Brian Skerry reveals ocean's glory -- and horror

159,217 views ・ 2010-06-02

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

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I would like to share with you this morning
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some stories about the ocean
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through my work as a still photographer
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for National Geographic magazine.
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I guess I became an underwater photographer
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and a photojournalist
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because I fell in love with the sea as a child.
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And I wanted to tell stories
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about all the amazing things I was seeing underwater,
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incredible wildlife and interesting behaviors.
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And after even 30 years of doing this,
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after 30 years of exploring the ocean,
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I never cease to be amazed
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at the extraordinary encounters that I have while I'm at sea.
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But more and more frequently these days
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I'm seeing terrible things underwater as well,
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things that I don't think most people realize.
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And I've been compelled to turn my camera towards these issues
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to tell a more complete story.
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I want people to see what's happening underwater,
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both the horror and the magic.
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The first story that I did for National Geographic,
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where I recognized the ability to include
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environmental issues within a natural history coverage,
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was a story I proposed on harp seals.
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The story I wanted to do initially
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was just a small focus to look at the few weeks each year
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where these animals migrate down from the Canadian arctic
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to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada
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to engage in courtship, mating and to have their pups.
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And all of this is played out against
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the backdrop of transient pack ice
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that moves with wind and tide.
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And because I'm an underwater photographer,
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I wanted to do this story from both above and below,
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to make pictures like this that show one of these little pups
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making its very first swim in the icy 29-degree water.
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But as I got more involved in the story,
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I realized that there were two big environmental issues I couldn't ignore.
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The first was that these animals continue to be hunted,
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killed with hakapiks at about eight, 15 days old.
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It actually is the largest marine mammal
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slaughter on the planet,
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with hundreds of thousands of these seals being killed every year.
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But as disturbing as that is,
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I think the bigger problem for harp seals
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is the loss of sea ice due to global warming.
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This is an aerial picture that I made that shows
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the Gulf of St. Lawrence during harp seal season.
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And even though we see a lot of ice in this picture,
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there's a lot of water as well, which wasn't there historically.
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And the ice that is there is quite thin.
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The problem is that these pups need a stable platform of solid ice
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in order to nurse from their moms.
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They only need 12 days from the moment they're born until they're on their own.
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But if they don't get 12 days,
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they can fall into the ocean and die.
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This is a photo that I made showing
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one of these pups that's only about five or seven days old --
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still has a little bit of the umbilical cord on its belly --
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that has fallen in because of the thin ice,
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and the mother is frantically trying to push it up to breathe
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and to get it back to stable purchase.
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This problem has continued to grow each year since I was there.
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I read that last year the pup mortality rate
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was 100 percent in parts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
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So, clearly, this species has a lot of problems going forward.
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This ended up becoming a cover story at National Geographic.
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And it received quite a bit of attention.
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And with that, I saw the potential to begin
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doing other stories about ocean problems.
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So I proposed a story on the global fish crisis,
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in part because I had personally witnessed
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a lot of degradation in the ocean over the last 30 years,
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but also because I read a scientific paper
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that stated that 90 percent of the big fish in the ocean
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have disappeared in the last 50 or 60 years.
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These are the tuna, the billfish and the sharks.
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When I read that, I was blown away by those numbers.
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I thought this was going to be headline news in every media outlet,
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but it really wasn't, so I wanted to do a story
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that was a very different kind of underwater story.
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I wanted it to be more like war photography,
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where I was making harder-hitting pictures
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that showed readers what was happening
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to marine wildlife around the planet.
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The first component of the story that I thought was essential, however,
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was to give readers a sense of appreciation
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for the ocean animals that they were eating.
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You know, I think people go into a restaurant,
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and somebody orders a steak, and we all know where steak comes from,
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and somebody orders a chicken, and we know what a chicken is,
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but when they're eating bluefin sushi,
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do they have any sense of the magnificent animal that they're consuming?
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These are the lions and tigers of the sea.
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In reality, these animals have no terrestrial counterpart;
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they're unique in the world.
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These are animals that can practically swim
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from the equator to the poles
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and can crisscross entire oceans in the course of a year.
