack survivor turned shark conservationist, Mike Coots, caught his first wave when he was four years old. Born on the island of Kauai in Hawaii, his grandmother took him to a small beach near their home and as he drifted in the ocean with his tiny bodyboard, he remembers the exhilarating thrill of the water as it rushed beneath him, catapulting him forward and carrying him across the cool, turquoise ocean, like a rocket launching for the first time.

Growing up on an island, his life was punctuated by daily visits to the ocean: “Living on a little island surrounded by the ocean, there was no real way of getting away from it.” As a child with his friends, he would spend every spare minute revelling in Hawaii’s deep blue playground, riding every splash of surf he could find, or in the summer months when Hawaii experiences poor swells, diving and snorkelling with rainbows of colourful reef fish, manta rays and turtles. “I think I probably spent as much time in the water as I did above it in those summer months.” His relationship with the ocean nurtured him throughout his childhood and teenage years, and has been sustained since.

It wasn’t until Mike was 15 that he began bodyboarding competitively: “We took a family holiday to New Zealand and my parents fell in love with the place, so we pretty much just packed up and moved south. I spent two years of high school there and really got into competitive bodyboarding.” Mike returned to Hawaii in his senior year and together with his friends, some of whom were already top competitive bodyboarders, formed a bodyboarding team.

“We’d train together with our coach - he would film us, critique our technique, and then we’d compete as a team all over Hawaii. I was convinced I wanted to be a competitive bodyboarder. It seemed like a nice way to live - earning a good wage, travelling the world, spending most of my time in the water.”

It was the October after graduating high school when Mike, then aged 18, and his teammates arrived at a local beach for the first swell of the season. They were excited, restless, eager - ready to feel the rush of the waves beneath their boards after a frustrating, flat summer.

They pulled-up a little after 7am, the morning was cool and calm, and Mike peered through his coach’s truck windscreen at the best waves he had seen in four months.

When we speak, he explains that although he was impatient to get in the water that morning, he had a strange feeling that something was not right. “I had this weird premonition. An unfamiliar stink wafted across the beach, a putrid smell of rotten fish. I’d never smelt it before and I haven’t smelt it since.” He later found out that thousands of freshwater fish had been flushed into the ocean that morning, and had died as soon as they hit the salt water. Putting his uncomfortable premonition aside, Mike suited up with the rest of the team and paddled out through the irresistible surf.

“We paddled out and my friends caught these great waves right off the bat, and I was sitting out there with

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Photography has played a significant role in Mike’s life since the attack, a way for him to show people that sharks are not the blood-thirsty monsters they are often portrayed to be.

BEHIND THE LENS

Mike doesn’t remember feeling any pain, just immense pressure as the tiger shark latched on to his legs and rag-dolled him back and forth in the water.

Oceanographic May 2018

Since losing his leg in an attack while bodyboarding in Hawaii, Mike has become a staunch defender of sharks.

He has spent plenty of time in the water with various species.

F E AT U R E

The dive [with tiger sharks] felt surreal and peaceful.

The water was clear and warm, and I felt safe. It was the most powerful thing I’ve ever done, and not something I’ll ever forget. one other guy when this beautiful wave came towards us you don’t want to share waves, so I started paddling.”

The attack came without warning - no fins in the distance, no splashing. Mike doesn’t remember feeling any pain, just immense pressure as the tiger shark latched onto his legs and rag-dolled him back and forth in the water.

Out of instinct, he punched it on the nose until it eventually let go. Shocked and disorientated, Mike clambered back onto his bodyboard and paddled frantically for the safety of shore. Just before reaching the beach, he felt a strange spasm in his leg: “I thought the shark was finishing me off. I felt this weird uncontrollable shake, but I looked over my shoulder to see my right leg perfectly severed.”

What Mike remembers of the rest of that morning is a blur. A small wave carried him to shore, where he was dragged out of the water and onto the beach. His friend Kyle used a surf leash to make a tourniquet and tied it firmly around his severed leg to stem the blood loss. Drifting in and out of consciousness, he was put in the back of a pick-up truck and rushed-off to the emergency room. The next morning, he awoke in hospital surrounded by his friends and family. Reluctantly, they broke the news that he had lost his right leg in the attack, but he already knew: “They thought I didn’t know, and it was a real sombre moment, but once they realised that I did know, everyone cheered up.”

Mike was 13 when he had his very first encounter with a shark. He was spearfishing along the dramatic coast of Kauai with his friends, when a shark swam right up to him. The sheer size of the fish was intimidating, but Mike was fascinated rather than fearful. Before the attack, he never really considered the threat of sharks. Shark attacks happen so rarely and there are other dangers to consider when you are out on the water, like hidden reefs, storms, or collisions with other surfers.

During the months of recovery and rehabilitation immediately following the attack, Mike’s fascination for sharks grew. He spent hours in the local library, which kept details of every shark attack that had happened in the area, researching where and when the other attacks had taken place, who they had happened to, and the injuries sustained. He wanted to know why the attack had taken place, and why the shark had chosen to attack him.

Mike still hasn’t truly found the answers he was looking for in relation to his own attack. The more he researched, the less he understood, and eventually he accepted the attack as a tool for positive change. He learnt to walk and surf again, and ten years later he was contacted

by a fellow shark attack survivor, Debbie Salamone, who founded the Shark Attack Survivors for Shark Conservation group. She asked if he was interested in using his story to help promote shark conservation. For Mike, it seemed like the perfect fit - he loved the ocean, was fascinated by sharks, and found himself, as a shark attack survivor, in a powerful position to instigate change.

Through his work in conservation, Mike learnt that one of the greatest threats facing worldwide populations of sharks is finning - the culling of sharks for their fins.

“I watched a movie by Rob Stewart called Shark Water, which said that 80 million sharks are killed each year for their fins. I remember thinking ‘this number can’t be true’.” Now, it is estimated that more than 100 million sharks are killed a year, many of them for shark fin soup.

The soup itself has no nutritional value, but is seen as a luxury dish, a signifier of wealth and social status. The process of harvesting the fins is cruel - the sharks are caught, de-finned and then thrown back into the water alive. A shark without its fins is rudderless. It will swim in circles until it dies, slowly, on the ocean floor. The fins are extremely valuable - the larger the fin the higher the bounty - but the flesh of the shark is worthless.

An ocean without sharks is an ocean in jeopardy, Mike explains: “We can’t predict exactly what will happen, but science tells us it isn’t good. As apex predators, sharks maintain our marine ecosystems by hunting the sick and weak, ensuring the genetic health of the species below them - they’re the garbage collectors of the ocean, the glue that makes it all stick. I like the analogy of a house - sharks form the roof and when they’re gone, the rest of the house will eventually collapse.”

As well as campaigning against shark finning, Mike has also launched Fin for a Fin, an initiative that prevents the culling of sharks after a shark attack in countries like Australia and America. As part of the campaign, he has created a high performance surf fin that surfers can use on their boards to indicate that they don’t wish for sharks to be culled, should they die in an attack. The profits then go back into protecting sharks and surfers by funding the shark alert network, Dorsal, and shark education charity, Tag For Life.

As Mike tells his story, it is clear he is committed to the conservation of sharks and passionate about sharing their story through photography. After the attack, Mike studied photography for four years, and now works as a photographer for international clients such as Sony, Canon, GoPro and surf brands Quicksilver, Billabong and O’Neill.

He also uses his photography skills to aid conservation.

“I feel fortunate to have social media as a platform to share captivating images of sharks with the world. I try to

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F E AT U R E

OPPOSITE: Mike uses his prosthetic to create captivating, sharkadvocating imagery.

THIS PAGE: It didn’t take Mike long to return to the water following the attack.

Losing a leg wasn’t going to lessen his love of the ocean.

photograph sharks in the same way I photograph humans, focusing on the eyes and portraying their emotions depicting them as having souls. I want to prove that sharks are intelligent, beautiful creatures, who deserve a place in our ocean.”

“If you look at the way a shark’s eyes are depicted in films, they’re pitch black, like death. When you’re underwater in clear blue ocean, you can see right through the different layers of their retina - you really see that there is a brain behind the teeth.”

After the attack, Mike dived with white sharks in Mexico and hundreds of other sharks at home in Hawaii, but it wasn’t until last year that he was finally able to overcome his fear and get back in the water with tiger sharks. In early 2017, he was invited on the trip-of-alifetime diving and photographing tiger sharks in the Bahamas. A few weeks later, he found himself floating in the Atlantic Ocean, swimming with the same species of shark that had taken his leg 20 years before.

“The boat pulled-up, set anchor, and as I looked below I could already see a shiver of sharks swarming around the boat. When you’re on land you’ve got five senses, but beneath the water you rely on your sight - it’s a very visual

H e l e n Tay l o r

experience. The dive itself felt surreal and peaceful - it was incredible. The water was clear and warm, and I felt safe. It was the most powerful thing I’ve ever done, and not something I’ll ever forget.”

The tide is certainly changing for shark conservation.

With the power of social media revealing the troubled plight of sharks to the world, and an unsustainable number of sharks being culled every year, Mike believes that now is the time to act. “There hasn’t been a better time than now for us to learn about sharks. It’s important that we work towards the peaceful coexistence of sharks and humans in our ocean, and with new technology like drones and shark tagging, I think it’s an achievable goal.

We should be able to coexist with sharks not because they exist in textbooks and museums, but because they abound in our ocean.”

Reflecting on how his relationship with the ocean has shifted over time, he said: “For how much bodily harm the ocean has caused me, it has also given me immense amounts of joy. It’s a beautiful thing, but it can also be tragic. It’s a force, something that we need to admire and respect. It’s also given me wrinkles - but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

M i ke C o o t s

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Column

By Dr Easkey Britton

The environmentalist WATER ENVIRONMENTS AND WELLBEING

“W

ater is life, it cleanses,” Farnaz said as we moved around the circle of women sharing experiences of what water means to us in our lives. We were a group of ten from very different backgrounds, ranging in age from 13 to 43. “Being in the water makes me feel calm,” said Laleh. “Water takes away my tiredness,” Mina added. For others, it was their very first time to get into the water. They were hesitant and nervous but encouraged by the other women in the group.

These women were participating in the Be Like Water programme - an active, physical practice aimed at tapping into the more playful, creative and therapeutic qualities of water and the sea.

This programme was initially developed by myself and Shirin Gerami (Iran’s first female triathlete) with minority groups of women and girls in Iran as a way to make surfing more accessible and to facilitate a greater body-self-nature connection.

This concept of water environments being therapeutic is nothing new. Water has been considered an active life-metaphor for millennia, with Taoist Lao Tzu writing in 6th century BC: “Nothing in the world is softer than water. But for attacking the hard, the unyielding, it has no equal.” In Victorian England, seaside holidays were recommended by physicians for respite and recovery from illness and in Ireland holy wells continue to be important places for spiritual wellbeing and health promotion. More recently there has been growing interest in policy, practice and academia in how blue spaces (outdoor, natural aquatic environments such as rivers, lakes, coasts, beaches, sea) impact our health and wellbeing. ‘Blue space’ has been defined by therapeutic geographers Ronan Foley and Thomas Kistemann as ‘healthenabling places and spaces, where water is at the centre of a range of environments with identifiable potential for the promotion of human wellbeing’.

My current research with the NEAR-Health project at National University of Ireland, Galway is one such project which explores how nature, including blue space, can help society attain and restore health. My bias as a life-long surfer has certainly influenced my desire to better understand what I’ve intuitively felt all my life, the power of the sea to heal and restore a sense of wellbeing.

Emerging evidence suggests that physical activity in the sea, in particular surfing, has confirmed

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psychological as well as physical benefits. The crisis of our time is the rise of mental health issues, with at least one in five young people in Ireland experiencing a mental disorder. Organisations such as Liquid Therapy and One Wave are tapping into the sea and surfing to tackle mental health issues, and the surrounding stigma, in a novel way. Part of the health benefits are linked to the fact that surfing is challenging. It’s dynamic and you’re always learning. Different coasts, winds, currents and seasons mean you are constantly adapting, which has considerable health benefits for both body and mind. While surfing, you have to think quickly in response to nature, learn to let go of the need to be in control and become aware of your environment.

Wave-exposed coastlines could have added benefits with research suggesting that negative ions released by breaking waves alter our biochemistry and light up our mood, relieving stress. A recent study in England by the European Centre for Environment and Human Health found that living near the coast can make us healthier.

An aquatic experience like swimming or surfing can take us out of our heads and into the sensory world of our bodies. “I feel lighter and calmer,” said Sanaz, a first-time water user, during her Be Like Water session. Her friend Yasmin agreed: “I feel like I am flying - out there on the water you don’t think about any of your problems.” EB About Easkey Dr Easkey Britton is an internationally-renowned surfer, artist, scientist and explorer from Ireland.

She pioneered women’s big-wave surfing in Ireland as the first woman to surf Aileen’s at the Cliffs of Moher and Mullaghmore. Easkey is a five-time Irish national surf champion, and holds a Ph.D. in Marine Environment and Society. She is the founder of Be Like Water, a platform to explore innovative ways to reconnect with who we are, our environment and each other, through water.

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“My bias as a life-long surfer has certainly influenced my desire to better understand what I’ve intuitively felt all my life, the power of the sea to heal and restore a sense of wellbeing”

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D E AT H

BY PLASTIC

Every year on a remote island in the North Pacific thousands of albatross chicks starve to death with stomachs full of plastic. Photographer Chris Jordan, a regular visitor to Midway, speaks candidly about his time on the island, the seabirds’ plight and why, as a photographer, he was moved to make his first film: Albatross.

Wo rd s b y G e o r g i n a F u l l e r P h o t o g ra p h s b y C h r i s J o rd a n

A dead albatross on a beach on Midway, a remote island in the middle of the North Pacific.

Oceanographic May 2018

F E AT U R E

ABOVE and OPPOSITE: Brightly coloured pieces of plastic, mistaken for food, cannot be digested by albatross chicks. Unable to regurgitate until they are four months old, many starve to death.

T

he first time Chris Jordan visited Midway Island in the North Pacific Ocean he didn’t see a living albatross. He had visited at a time of year when the colony was out at sea, wings spread wide above an endless ocean for months on end. The birds would return soon enough, but not before Chris was back amongst the glass and steel of his hometown, Seattle. It didn’t matter though - he was not on Midway to photograph the living; he was there to photograph the dead.

The Hawaiians call Midway Pihemanu, which translates as ‘loud din of birds’. It is a name that reveals a great deal about the island and its role as a noisy nesting ground in the middle of the world’s largest ocean.

But when Chris arrived to the island for the first time and disembarked from the small government plane that had carried him there - its wheels touching down just as millions of albatross feet would in the coming months - he was not met with the loud din of birds, but a silence of sorts. Birdsong still drifted on warm, salty breezes, of course: red-footed boobies, bristle-thighed curlews and black noddies, among myriad others, did their best to fill the void left by 1.5 million departed albatross. But the hush stretched beyond that of the quiet left behind by the island’s great ocean-going absentees.

Midway was littered with the unmoving bodies of albatross chicks, majestic seabirds that never took to the skies. Birds lay in various stages of decay. The most advanced of them, where little but bone remained, revealed the horror of their demise: they had starved with stomachs full of plastic. Skeletons encircled items such as bottle tops and lighters, piles of plastic where bellies used to be. Such materials would likely outlast the remaining bones too, never mind the disappeared feathers and flesh.

“I knew it wouldn’t be easy,” reflects Chris. “Standing over the dead birds brought a mixture of feelings that’s difficult to contain. At the same time the scenes were always held in an envelope of exquisite beauty and a kind of indescribable stillness. The experience was nuanced and complex. It’s hard to face that head-on.”

There is no doubting the power of Chris’s images. They are heart-breaking, of course, but they also invoke a sense of culpability within the viewer that sits as uneasily as the grimness of the images themselves. Any one of us could have thrown that bottle top away, or that lighter - and we could have done it 20 years ago, such is the longevity of plastic. Global trade and the rhythm of ocean currents means Midway’s debris arrives from all over the world - the UK, Spain, Peru. It renders geographical excuses redundant. “A lot of the plastic items still had stamps of origin on them. We found pieces from Europe, the US and South America,” Chris reveals. “With certain environmental problems - such as the poaching of elephants for their tusks, or sharks for their fins - there are individual bad actors who can be singled out, but we all use plastic, and we are all part of the problem.”

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F E AT U R E

“IT IS HARD TO IMAGINE A CREATURE BETTER SUITED TO DELIVERING AN URGENT MESSAGE TO HUMANITY ABOUT OUR BROKEN RELATIONSHIP WITH THE NATURAL WORLD”

As flesh decomposes, plastic remains. The vivid colours of bottle tops are a striking anomaly in a landscape of greens and browns.

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F E AT U R E

It is uncomfortable, a shocking consequence of a throwaway culture that Chris has spent years trying to expose. Prior to photographing the dead chicks of Midway Chris had completed numerous large-scale photographic projects he hoped would highlight the brutal side-effects of “mass consumerism”, as he refers to it. Cars, oil, computers. He never landed a punch.

The plight of the Midway albatross, first relayed to Chris by an environmental biologist friend, represented an opportunity. The dark underbelly of the world’s single-use culture was finally exposed. The horror of Midway was relatable, one that could, perhaps, finally shift people’s focus. “I was studying the Pacific Garbage Patch and the story once again seemed a broad consumerism issue destined to slot alongside my previous projects,” says Chris. “That was until the story of Midway was relayed to me. I was drawn to it because it offered a chance to face a global issue on a personal scale.”

In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a dead albatross is hung around the neck of a sailor guilty of killing it. The bird has since been culturally adopted as a symbolic messenger, a harbinger of changing winds and shifting fortunes. Surrounded by dead albatrosses in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Chris felt guilty - at least in part - of killing them. Our impact, as humans, was being felt in the farthest corners of our planet, by species incapable of understanding the silent assault they were facing. Each of those albatrosses hung heavy on him. Chris knew his photographs would result in those birds hanging heavy on others too.

“Of the hundreds of different kinds of seabirds that could be bringing us this message, it is the albatross, a creature whose mythic poetry runs deep in the collective psyche,” says Chris. “From a storytelling point of view, it is hard to imagine a creature better suited to delivering an urgent message to humanity about our broken relationship with the natural world.”

The location of the devastation is important too. Just as important, in Chris’s mind, as the allegorical intrigue of the mighty seabirds, omens felled before flight. Midway lies more than 2,000km from the nearest continental landmass, its name a nod to its mid-ocean location. “A bird filled with plastic near a landfill in Detroit or on an island off the coast of Bangladesh, wouldn’t carry such significance. The fact this was happening in such a remote place was gut-wrenching.”

Much of Midway’s plastic, as aforementioned, arrives on the conveyor-belt currents of the ocean. The rest arrives in the mouths of albatross, ‘food’ for growing chicks. The US Fish and Wildlife Service estimates almost 50kg of plastic washes onto Midway’s shorelines every week. Each year, about a third of albatross chicks die on Midway, many of these as a result of plastic. Parents confuse brightly coloured debris for food, and because albatross are not born with the ability to regurgitate, chicks’ bellies fill with objects that can neither be digested nor brought back up. They starve to death.