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If we weren't so efficient at catching them, because they grow their entire life,
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would have 30-year-old bluefin out there that weigh a ton.
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But the truth is we're way too efficient at catching them,
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and their stocks have collapsed worldwide.
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This is the daily auction at the Tsukiji Fish Market
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that I photographed a couple years ago.
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And every single day these tuna, bluefin like this,
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are stacked up like cordwood,
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just warehouse after warehouse.
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As I wandered around and made these pictures,
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it sort of occurred to me that the ocean's not a grocery store, you know.
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We can't keep taking without expecting
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serious consequences as a result.
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I also, with the story, wanted to show readers
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how fish are caught, some of the methods that are used to catch fish,
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like a bottom trawler, which is one of the most common methods in the world.
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This was a small net that was being used in Mexico to catch shrimp,
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but the way it works is essentially the same everywhere in the world.
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You have a large net in the middle
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with two steel doors on either end.
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And as this assembly is towed through the water,
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the doors meet resistance with the ocean,
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and it opens the mouth of the net,
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and they place floats at the top and a lead line on the bottom.
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And this just drags over the bottom, in this case to catch shrimp.
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But as you can imagine, it's catching everything else in its path as well.
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And it's destroying that precious benthic community on the bottom,
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things like sponges and corals,
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that critical habitat for other animals.
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This photograph I made of the fisherman
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holding the shrimp that he caught after towing his nets for one hour.
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So he had a handful of shrimp, maybe seven or eight shrimp,
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and all those other animals on the deck of the boat are bycatch.
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These are animals that died in the process,
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but have no commercial value.
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So this is the true cost of a shrimp dinner,
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maybe seven or eight shrimp
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and 10 pounds of other animals that had to die in the process.
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And to make that point even more visual, I swam under the shrimp boat
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and made this picture of the guy shoveling
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this bycatch into the sea as trash
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and photographed this cascade of death,
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you know, animals like guitarfish, bat rays,
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flounder, pufferfish, that only an hour before,
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were on the bottom of the ocean, alive,
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but now being thrown back as trash.
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I also wanted to focus on the shark fishing industry
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because, currently on planet Earth,
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we're killing over 100 million sharks
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every single year.
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But before I went out to photograph this component,
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I sort of wrestled with the notion of how do you make a picture of a dead shark
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that will resonate with readers
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You know, I think there's still a lot of people out there who think
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the only good shark is a dead shark.
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But this one morning I jumped in and found this thresher
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that had just recently died in the gill net.
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And with its huge pectoral fins and eyes still very visible,
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it struck me as sort of a crucifixion, if you will.
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This ended up being the lead picture
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in the global fishery story in National Geographic.
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And I hope that it helped readers to take notice
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of this problem of 100 million sharks.
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And because I love sharks -- I'm somewhat obsessed with sharks --
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I wanted to do another, more celebratory, story about sharks,
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as a way of talking about the need for shark conservation.
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So I went to the Bahamas
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because there're very few places in the world
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where sharks are doing well these days,
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but the Bahamas seem to be a place where stocks were reasonably healthy,
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largely due to the fact that the government there
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had outlawed longlining several years ago.
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And I wanted to show several species
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that we hadn't shown much in the magazine and worked in a number of locations.
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One of the locations was this place called Tiger Beach,
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in the northern Bahamas where tiger sharks
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aggregate in shallow water.
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This is a low-altitude photograph that I made
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showing our dive boat with about a dozen of these big old tiger sharks
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sort of just swimming around behind.
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But the one thing I definitely didn't want to do with this coverage
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was to continue to portray sharks as something like monsters.
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I didn't want them to be overly threatening or scary.
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And with this photograph of a beautiful
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15-feet, probably 14-feet, I guess,
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female tiger shark,
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I sort of think I got to that goal,
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where she was swimming with these little barjacks off her nose,
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and my strobe created a shadow on her face.
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And I think it's a gentler picture, a little less threatening,
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a little more respectful of the species.
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I also searched on this story
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for the elusive great hammerhead,
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an animal that really hadn't been photographed much
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until maybe about seven or 10 years ago.