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MAIN IMAGE: Albatross lay single eggs, incubated by both parents.

When the egg hatches, several weeks of brooding follows, before the parents return to sea to source food.

TOP: Over the course of his eight trips to Midway, Chris saw a beauty in the albatross of Midway that he had never anticipated finding.

MIDDLE: With no natural predators on the island, the albatross were comfortable with Chris and his crew.

BOTTOM: The Laysan albatross has a typical wingspan of two metres.

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BEHIND THE LENS

F E AT U R E

“THERE IS SOMETHING INCREDIBLY MACABRE ABOUT SEEING DENTAL FLOSS HANDLES REAPPEAR FROM INSIDE THE STOMACHS OF DEAD CHICKS”

ABOVE: While Chris frequently encountered death during his time on Midway, he also witnessed life.

OPPOSITE: Before the scourge of plastics, hundreds of thousands of albatross were killed for their beautiful feathers.

“There is something incredibly macabre about seeing dental floss handles reappear from inside the stomachs of dead chicks. Compared to substances like pesticides, which are measured in the ocean in parts per billion, plastic is highly visible, killing in plain sight, exposing the grotesque triviality of our throwaway culture,” says Chris.

Having “experienced the island as a desolate and lonely place permeated by tragedy”, Chris never expected to go back. He took his photos, said goodbye, returned home and considered the project finished. But something pulled him back. Since that first visit to Midway, Chris has returned to the island eight times, collecting thousands of images and, eventually, creating a feature film.

Despite the death that so frequently surrounded him, he also witnessed life: the birth of chicks, their growth, their first flights. He fell in love with their majesty and elegance. The privilege felt in sharing their home for short periods of time, and the beauty and grace they revealed to him, was precious. It was these moments that inspired his film: Albatross.

“Originally I went to Midway to photograph the plastic inside the dead birds. When I returned and met the live birds, beheld their grace and sentience, I realised that to know them, you have to see them in motion,” says Chris.

He spent a total of three months on the island, accompanied by a small crew on each occasion - as well as the resident biologists from the US Fish and Wildlife Service posted on the island. The island’s decommissioned military base served as living quarters, its rusted infrastructure a reminder of man’s crumbling impact on the natural world. From first light to beyond sundown the team filmed and edited.

“Throughout the filming process I felt my job was to be empathetic, to experience the albatross on their terms, from their perspective,” says Chris. “It was, after all, their story. As such, we didn’t storyboard the film. We just filmed. We filmed everything of interest - an open-ended and spontaneous way of filming. It was some of the hardest work I have ever done, but there was also a spontaneous flow to the process and project that felt joyful.”

Most of the film is devoted to the uplifting side of the Midway story. It is something that aims to instil a sense of connection and hope. Chris and his team want to show that plastic-filled birds are not the whole picture, that plastic is only a part of the albatross story, an issue that can be solved with collective will.

Chris hopes to have created something that is both balanced and transformational. “Encountering beauty can be just as powerful a tool for change as horror,” he says. Albatross is, he hopes, a pathway to reconnection, an ode to the island and the albatross who call it home.

For more information on Chris Jordan’s Albatross, visit www.albatrossthefilm.com.

C h r i s J o rd a n

Georgina Fuller

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Column

By Ocean Ramsey

The shark ethologist FACE-TO-FACE WITH TIGER SHARKS

“ It is their ocean. You would be wise to dive, swim, surf and play in their home with respect, care and regard for their important ecological role.”

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iger sharks are beautiful creatures. I spend a significant amount of my life in the water with them, and have done for many years. I have a deep appreciation and respect for them - along with a great many other types of sharks. Over the course of many thousands of interactions I have learned the best ways of managing my time in the water with them - both for my safety, and the wellbeing of the shark. For those lucky enough to encounter a tiger shark, while out snorkelling or freediving perhaps, there is a best way of handling your interaction if the experience becomes a little closer than you would personally like.

But before we get to that, it is important to consider the environment you are visiting, to make sure you enter the water with an understanding of the creatures you are hoping to encounter.

It is important to constantly scan the ocean around you. In my experience, sharks are extremely sensitive to eye contact and body language. Calmly scanning the water column is behaviourally more akin to a predator. Any sharks in the water with you are more likely to treat you as such, giving you space, approaching you with more caution. It is also always worth remembering it is their ocean.

You would be wise to dive, swim, surf and play in their home with respect, care and regard for their important ecological role.

On the rare instances people do receive unwanted attention, there are a few ways of deflecting…

If a tiger shark swims directly at you, you should reposition yourself to pass over its head. Behind the shark’s dorsal is the safest place to be. If a shark is at the surface with you - and you are unable to pass over its head - fin sideways out of its path. It will likely reroute too, or move to a deeper profile.

Should you encounter a shark just beneath the surface - and you think you can close the distance between you before it reaches the top - then do so, ready to place your hand flat and firm on the top of the head if it is a close pass. When the use of a hand is required during close encounters, it is critical to lock out your elbow. If the shark does then turn

into you, you will simply be pushed through the water, the shark unable to get any closer. Of course, touching is a last resort.

While this may sound scary, the chances are you will never get that close. Tiger sharks, when they encounter freedivers, will generally turn away particularly if you swim towards it. This is even more likely if you use a hand to ward it away. Far more likely - for snorkelers and freedivers lucky enough to encounter a tiger shark - is the shark will circle at a distance, watchful and wary. They are naturally cautious creatures.

Encountering a tiger shark - or any shark for that matter - is a blessing. As a shark advocate and marine biologist, I am fortunate I get to do it so often. In my experience diving and interacting with thousands of tiger sharks, it is extremely difficult to win their trust and takes a long time to build up to a close interaction. The sad reality for most people, particularly in light of dramatically declining populations, is that they will never encounter a shark in its natural habitat.

For those who do, it is an interaction they will never forget. Global shark populations are declining at an alarming rate, with many species likely to go extinct within our lifetime. If you would like to #HelpSaveSharks, or learn more about shark body language, how to deter or coexist with sharks, please check out my programme @oneoceandiving that runs daily in Hawaii and is open to the public. OR

About Ocean Ocean Ramsey is a marine conservationist and biologist, specialising in shark ethology. She is the founder of the non-profit Water Inspired, and co-founder of One Ocean Research and Diving in Hawaii. She is a PADI MSDT and a competitive freediver. TED talk: ‘How sharks affect us all’.

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An experience without equal ““The reef systems here are some of the most pristine I have seen anywhere in my dive travels around the globe, and Wakatobi resort and liveaboard are second to none. The diversity of species here is brilliant if you love photography.” ~ Simon Bowen

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Behind the lens

SCOTT PORTELLI Behind the Lens places a spotlight on the world’s foremost ocean photographers.

Each edition focusses on the work of an individual who continues to shape public opinion through powerful imagery and compelling storytelling.

BEHIND THE LENS

Q&A

SCOTT PORTELLI Wildlife Photographer of the Year winner and expedition leader For almost 20 years, Scott has been using photography to reveal the beauty of our wild blue spaces and highlight the many threats they face.

O CEA NO G R A PH I C M AGAZ I N E (OM ): T H AN K S FOR TAKING TIME OUT TO TALK WITH US, S COT T. W H ER E ARE YOU C U RRE N T LY ?

SCOTT PORTELLI (SP): I’m on the northern shores of Baffin Island, in the Arctic. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks photographing base-jumpers in a frozen fjord. It’s been an unusual trip for me so far, full of helicopters and adrenaline-seekers rather than the wildlife that I’m more accustomed to. Wild life rather than wildlife I suppose! The next two weeks will be wildlife focused, though. I’ll be on the floe edge, where the ice breaks apart. I’m hopeful of some great marine mammal encounters. The rest of the trip will serve as a recce - an opportunity to get the lay of the land for future expeditions. I hope to put an itinerary together, sort logistics and get to grips with local procedures as best I can.

O M: EX PEDIT IO N S P L AY A C E N T RAL ROL E I N YOUR WORK AS A P H OTOGRAP H ER AND H OW YO U G O A B OU T C OM M U N I C AT I N G T H E BEAUTY OF TH E NATURAL WORLD. WH AT IS IT YOU LO O K F O R I N E XP E D I T I ON L OC AT I ON S ?

SP: It’s about intimate experiences and unique environments. There are plenty of places people can visit all over the world that give them exposure to natural, wild beauty, but the intensity and quality of those encounters can vary dramatically. I aim to take people to places that are unlike anywhere else and where encounters are near-guaranteed - well, as much as you can with wild animals. I could, for example, come out here to the Arctic in July and focus on walrus encounters. The whales in Tonga, one of my all-time favourite wildlife photography locations, is another great example of a location that provides powerful and intimate experiences for photographers and enthusiasts alike.

My focus is getting people out into nature and showing them invigorating places, connecting them with nature and the animals they are photographing. It’s about ensuring they return home full of positivity, ready to share those experiences and encounters.

It’s a powerful form of conservation, getting people in those environments. I always take small groups. It guarantees a positive experience and minimises impact on the wildlife and their environment. On some expeditions, such as the program I run in the Azores, I take just three people. It’s a concentrated way of highlighting an area, a cause or a plight. Small intimate groups are great for discussions and the quality of output is generally high. I also do lectures on some of my trips, such as when I’m in Antarctica. I work with professional photographers, filmmakers and media outlets, but also enthusiasts who want to connect with the ocean environment and the creatures that call it home.