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It's a very solitary creature.
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But this is an animal that's considered data deficient by science
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in both Florida and in the Bahamas.
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You know, we know almost nothing about them.
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We don't know where they migrate to or from,
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where they mate, where they have their pups,
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and yet, hammerhead populations in the Atlantic
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have declined about 80 percent in the last 20 to 30 years.
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You know, we're losing them faster than we can possibly find them.
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This is the oceanic whitetip shark,
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an animal that is considered the fourth most dangerous species,
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if you pay attention to such lists.
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But it's an animal that's about 98 percent in decline
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throughout most of its range.
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Because this is a pelagic animal and it lives out in the deeper water,
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and because we weren't working on the bottom,
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I brought along a shark cage here,
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and my friend, shark biologist Wes Pratt is inside the cage.
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You'll see that the photographer, of course, was not inside the cage here,
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so clearly the biologist is a little smarter than the photographer I guess.
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And lastly with this story,
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I also wanted to focus on baby sharks, shark nurseries.
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And I went to the island of Bimini, in the Bahamas,
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to work with lemon shark pups.
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This is a photo of a lemon shark pup,
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and it shows these animals where they live for the first two to three years of their lives
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in these protective mangroves.
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This is a very sort of un-shark-like photograph.
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It's not what you typically might think of as a shark picture.
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But, you know, here we see a shark that's maybe 10 or 11 inches long
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swimming in about a foot of water.
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But this is crucial habitat and it's where they spend the first two, three years of their lives,
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until they're big enough to go out on the rest of the reef.
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After I left Bimini, I actually learned
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that this habitat was being bulldozed
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to create a new golf course and resort.
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And other recent stories have looked at
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single, flagship species, if you will,
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that are at risk in the ocean
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as a way of talking about other threats.
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One such story I did documented the leatherback sea turtle.
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This is the largest, widest-ranging,
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deepest-diving and oldest of all turtle species.
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Here we see a female crawling
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out of the ocean under moonlight
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on the island of Trinidad.
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These are animals whose lineage dates back about 100 million years.
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And there was a time in their lifespan
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where they were coming out of the water to nest
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and saw Tyrannosaurus rex running by.
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And today, they crawl out and see condominiums.
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But despite this amazing longevity,
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they're now considered critically endangered.
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In the Pacific, where I made this photograph,
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their stocks have declined about 90 percent
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in the last 15 years.
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This is a photograph that shows a hatchling
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about to taste saltwater for the very first time
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beginning this long and perilous journey.
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Only one in a thousand
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leatherback hatchlings will reach maturity.
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But that's due to natural predators
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like vultures that pick them off on a beach
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or predatory fish that are waiting offshore.
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Nature has learned to compensate with that,
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and females have multiple clutches of eggs
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to overcome those odds.
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But what they can't deal with is anthropogenic stresses,
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human things, like this picture that shows
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a leatherback caught at night in a gill net.
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I actually jumped in and photographed this,
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and with the fisherman's permission,
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I cut the turtle out, and it was able to swim free.
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But, you know, thousands of other leatherbacks each year
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are not so fortunate,
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and the species' future is in great danger.
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Another charismatic megafauna species that I worked with
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is the story I did on the right whale.
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And essentially, the story is this with right whales,
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that about a million years ago, there was
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one species of right whale on the planet,
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but as land masses moved around and oceans became isolated,
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the species sort of separated,
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and today we have essentially two distinct stocks.
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We have the Southern right whale that we see here
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and the North Atlantic right whale that we see here
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with a mom and calf off the coast of Florida.
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Now, both species were hunted to the brink of extinction
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by the early whalers,
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but the Southern right whales have rebounded a lot better
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because they're located in places
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farther away from human activity.
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The North Atlantic right whale is listed as
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the most endangered species on the planet today
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because they are urban whales; they live along the east coast
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of North America, United States and Canada,
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and they have to deal with all these urban ills.
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This photo shows an animal popping its head out at sunset off the coast of Florida.
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You can see the coal burning plant in the background.
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They have to deal with things like toxins and pharmaceuticals
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that are flushed out into the ocean,
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and maybe even affecting their reproduction.