O M: W H AT MOT I VAT E S YOU AS A P H OTOGRA P H ER? SP: I’m trying to show people there’s no disconnect between them and our planet’s wild places - or that there shouldn’t be. Through the imagery that we create and the different experiences people have on expedition, they become more connected. I often get people who radically change their lifestyle after the profound experiences they’ve had in the wild. I had one person who snorkelled with whales in Tonga who was so affected by the experience they sold their home and travelled the world, deciding there’s more to life than a 9-5 job. So, ultimately, it’s reconnection that motivates me. These people pass their experience on to someone else, who in turn passes it on, and so on. As far as our wild places go - especially our ailing ocean - it’s a great way to affect change.

OM: W H ER E D ID I T AL L S TART F OR YOU ? W HEN DID YOU FIRST CONNECT WITH TH E OCEAN? SP: Born and raised in Sydney, Australia, the ocean has always been a huge part of my life.

Throughout my childhood I was regularly in the water, interacting with marine life, seeing what the ocean had to offer. The more I was in it, the more curious I became. Curiosity leads to education, which in turn leads to a desire to protect. It was at university that I connected on a deeper level, living right on the coast. Since then, I’ve never been more than a five-minute drive away from the ocean. That period of my life was also the first time I had money and was able to take myself in a direction of my choosing - photography.

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O M: DID P H OTOGRAP H Y F E E L L I K E A NATURAL FIT? SP: Yes, definitely. I always had a camera when I was young, but I started to take it seriously around 2000, turning professional a few years later when digital became mainstream. The ocean and underwater photography has pretty much always been a part of what I’ve been about as a photographer and has always felt like a great fit.

O M: YOU ’ RE A W I L D L I F E P H OTOGRA P H ER OF TH E YEAR WINNER - H OW BIG A MOMENT WA S T H AT F OR YOU, BOT H P E RS ON ALLY AND P ROFESSIONALLY? SP: It was amazing. It was always the one Award I wanted to achieve. To be awarded in the Invertebrate category when there are tens of thousands of other entries was pretty special. Being awarded at the Sony World Photography awards was a career highlight too. There were 90,000 entries and I was named National Winner for Australia. Both awards came in the same year (2016), which was inspiring. It confirmed I was on the right path! From a photography point of view, winning those awards are some of my proudest moments.

O M: IN YOU R T I M E AS AN OC E AN P HOTOGRAP H ER, WH AT CH ANGES H AVE YOU EXP ERIENCED ?

SP: I’ve seen significant change with regards to the number of people getting involved. More people care about the ocean now than 18 years ago and there are certainly more people involved in protecting our marine environments. This change is realised in new ideas and initiatives, as well as formal associations and charities. In places like Tonga the change has been profound - commercial tourism reigns, but conservation places a pivotal role on those in the industry trying to manage these natural resources. Involvement and awareness amongst local communities has also risen, which is important.

O M: YOU R W ORK F OC U S S E S ON S H ARING IMAGERY TH AT ENCOURAGES P EOP LE TO CARE FOR THE O CEA N. ARE T H E RE AN Y I N I T I AT I V ES YOU’RE INVOLVED IN TH AT TAKE MORE DIRECT ACTION ?

SP: About four years ago I set up the Tongan Fluke collective. The premise was to create a central database that scientists and marine biologists could access when in need of fluke data.

Scientists undertaking work in Tonga were constantly asking photographers for their fluke shots in order to identify individual whales, but none of the scientists were collaborating on a single source of data. The data therefore remained segmented - different scientists using images from different photographers. They needed to start sharing the information, but the infrastructure wasn’t there to support it. I approached the 40 or so photographers who regularly visit Tonga and suggested we consolidate our fluke imagery, make the images free to all scientists, affording them access to useful, more complete data.

Every season I collect the fluke shots, crop them, label them (including meta data on where and when it was taken) and list the GPS coordinates of the sighting. At the end of a season I might have collected 100 fluke shots. I have images from as far back as 2001 and we’ve managed to ID 300 individual whales to-date. As the years go by we’ll add to that list which, in turn, adds to our understanding of whales and their migratory behaviour and population numbers. It’s a positive thing and I’m motivated to keep the momentum going. There are four organisations that currently use the database, one of which - Happy Whale - feeds back information regularly, such as where else in the world individuals have been spotted. It’s fascinating to say the least, but pivotal for the data to be useful.

O M: H OW S AT I S F Y I N G I S I T TO S E E YOUR WORK BEING USED AND VALUED? SP: It’s pleasing, of course. It’s hard to motivate photographers, because their focus isn’t on fluke shots, so when I do get positive feedback from conservation organisations I can share that with the ocean photography community and encourage them to keep up the great work - their images are having an impact!

O M: W H AT ’ S N E XT F OR YOU ?

SP: Hopefully some narwhals! I’ve wanted to photograph them for years. There aren’t many people who’ve done so in the last ten years - Paul Nicklen, being one - so being in a place like this, I’ve got a chance. Focussing on finding and photographing a rare creature is exciting. Here’s hoping for some powerful imagery to share when I return home.

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BEHIND THE LENS

Antarctica Scott during an expedition to Antarctica, a place he visits every year. In a place that has some of the most extreme cold water diving on the planet, experience and planning are key - as is the right equipment.

Tonga, South Pacific A school of fish seeks refuge in the mouth of the Cave of Swallows, Tonga. The size of the school creates a shimmering ball of light and movement as a snorkeler attempts to capture the moment. The fish stay together for protection from predators.

Antarctica Weddell seals thrive in the harshest environment on the planet, hunting in the icy depths of Antarctica. But they need to rest too. This individual had hauled itself onto the ice to rest and recuperate after a hard day’s hunt.

Byron Bay, Australia Green turtles will feast for hours on an unsuspecting giant jellyfish, starting on the tentacles and working their way up to the soft outer bell.

The jellyfish is one of the green turtle’s primary food sources and an easy catch.

Tonga, South Pacific Humpback whales are charismatic and curious creatures - particularly with their desire to interact with humans. This individual dropped in during a safety stop at the end of a coral reef dive in Tonga, much to the delight of the divers present.

South Georgia, Sub-Antarctic Islands The Sub-Antarctic Islands are a haven for large marine mammals. A beach can be shrouded with hundreds of elephant seals at times, particularly during mating and shedding periods. This individual rested in the surf as the waves rolled in and receded around it.

Tonga, South Pacific A young humpback calf returns to the water having propelled its three-ton body from it just moments before. The baby whale had begun the breach from 10m below, three flicks of its tail generating enough speed to leap from the water. The wake lingered for at least 30 seconds.

Whyalla South Australia The Australian Giant Cuttlefish aggregation is truly one of nature’s great events. Thousands of cuttlefish congregate in the shallow waters around the Spencer Gulf in South Australia to mate. Cuttlefish display an array of patterns, textures and colours to indicate their intentions.

Behind the lens SCOTT PORTELLI Scott Portelli is an international award-winning wildlife, nature and underwater photographer. His awards list includes wins at Wildlife Photographer of the Year, National Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year and the Sony World Photography Awards. Scott is a member of the Australian Institute of Professional Photography and has been awarded both Gold and Silver with Distinction awards at the prestigious Australian Professional Photography Awards. His work has been exhibited around the world, as well as extensively in Australia. Scott has spent more than a decade working in the polar regions with a focus on Antarctica and the Sub-Antarctic areas, producing a unique portfolio of fine art photography that showcases the delicate environments and their intriguing inhabitants. Working in extreme conditions, Scott’s photography provides a rare glimpse - both above and below the waterline - into some of our planet’s most remote places.

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Spacious en-suite staterooms create ample private space; a dedicated chef provides fine dining; and a one-to-one staff-to-guest ratio ensures the utmost in attentive personal service.

www.wakatobi.com

One of Craig’s first challenges in getting to know the Superstar, the octopus featured in Blue Planet II, was learning to find her. He tracks octopods by looking for predation marks in shells of molluscs.

COMMUNING WITH AN

ocean shaman

Like many urbanites, Pippa Ehrlich had lost her connection with the ocean. Meeting and diving with Craig Foster, the ‘octopus whisperer’ featured in Blue Planet II, set her on a path of reconnection and opened her eyes to things she never imagined possible.

Wo rd s b y P i p p a E h r l i c h P h o t o g ra p h s b y C ra i g Fo s t e r a n d P i p p a E h r l i c h

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“When you are born, you are wild,” Craig explained. “A little baby’s body is waiting for a whole range of things to happen to it. We have evolved for thousands of years to go through these things, but because of the way our lifestyles have changed, most of those experiences never happen...”

F E AT U R E

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his story begins with a tiny shark. I was waist deep in 15˚C water when I saw it - a miniature creature swimming close to the surface with a beautiful serpentine pattern running down its back. I had been diving along this coastline for more than five years, but I had never seen a shark as small as this one. I stood frozen as it swam towards me, then, without thinking, I spread my hands and submerged them in the water. The shark pup swam right into them. I was bewildered.

Shysharks are benthic animals, generally sticking close to the ocean floor. What possessed such a tiny, vulnerable animal to swim up the water column into the hands of a land-dwelling giant like me? I shouted to get the attention of my diving companions.

This was my first dive with Craig Foster. I first heard of Craig when I was much younger. He and his brother Damon, made waves in the documentary film world with The Great Dance, a film that gave viewers a glimpse of life and nature through the eyes of the San Bushmen. More recently Craig gave up his career as an award-winning filmmaker to become a naturalist - a modern-day shaman of the ocean wilderness that laps at the shores of Cape Town’s urban jungle.

In late 2014 a friend showed me images from his dives with Craig. At that time, I had a job as a journalist for a shark conservation and research organisation and I begged for a diving invitation. Two months later, I found myself holding a week-old shark that had swum into my hands - a seminal moment for a shark journalist.

We spent the rest of that morning diving without wetsuits in the cold waters of the kelp forest. I knew this environment well, but on that day I felt like I had slipped into a new dimension - the mythical ‘Golden Forest’, as Craig calls it. I watched Craig lift a sleeping catshark and cradle it at the surface. We followed trails in the sand leading to almost invisible sea slugs. I gently held a huge octopus as it suctioned onto my leg. I was conflicted about our contact with these wild creatures; as a science journalist this new way of interacting with nature went against everything I believed, but these gentle exchanges gave me a deep sense of connection that I had not anticipated. I left Craig’s house that afternoon feeling calm and alive, but with a headful of questions. It would be more than two years before I found answers.

I thought about that day often over the next few months. I emailed Craig to ask if I could join him again and was disappointed to receive no reply. I went diving with friends and bought an expensive open-cell wetsuit.

Dive after dive, I moved through the water anticipating another experience that would rekindle that moment with the shark pup, but the kelp forest had reverted into the same beautiful, but alien world I had known before.

Over the next couple of years I travelled to amazing places and met some of the world’s most renowned marine scientists and conservationists. I was grateful Pippa, pictured, started diving on an almost daily basis to find a way back to her own wild nature.

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TOP: Craig developed a bond with an octopus he named the Superstar.

MIDDLE: Cape clawless otters are typically timid. Craig enjoyed a close encounter with one for more than 15 minutes.

BOTTOM: Pyjama sharks reproduce by laying leathery egg cases which they fasten to the base of kelp fronds. Craig visited these eggs daily, right up to the birth of the tiny sharks.

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“I gasped as my face hit the water. My body recoiled and I had to fight my first response, which was to get out immediately. I swam closely behind Craig, following the white soles of his feet.” for these opportunities, but had become increasingly frustrated that my relationship with nature was mostly limited to the stories I was telling about other people who had daily contact with the ocean. Somehow, I couldn’t forget the little shark and finally, in early spring of 2016, I managed to arrange another dive with Craig.

He watched me thoughtfully as we sat down on a rock looking out into a small, sheltered bay. “When you are born, you are wild,” he explained. “A baby’s body is waiting for a whole range of things to happen to it. We have evolved for thousands of years to go through these things, but because our lifestyles have changed, most of those experiences never happen. Most of us are too soft for the cold. That’s going to be your biggest challenge.

You have to get in every day. That’s the only way to access this,” he went on. “Access what exactly?” I wondered silently. This is what I had been trying to work out since our last meeting.

The idea of getting into this frigid world every day without a wetsuit was daunting. In winter temperatures can drop below 10 degrees Celsius. The sky was grey and my feet had already gone numb in the shallow water we had waded through. I was not looking forward to being fully submersed in it.

I gasped as my face hit the water. My body recoiled and I had to fight my first response, which was to get out immediately. I swam closely behind Craig, following the white soles of his feet. I was amazed at how many animals he could find in those first few metres: brittle stars that brood their babies in tiny slits at the base of their arms, rocksucker fish that can bite limpets off rocks, and whelks that are covered in a colony of tiny poisonous organisms that act as a protective cloak. Clearly, Craig had developed an intimate relationship with the forest.

He saw meaning in details that I had never considered before. Each animal had a story and every track told a small part of that story.

When we came out of the water 40 minutes later I started to shake, but I was ecstatic. The cold had pumped a powerful cocktail of chemicals into my brain that help to balance the mood hormone serotonin. Once I was dressed and started to warm up, a new feeling flooded my system: a deep sense of relaxation and connection. I felt grounded. I would later learn that when our bodies warm up after being cold, we release prolactin, the same hormone produced by new mothers - the chemical component of the intense love they feel for their babies.

I left the dive site with homework: before I could dive

with Craig again I had to complete ten dives on my own.

Day after day I found myself sitting on the sand, dreading the water. For the first few dives I timed myself, exiting the water after 20 minutes. I was so preoccupied with the cold that I could not tune into the environment.

I hardly noticed the life unfolding around me. But the physiological effects of the cold were undeniable and for a few hours after every dive, I felt enclosed in a cloud of calm and connection - but I still could not access the Golden Forest.

I started to wonder if the magic ingredient was not the cold, or reverence for nature, but Craig himself.

Finally, one Saturday in early November, things started to shift. It was a hot, bright day - luxury conditions for diving in the cold. My friends pulled on their wetsuits and watched me cynically as I stretched on the beach.

At the beginning of the dive I felt great, but slowly the cold crept in and the voice in my head grew louder: “20 minutes is up. You can get out now.” I was turning back when someone shouted they had seen an octopus. I swam up to them and was excited to find another animal nearby. They shape-shifted continuously as we watched, growing horns, changing colour and never taking their eyes off us.

I knew the water was cold, but rather than resisting, I loved it. Shards of light shone like laser beams as I swam through passages of kelp and along massive starfish-covered boulders. I felt like a bird weaving my way through that dense, swaying canopy. A school of dreamfish darted in unison, murmuring like a flock of swallows, and a big red roman stared at me from just a few metres ahead. The rocks were covered with corals and urchins and psychedelic anemones. For a moment, I felt part of that world.

I reached the shore on the far side of the boulders and looked up at my friends who were staring at me from the beach in their wetsuits. We had been in the water for more than an hour and they were cold. All I could feel were waves of ecstatic energy. I laughed in the car on the way home. I had stayed in that water longer than I believed possible and felt like I had discovered a super power. More importantly, I got another glimpse into the magic of the Golden Forest.

Craig was excited about my breakthrough. We started diving together more regularly and slowly he began to share the secrets he is unravelling by learning to track in the kelp forest. He is a code-breaker. Through years of patient observation and tracking, he is hacking into the most powerful and ancient code in existence - the matrix of the natural world. “You need to learn all the animals of the kelp forest. You have to become familiar with what’s normal before you can start picking up on things that are extraordinary. That’s how you find your way,” he explained.

During our dives together I gained new insights into the kelp forest, but also into Craig’s story and discovered that it was not that different from mine. He had spent his twenties and thirties travelling around the world

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documenting stories about humans and nature. He spent months in the wilderness filming people whose blood and bone depended on their connection to the environment, but at the end of the shoot he returned to the comforts of home and the city. By his early forties he had become frustrated and depressed.

“I felt like an outsider to nature. While I could see the obvious signs the Bushmen showed me, I was unable to grasp the invisible and silent whispers they seemed to be following. With subconscious ease, their minds could interpret the enormous matrix of signs and sounds that make up the symphony of nature. By comparison, my world was deathly silent. I realised then, that the language of the wild was something that would take a lifetime to learn.” It was that yearning to establish an authentic connection with nature that brought him back to the wilderness where he had learned to swim and forage as a little boy.

Craig gave up filmmaking and dedicated himself to diving 365 days a year - and that is how he met the Superstar. A few years into his daily dives he came across a baby octopus that seemed as curious about him as he was about her. He learned to track her from den to den and spent months winning her trust. Eventually she showed him how she hunted crustaceans and outwitted her most deadly predator, the pyjama shark. This became a ground-breaking sequence in the BBC’s Blue Planet II. These experiences allowed Craig to understand - even communicate - with the octopus. By observing the animal almost every day he realised she was talking to him with her body, using colours and shapes: red, for example, meant she felt threatened, while beige indicated comfort and a willingness to interact.

These interactions made him consider how he was perceived in the kelp forest. He altered his own body language during dives, a change which allowed him to interact more intimately with the forest’s residents. On one occasion a massive short-tailed stingray covered him with its body. A few months later, a clawless otter approached to touch his body and face. A common cuttlefish tugged at his fingers and lay in his hand for more than an hour. For Craig, this indicated more than just a shift in his physical presence in the forest - it meant he was finally learning to connect and communicate with nature in that deeper way he had observed as a filmmaker.

Craig and I are now working together full-time on My Octopus Teacher, a feature documentary about his year with the Superstar and the lessons he learned from her.

We continue to dive every day and document the stories of the Golden Forest. It may be situated on the doorstep of a major city, but miraculously, the kelp forest continues to be a true wilderness - a magical place where citydwellers can still go to commune with the ocean and the creatures who call it home.

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The kelp forest is dense with predators and each animal has developed unique defence mechanisms. Perhaps the most genius defence of all belongs to the common octopus. It was this incredible armouring behaviour that made the octopus a star on the BBC’s Blue Planet II.

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Column

By Dr Simon Pierce

The marine biologist THE WHALES THAT EAT SHARKS

“Our guide mentioned as an aside that Kaikoura sperm whales occasionally hunt mako sharks. Erm, what?”

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ew Zealand is a nice place to be during the Southern summer. I’m not the only one that thinks so. While the only native land mammals are bats, around half the world’s marine mammal species are found in Kiwi waters.

Everything from the endemic New Zealand dolphin, the world’s smallest, to enormous blue whales frequent this long coastline.

The best place to see marine life in New Zealand is a small town named Kaikoura in the northeast South Island. The Kaikoura Canyon, just offshore, has been described as “the most productive nonchemosynthetic habitat recorded to date in the deep sea.” A multitude of animals, from the world’s smallest penguins to the world’s largest predator, the sperm whale, call Kaikoura home.

The latter was the focus of my latest visit. Sperm whales are huge, smart, and formidable. Males grow to 18-21 metres in length, and can weigh 60 tons.

Adults dive to more than two kilometres, and hold their breath for more than two hours. They can eat massive prey, such as 13-metre-long squid. Their teeth, on the lower jaw, measure up to 27cm high.

On the way out to find said whales, our guide mentioned as an aside that Kaikoura sperm whales occasionally hunt mako sharks.