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They also get entangled in fishing gear.
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This is a picture that shows the tail of a right whale.
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And those white markings are not natural markings.
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These are entanglement scars.
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72 percent of the population has such scars,
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but most don't shed the gear, things like lobster traps and crab pots.
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They hold on to them, and it eventually kills them.
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And the other problem is they get hit by ships.
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And this was an animal that was struck by a ship
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in Nova Scotia, Canada
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being towed in, where they did a necropsy
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to confirm the cause of death,
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which was indeed a ship strike.
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So all of these ills are stacking up against these animals
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and keeping their numbers very low.
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And to draw a contrast with that beleaguered North Atlantic population,
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I went to a new pristine population of Southern right whales
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that had only been discovered about 10 years ago
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in the sub-Antarctic of New Zealand, a place called the Auckland Islands.
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I went down there in the winter time.
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And these are animals that had never seen humans before,
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and I was one of the first people they probably had ever seen.
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And I got in the water with them,
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and I was amazed at how curious they were.
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This photograph shows my assistant standing on the bottom at about 70 feet
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and one of these amazingly beautiful, 45-foot,
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70-ton whales,
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like a city bus just swimming up, you know.
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They were in perfect condition,
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very fat and healthy, robust, no entanglement scars,
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the way they're supposed to look.
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You know, I read that the pilgrims, when they landed at Plymouth Rock
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in Massachusetts in 1620,
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wrote that you could walk across Cape Cod Bay
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on the backs of right whales.
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And we can't go back and see that today,
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but maybe we can preserve what we have left.
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And I wanted to close this program with a story of hope,
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a story I did on marine reserves
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as sort of a solution
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to the problem of overfishing, the global fish crisis story.
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I settled on working in the country of New Zealand
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because New Zealand was rather progressive,
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and is rather progressive in terms of protecting their ocean.
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And I really wanted this story to be about three things:
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I wanted it to be about abundance,
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about diversity and about resilience.
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And one of the first places I worked
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was a reserve called Goat Island
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in Leigh of New Zealand.
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What the scientists there told me was that
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when protected this first marine reserve in 1975,
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they hoped and expected that certain things might happen.
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For example, they hoped that certain species of fish
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like the New Zealand snapper would return
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because they had been fished to the brink of commercial extinction.
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And they did come back. What they couldn't predict was that other things would happen.
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For example, these fish
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predate on sea urchins,
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and when the fish were all gone,
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all anyone ever saw underwater
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was just acres and acres of sea urchins.
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But when the fish came back
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and began predating and controlling the urchin population,
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low and behold, kelp forests emerged in shallow water.
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And that's because the urchins eat kelp.
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So when the fish control the urchin population,
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the ocean was restored to its natural equilibrium.
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You know, this is probably how the ocean looked here
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one or 200 years ago, but nobody was around to tell us.
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I worked in other parts of New Zealand as well,
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in beautiful, fragile, protected areas
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like in Fiordland, where this sea pen colony was found.
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Little blue cod swimming in for a dash of color.
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In the northern part of New Zealand,
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I dove in the blue water, where the water's a little warmer,
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and photographed animals like this giant sting ray
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swimming through an underwater canyon.
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Every part of the ecosystem in this place
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seems very healthy,
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from tiny, little animals like a nudibrank
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crawling over encrusting sponge
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or a leatherjacket
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that is a very important animal in this ecosystem
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because it grazes on the bottom and allows new life to take hold.
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And I wanted to finish with this photograph,
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a picture I made on a very stormy day in New Zealand
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when I just laid on the bottom
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amidst a school of fish swirling around me.
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And I was in a place that had only been protected
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about 20 years ago.
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And I talked to divers that had been diving there for many years,
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and they said that the marine life was better here today
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than it was in the 1960s.
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And that's because it's been protected,
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that it has come back.
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So I think the message is clear.
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The ocean is, indeed, resilient and tolerant to a point,
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but we must be good custodians.
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I became an underwater photographer
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because I fell in love with the sea,
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and I make pictures of it today because I want to protect it,
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and I don't think it's too late.
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Thank you very much.
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About this website

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