Erm, what?

I know, I know. Sperm whales eat squid. It’s true.

They’re estimated to eat 110-320 million tons of squid per year, with each individual eating up to 1.5 tons per day.

They eat sharks, too. It’s totally a thing.

Whale watching is a big deal in Kaikoura. You can see whales from a boat, helicopter or small plane. I’ve done the flights a couple of times.

They’re brilliant. Chatting before a trip, one of the pilots also mentioned that he’d watched a sperm whale hunt down a blue shark.

That settled it. I had to know more.

A 1980 study used historical whaling data to investigate sperm whale diet. Several large sharks (up to 3m long) were found in the whales’ stomachs, including a 2.5m basking shark and large, deepwater sleeper sharks (the genus that includes Greenland sharks). In 1998, a group of three sperm whales were also observed ‘attacking’ a megamouth shark, one of the most enigmatic sharks on the planet, off Sulawesi in Indonesia. Pelagic sharks, such as blues and makos, are therefore entirely within their capabilities.

Sperm whales live in a world of sound. Sunlight only penetrates the top couple of hundred metres of

ocean. Underneath, it’s permanent darkness. Sperm whales spend more than half their lives at depths of 500m or more, so vision isn’t particularly useful when hunting.

The whale’s species name, macrocephalus, means “big head”. Bit rude, but - to be fair - their head is around a third of their body length. A large part of this real estate is occupied by the junk, a mass of oil-saturated fatty tissue, which acts as a component of their sound production and bio-sonar system.

That has no direct relevance to the story. I just wanted to point out that they have a lot of junk in their trunk.

Anyway, the whales use this organ to make extremely loud ‘clicks’, the loudest noise produced by any animal. Scientists even put forward a ‘biological big bang hypothesis’, suggesting that the whales’ powerful clicks could be used to stun their prey. (I prefer to call it the ‘mind bullet hypothesis’.)

The regular loud clicks, which the whales use to locate prey at depth, rapidly speed up to create a “buzz” when they’re actively pursuing prey.

Sadly for all concerned, a recent study found that the loudest clicks are probably for longer-range echolocation. The buzzes used to zero in on their prey are much quieter, and used for quick updates on the location of a fleeing snack. Not mind bullets then. Curses.

Last year, a study at Kaikoura found that buzzes were rarely recorded between the surface to 300m deep. Of course, the surface is well-lit, so echolocation may not be required. In the darkness of the deep sea, sharks are clearly a routine snack.

Researchers examined 133 sperm whale stomachs from New Zealand between 1963-64, when there was commercial whaling. Half of their diet was fishes, including a lot of deepwater sharks.

If there’s a lesson here, I guess it’s that food webs are complicated. Apex predators can be prey themselves. Also, you should probably visit Kaikoura. It’s very nice. Lots of seafood. SP About Simon Dr Simon J Pierce is a marine conservation biologist and underwater photographer from New Zealand. He is a co-founder and Principal Scientist at the Marine Megafauna Foundation, where he leads the global whale shark research programme, and a regional Co-Chair for the IUCN Shark Specialist Group.

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A Triton submersible begins its descent to the deep, an underwater photographer in tow - for as long as he’s able.

Deep Science Dr Lucy Woodall, Principal Scientist for Nekton, the deep ocean exploration organisation, reveals what it is like to explore the deep ocean and why she is committed to understanding and protecting our planet’s largest, least-explored, and most critically-important ecosystem.

Wo rd s b y D r L u c y Wo o d a l l P h o t o g ra p h s c o u r t e s y o f N e k t o n M i s s i o n

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“A

cow? Repeat: A cow? What’s a cow doing down there?” the underwater telephone crackled as the Surface Officer relayed what he had heard. Or rather misheard.

“Cow-fish. Repeat: Cow-fish”.

I was descending in a two-person Triton submersible at 50ft a minute, down the side of an extinct volcano a few miles off the coast of Bermuda. I was part of Nekton’s first mission to explore and research the state of the ocean. It was the realisation of a childhood dream.

I have always had a fascination with the sea. My mother tells a story of when I was a five-year-old on a family holiday at the seaside. I was scrambling around in rock pools and found a strange, brightly coloured sea creature.

“Mum,” I said, “what’s this?” She told me it was a starfish.

Then I found another equally bizarre creature nearby.

Again I asked what it was. “It’s a starfish, Lucy. I’ve already told you that!” “But mum,” I replied, “it’s a different colour and this one’s bigger and it’s not really the same shape.” My mother always says that is when she realised I was going to be a scientist. Full of wonder, she says, but always obsessed with details.

Nothing can prepare you for your first dive in a Triton, a new breed of submersible. They are incredible pieces of technology - a sci-fi fantasy made real. David Attenborough was taken down in one when filming on the Great Barrier Reef. The subs were used extensively throughout the BBC’s Blue Planet II series.

The acrylic transparent pressure hull feels as if it disappears when you are underwater, affording the sensation of floating like a voyeur in our planet’s inner space. Apart from the occasional communication with the surface, it is blissfully quiet during descent as the weight of the submersible and the flooded ballast tanks carries you downwards without the need for noisy thrusters.

I guess mum had been proved right. I do have a passion for the sea and my life as a scientist has all been about

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trying to understand more about it. The deep ocean is our planet’s largest and most critical ecosystem yet it remains the least known part of our planet. We do know that its health is vitally important for a healthy planet, and our own healthy lives.

I have been fortunate to work in some fascinating areas of ocean research during my career as a scientist. But the opportunity to work with Nekton has been a highlight.

Our goal is simple - to explore the depths of the ocean and reveal the unknown. The vast majority of deep ocean research is funded by governments. As a small charitable research institute, our mission is to collaborate with others and act as a catalyst to find new ways to accelerate scientific discovery of the ocean.

It took us 20 minutes to reach the seabed, falling through shades of blue until the darkness finally swallowed us in. At 300m - our maximum operating depth - nothing of the blistering mid-summer Bermudan sun remained. We awaited the arrival of our sister sub, another Triton, with which we were completing to dive.

My submersible, Nomad, was equipped with sampling equipment, the other, Nemo, was equipped with cameras to document life on this part of the seabed for the first time, a Planet Earth-based Mars-lander. A Sargassum fish - an otherworldly frogfish capable of changing colour - had latched onto our sub for the descent, hitching a ride as if we were part of the habitat - a giant piece of algae or seaweed. Nekton meets nekton.

With only a fraction of 1% of the ocean explored, it takes a 21st century oceanic shuttle like the Triton to become a pioneer, enabling us to be the first people to lay eyes on a previously unrecorded part of our planet.

My pilot, Kelvin Magee turned on the submersible’s

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headlights to light up this formerly unseen world. With light, the colours returned: orange sea stars, red sponges and yellow sea fans. Life was diverse and abundant.

What makes the Triton so revolutionary is its 360-degree spherical hull which holds the observation platform where the pilot and scientist sit. Observation is where the journey of enquiry begins. I surveyed the seabed around me, marvelling at being able to witness such an environment first-hand. As an ocean scientist the advantages of being physically present on the seabed cannot be overemphasised. I am used to seeing these images on a screen, data beamed up to the surface ship.

Being there in person I could immediately see things of potential interest that would have been much harder to spot watching a video feed from a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV), a racehorse with its blinkers suddenly removed. I instantly saw features and patterns that from a screen would have required extensive data analysis to recognise. There were different types of fauna in the valleys than there were in the ridges of the rock, for

“It took us 20 minutes to reach the seabed, falling through shades of blue until the darkness finally swallowed us in.� example. I am usually on the edge of my seat when I watch such images in 2D; being there in person was unimaginably thrilling, a dream realised.

Bermuda holds a special place in the history of deepsea exploration. This is partly because the island itself is a seamount, part of an ancient volcano thrust up from the deep. The Challenger expedition of 1872-76 laid the foundations for the modern-day science of oceanography and then in the 1930s William Beebe set up a deep-sea research station there.

He built a bathysphere with an engineer named Otis Barton which was suspended from a steel cable under a ship on the surface. This was able to reach around halfa-mile down (an incredible depth at the time), and made the first observations of deep-sea life as well as making the first live radio broadcast from the deep ocean.

One of the key objectives of our first mission - the XL Catlin Deep Ocean Survey - was to create and field-test a new standardised methodology for marine biologists.

This is a protocol that can be used all around the world for measuring physical, chemical, and biological indicators to assess the function, state, and resilience

Having left the darkness of the deep behind, the crew of this submersible return to the surface just before darkness falls topside too.

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“Our next mission will take place over three years and will concentrate on the Indian Ocean, the least known ocean on our planet. It is an audacious and challenging undertaking.�

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Room with a view: Sister sub Nemo approaches the seabed, as seen from the observation platform of Nomad.

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A submarine inspects a vast sea wall, the scientists within documenting what they see, aquanauts in another realm.

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of the deep ocean. It means that results in one part of the ocean can be compared meaningfully with results in another thousands of miles away.

In May, we will be presenting our official findings to the Bermudian government. Our scientific team, drawn from a dozen different marine research institutes, has analysed more than 40,000 samples from the mission and discovered dozens of new species from minute animals that live in sponges to two-metre-high black corals that cling to subsea volcanic cliffs.

We also discovered lionfish at far greater depths than had previously been observed. Lionfish are native to the Indo-Pacific but have been observed in the Atlantic since the 1980s. In these waters, they have no predators to keep their numbers under control and prey on many coral fish species, threatening the health of the reefs. Their ability to survive at depths of hundreds of metres means population control will be even more difficult than previously thought.

Another significant surprise was the inaccuracy of some of the old charts, with the seabed up to a kilometre deeper in some parts than previously recorded. The ROV we deployed on that particular occasion - one of 13 different subsea research tools we used on the mission - descended to such a depth we initially suspected it must have malfunctioned.

Having done a lot of my previous scientific work on our species’ impact on the ocean, particularly marine plastics, I expected to see litter. We found some, but not as much as I had expected. However, we did witness plenty of single-use plastic debris both on the surface and on the seabed, as well as discarded anchors. Micro-plastics (plastics <5mm) were also ubiquitous in the numerous net tows of surface water.

What many people still don’t realise is the complexity of ocean systems.

One of our greatest challenges is to share the scientific reality that the ocean is constantly moving and mixing and cannot be neatly divided up to solve one problem at a time. Ocean plastic has recently caught public attention as we can see and feel the impact that we humans are having. As such a versatile material, that we see and use every day of our lives, plastic is now helping many of us understand how connected the ocean is with our own lives. Ocean plastic is just one part of the complex challenge of ocean pollution, which along with other human activities has implications on the ocean’s resilience.

A vital part of Nekton’s mission is to inspire the next generation. Deep ocean research expeditions using submersibles are an ideal vehicle to increase young people’s interest in and knowledge of the ocean. Through deploying 360-degree cameras in our submersibles we have been able to give young people direct experience of the process of discovery, and our educational programme Submarine STEM provides an inspirational introduction to scientific learning and to the blue planet itself.

Our next mission will take place over three years and will concentrate on the Indian Ocean, the least known ocean on our planet. In collaboration with local nations, we are aiming to undertake a series of expeditions as part of one mission, to create a step-change in our knowledge of these undiscovered depths and to help inform more sustainable ocean management. The mission will conclude with a State of the Indian Ocean Summit in April 2022. It is an audacious and challenging undertaking for a non-government funded institute like Nekton. Many say it is impossible, but we need to try.

D r L u c y Wo o d a l l

Nekton Mission

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BEHIND THE LENS

Photography is an important tool in whale shark conservation, critical for identifying individuals and measuring their length.

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T H E W H A L E S H A R K S T H AT

went nowhere The whale sharks of Mafia Island fascinate marine biologists.

While other populations of whale sharks around the world travel great distances every year, the sharks of Mafia Island stay put.

Marine Megafauna Foundation co-founder and whale shark expert, Dr Simon J Pierce, explains why.

Wo rd s a n d p h o t o g ra p h s b y S I M O N J P I E R C E

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F E AT U R E

TOP: Whale sharks are listed as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Endangeredâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

LEFT: Conservation efforts off the coast of Mafia Island require teamwork and, often, decent breath-hold skills.

RIGHT: Whale sharks are regularly caught in fishing nets - the shrimp patches that attract them are also prey for several species of fish which are, in turn, targeted by fishermen.

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W

hale sharks are ocean wanderers. They swim about 25 kilometres each day; around ten thousand kilometres per year. That’s the distance from London to Cape Town.

Some of them, though, just swim around in circles.

Mafia Island, 20km off the Tanzanian coast, is home to what may be the world’s laziest whale sharks. Or possibly the smartest. Potentially both.

This “Mafia” has no particular association with organised crime. Rather, the island’s name is thought to be derived from a Swahili phrase that translates, roughly, as “healthy dwelling place”. Mafia Island, slightly under 50km in length, is smaller, less populated, and feels a world away from the bustling tourism industry of its big brother, Zanzibar, to the north.

Mafia is a quiet place. The small airport welcomes arrivals from Tanzania’s largest city, Dar es Salaam, with a statue of a whale shark installed on the island’s one and only roundabout. These sharks, known as “papa potwe” on Mafia, are an iconic species. They are the world’s largest cold-blooded animal, growing to around 20 metres in length, and the largest fish that has ever lived.

Despite their enormous size, whale sharks are remarkably inoffensive. Their diet consists of zooplankton, tiny animals that get swept around by ocean currents, and small fishes.

Though whale sharks are true sharks, they are so placid that almost anyone, regardless of previous snorkelling experience, can safely enter the water and swim with them. Their gentle nature has made the whale shark a popular focus of marine wildlife tourism. Sadly, these same qualities, coupled with valuable fins and meat, have resulted in people hunting whale sharks in all sorts of inventive ways, with major fisheries having occurred in mainland China, India, the Philippines, and Taiwan.

Around half of the world’s whale shark population has been killed since the 1980s. They were classified as a globally endangered species in 2016.

Mafia Island, though, still has whale sharks. All the time.

My work at Mafia began in 2012. Dr Chris Rohner and I, both from the Marine Megafauna Foundation, won a research contract advertised by WWF Tanzania.

Our assigned objectives were to find out what the whale sharks were doing off Mafia Island, and to identify the factors that influence their abundance.

We teamed up with Liberatus Mokoki, owner of The Whale Safari, who has been taking tourists out to see the whale sharks since 2004. “Whale shark season” at Mafia

is from around October to February. Over this period, the sharks are routinely seen feeding at the surface, heads protruding and dorsal fins carving through the water as they’re propelled by wide sweeps of their enormous tails.

They’re very easy to find. We can sometimes watch them swimming by from our breakfast table, onshore.

For the sharks, this swimming requires an enormous cost in energy. Whale sharks are, necessarily, masters of conserving effort. The stereotypical tropical ocean – warm, blue and clear – is a biological desert. Warmer water carries a lower oxygen content, and tropical waters are typically low in vital nutrients, which means less phytoplankton, the tiny ocean plants. Without an abundance of phytoplankton at the base of the food web, fewer large animals can be supported.

A giant shark needs a lot of food. That’s why whale sharks migrate. Whale sharks seem to be less concerned about what they’re specifically eating, and more focused on how much. They will travel vast distances to take advantage of short-lived explosions of productivity, whether that be plankton blooms, fish spawning events, or schooling baitfish.

Mafia is popular with whale sharks because of shrimp.

Lots and lots of shrimp. Small sergestid Lucifer shrimp, to be exact. These one-centimetre translucent shrimps are impressive swimmers in their own right. For plankton, they’re quick, and they’re present in incredible densities.

Our plankton sampling has shown that the shrimp clouds targeted by whale sharks tend to have ten times the density of zooplankton of nearby comparison samples.

For the sharks, the sheer quantity of shrimp present make chasing down these highly-mobile patches worth the energetic spend. We’ve done some preliminary tagging work with multi-sensor “behaviour” tags, temporarily affixed to the dorsal fins of the sharks, which use a battery of recording devices, such as accelerometers, gyroscopes and pressure sensors, to reconstruct the three-dimensional movements of these fish over hours to a few days.

We found that the sharks spend around 4.5 hours feeding each day while the shrimp are abundant. Whale sharks are ectothermic, meaning that they don’t have to burn energy to maintain a constant body temperature; instead, their internal temperature naturally varies with the environment. Their metabolism is far slower than a whale of the same size. Some back-of-the envelope calculations on shrimp densities, and the sharks’ estimated energy expenditure, indicate that they only need to actively feed for about 10 minutes per day to meet their basic daily requirement. Anything after that is bonus time, meaning the additional energy can be channelled into growth.

Almost three-quarters of the sharks we see at Mafia are feeding, so it’s clear that the shrimps are a powerful attraction for the sharks. However, not many sharks seem to visit the island. Though we’ve counted up to 24 sharks feeding close together at Mafia, the total identified population is less than 200.

The characteristic white spots and patterns on each

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BEHIND THE LENS

whale shark are unique. Individual sharks have been shown to be re-identifiable for at least 22 years. In the field, we photograph each shark on both its right and left side, determine sex based on the presence or absence of claspers, the male reproductive organs, and estimate its size. The global whale shark database, an online resource hosted at www.whaleshark.org, holds identification photos for almost 9,000 whale sharks from more than 50 countries.

Only a specific subset of whale sharks make use of Mafia’s waters. Almost 90% of the sharks we’ve identified are males, nearly all between three and nine metres in length. Whale sharks reach adulthood at about nine metres, and are born at 40-65 centimetres. Though little is known about their reproduction, I’d expect there to be an approximately equal number of male and female pups.

For some reason, then, Mafia is missing the youngest whale sharks, most of the adults, and almost all the female sharks.

Despite this rather bromantic population structure, these juvenile male sharks do tend to loiter. Matthew Potenski, from the Shark Research Institute, spent some time on the island tagging and photo-identifying the sharks for a couple of seasons prior to 2009. A decade on, many of the 21 sharks first identified by Matthew and others over that time are still being seen at Mafia. In fact, we re-identified more than half of those sharks during our 2016 and 2017 field periods.

Since our own work began in 2012, we’ve seen several sharks in every subsequent year. These days, it’s like visiting old friends. Several sharks have been re-sighted over 40 times. While most hotspots do have a few regulars, such as “Stumpy” off Western Australia, who was seen at Ningaloo Reef in 19 of the 22 years between 1995 and 2016, the Mafia sharks are unusually persistent.

Around February, the shrimp patches dissipate, and the sharks disappear. Whale shark tourism closes down, and so does research. Everyone assumed that the sharks were moving well away from Mafia during the off season.

Fortunately, our research collaborators at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology had deployed small acoustic pinger tags on some sharks in 2012/13, and installed an array of passive acoustic receivers adjacent to the island. Each tag was uniquely coded, so whenever a tagged shark swam within a few hundred metres of a receiver we knew where the shark had been, who it was, and when it was there.

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When we returned to Mafia the following October, we recovered and downloaded the receivers. It was then that we realised just how resident these sharks actually are. Many of the sharks were still there, just off Mafia, the whole time. They simply weren’t at the surface, and had moved slightly further offshore, around the limits of the receiver array.

While it’s easy to explain the sharks’ presence during “shrimp buffet season”, we don’t know much about their habits during these months in between. Elsewhere, when the food source disperses, so do the sharks - often swimming thousands of kilometres afield.

The likely answer is, then, that they’re switching to alternate prey. However, we don’t know what that could be. Certainly, the sharks will feed on baitfish given the opportunity, and they likely also feed at night on the zooplankton that emerges from the sandy bottom at dusk. However, even the fishermen working year-round off Mafia rarely see sharks over these months. Ultimately, it’s still a mystery at this stage.

Whatever the reason, many sharks spend several years, or even decades, close to the island. For management and conservation, that presents both challenge and opportunity.

At this stage, no formal management is in place for whale sharks in Tanzania. The species remains unprotected. There are multiple active threats that could put this small population at risk. Several sharks are caught and killed each year off Zanzibar. In Mafia itself, there is some conflict between sharks and fishers. The dense shrimp patches that attract the sharks are also important prey for several species of small anchovies and mackerel which are, in turn, targeted by people.

The fishers aren’t trying to catch the sharks, but their large ring-nets can trap and entangle whale sharks. Of the 74 sharks we saw in 2017, 85% had scars. Most were minor, but several bore major amputations or propeller cuts that could lead to death or long-term disability. Most of the serious scars were from boat strikes, likely from when vessels were travelling too fast through feeding

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areas. Others appeared to be purposeful wounds, where fins had been cut off by knives. While there is a possibility that these fins could be sold, we think it is more likely that the fins were removed while untangling the shark from being enmeshed in fishing nets.

There is also a significant positive side to the sharks’ high residency. Whale sharks are increasingly valuable to the island, with shark tourism having doubled since our study began in 2012. While this does introduce some management issues in itself, more and more people are employed in this industry, and it acts as a major draw for tourists to visit the island. Personally, I actively encourage people to visit Mafia and swim with the whale sharks, as there is excellent potential for the island to develop as a marine ecotourism destination. The opportunity for whale shark tourism is world class, with our long-term data showing an average of 4.6 whale sharks seen per trip. I think Mafia is the best place to see whale sharks in Africa, and right up there with the world’s best shark tourism destinations.

We still know little about the life of this endangered species. The fact that we can see the same sharks, year to year, potentially for the next few decades, makes Mafia a fantastic “natural laboratory” for whale sharks. It’s a great opportunity to learn more about these remarkably enigmatic fish. Because the sharks are only seasonally at the surface, and generally in a predictable area, the prospects are good for creating a managed zone where sharks can feed safely without much impediment to local fishing practices.

Mafia has long been known as a “healthy dwelling place” for people. With a bit of work, we can ensure that the same is true for the world’s largest fish.

“Since our work began in 2012, we’ve seen several sharks in every subsequent year. These days it’s like visiting old friends.”

S i m o n J P i e rc e

Mafia Island translates as ‘healthy dwelling place’ in Swahili. For marine biologists like Simon, it’s also a healthy studying place.

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CHARITY PARTNERSHIP

Project AWARE ® is a global movement for ocean protection powered by a community of adventurers.

Project AWARE is an international non-profit organization working to create positive change for the ocean.

www.project aware.org

Feature

ONE MILLION LESS ITEMS OF TRASH IN OUR OCEAN A unique global citizen science survey in which scuba divers around the world remove and report marine litter has reached a milestone: one million pieces of trash removed from the ocean.

The #OneMillionLess milestone was reached thanks to an army of activist divers who, since 2011, have taken part in Dive Against Debris® - the world’s first and only underwater marine debris removal and survey that operates on a global scale, yielding data about the types and quantities of marine debris items found on the seabed.

Not only do divers have a natural affinity to protect the marine environment, they have the unique skillset to take direct action underwater to protect marine wildlife from the devastating impacts of marine debris.

Since 2011, 49,188 Dive Against Debris volunteer divers from 114 countries have taken part in an effort both to clean up the ocean and build evidence to shine a light on the global marine litter crisis.

Recreational divers and dive leaders have retrieved objects varying from sunbeds to batteries and shoes, as well as vast quantities of plastic bags, cutlery and bottles.

The data collected captures essential information for Key Statistics on Dive Against Debris® : ONE MILLION Pieces of rubbish removed

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and reported since 2011

49,188

Scuba divers

5,351

Surveys

114

Countries around the world

5,597

Entangled or dead animals

64%

Plastic waste

307,064kgs

Total weight

scientists to estimate debris that has sunk to the seafloor.

It also supports work to find solutions to save vulnerable marine life and ensure the future of a clean and healthy ocean.

Project AWARE Program Specialist Hannah PragnellRaasch comments: “With 150 million metric tons of mismanaged plastic conservatively estimated to make its way into the ocean by 2025, it sadly comes as no surprise that plastic items are consistently the top items reported - accounting for 64% of all debris items reported to date. That’s really quite staggering and serves as a harsh reminder that we, the human population, really are choking our marine environment.”

The #OneMillionLess milestone comes at a time of unprecedented focus on the issue of plastic pollution and its impact on the health of the ocean. Scientists estimate some 20 million tonnes of plastic waste could enter the ocean every year. Last year saw the United Nations and national governments step up efforts to eliminate plastic waste. The European Commission recently adopted the first-ever Europe-wide strategy on plastics, part of the transition towards a more circular economy to keep plastics and their value in the economy, avoid waste and reduce marine litter.

Volunteers involved in Dive Against Debris have provided data which is helping convince decision-makers to adopt more stringent policies on plastics. Of all items reported through Dive Against Debris, 64% were plastics. In December 2017, the Vanuatu Government announced a ban on the import and local manufacturing of non-biodegradable plastics, based on studies done by environmental groups including local dive centre Big Blue.

Dive Against Debris surveys not only provide an immediate relief to undersea habitats and marine life

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CHARITY PARTNERSHIP

S H A R E Y O U R S TO RY O F C H A N G E JOIN MY OCEAN

P R OT E C T W H AT Y O U L OV E W I T H P R O J E C T AWA R E ’ S C L OT H I N G

CHALLENGE YOURSELF FUNDRAISE FOR THE OCEAN

S TO P O C E A N P L A S T I C through the direct actions of participating dive volunteers, the data submitted contributes to long-term solutions by building the evidence necessary to advocate for change.

Comparatively speaking, information regarding land and surface debris is widely available but underwater data is lacking. Dive Against Debris aims to fill this gap providing quantitative data to show the true extent of the global marine debris crisis. The data yielded bridges the gap to an issue that has been previously disregarded as out of sight, out of mind. By sharing the data with partners and making it available for all to see online through the Dive Against Debris interactive online map, Project AWARE and its dedicated army of debris activists and citizen scientists are working toward solutions that will ultimately prevent debris entering the ocean in the first place.

“We have an army of debris activists out there working to make a difference, and we salute every one of them on the #OneMillionLess Dive Against Debris ® milestone.”

DANNA MOORE, DIRECTOR, PROJECT AWARE

N E W S TO P O C E A N P L A S T I C C L OT H I N G D E S I G N S AVA I L A B L E N OW projectaware.org/shop

Project AWARE creates positive change for a return to a clean, healthy ocean through community action.

WHAT YOUR SUPPORT HELPS ACHI EVE

Data collected by scuba divers provides a unique underwater view into the growing problem of ocean trash.

The Dive Against Debris interactive online map visualises more than seven years of ongoing reporting by Project AWARE’s network of dive volunteers taking action for a clean ocean one dive at a time.

Danna Moore, Director at Project Aware, urges more divers to get involved and calls on governments and industry to act urgently to adopt measures to reduce plastic waste and penalise ocean polluters. Project AWARE is asking divers to remove and report one million more pieces of rubbish by end of 2020 and help highlight the true extent of the marine debris problem.

Project AWARE applauds the engagement and dedication of divers globally in highlighting the issue as well making a huge contribution to clean up marine trash and save wildlife.

1,000,947 DEBRIS ITEMS REMOVED

5,597

177,204

CONSERVATION ACTIONS, IN

182

COUNTRIES

ENTANGLED ANIMALS RESCUED OR REPORTED

391

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BE T HE CHAN GE YOU WAN T TO SEE FOR T HE OCEAN – GET I N VOLVED! Oceanographic May 2018

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Like our riders, Mako Boardsports loves venturing out and redefining how we play on the water so naturally we want to look after those special environments, not only for ourselves but for future generations. Creating a jetboard product that has a positive effect on our aquatic playground and the people that use it, is a smart choice - after all, we’re on the front line, we need the environment in tiptop shape to not only enjoy its splendour but also our favourite past time.

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RECYCLING OCEAN PLASTIC Together with leading material experts and suppliers, Mako Boardsports gives ocean plastic waste new life in ways that reduce the use of virgin plastics in our jetboard, to help clean up our waters and do our bit towards eco-innovation and long-term change.

REDUCING CARBON FOOTPRINT Trees are nature’s most effective tool in helping to combat climate change. Mako Boardsports works with the Woodland Trust to reduce its carbon footprint by locking up carbon emissions through planting trees.

SUPPORTING SHARK CONSERVATION Mako Boardsports pledge to donate a percentage of our jetboard sales to support the Shark Trust, a charity committed to safeguarding the future of sharks through science, education, influence and action.

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INSPIRED BY NATUREâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S GENIUS

THE NEXT GENERATION JETBOARD

O N T H E C OV E R

£6.00 A polar bear navigates the changing seascape of the Arctic Ocean. Grand Prize winner of the ‘2017 Drone Photo of the Year’ by Skypixel/DJI. Photograph taken by Florian Ledoux.

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