Great White and Oceanic Whitetip Sharks: Photographing Top Ocean Predators (Part 3) | Nat Geo Live

The third in the four species of sharks that I wanna share with you tonight is the Oceanic White Tip shark, a shark that has been listed as the fourth most dangerous species of sharks if you pay attention to such lists. It's an animal that is a true pelagic predator. This animal lives way out in the open ocean, hunts in deep water, occasionally rises to the surface. It's been called the ship wreck shark because there are sort of infamous stories about them taking out sailors that were ship wrecked, drifting at sea.

But this is an animal that has to be very efficient at hunting. The open ocean has been described as the desert, and there are only pockets of life here and there, so these animals have to be very, very good at what they do. Oceanics tend to be generally in size between nine and 12 feet in length. And they have those beautiful long pectoral fins, not unlike the Thresher or the Blue shark that we saw, but even longer. Their scientific name, their Latin name is longimanus, which when translated means the long hand or the long fingers, which is an apt description.

You can imagine an animal like this, swimming up toward the surface and then just gliding down. Maybe a mile deep into the ocean, looking for prey. Completely effortlessly, with its pectorals, those dermal denticles, completely hydrodynamic, just swooping in silently and nailing some deep water fish. Very efficient predator, and this one, as you can see, is kinda find it beefy, kind of fat, so there's no problem getting food.

This is an image I made that shows that distinct shape, the silhouette shape. This was in a place called Cat Island in the Bahamas. And it was back in 2006 that I did an expedition there as part of a story I was doing for National Geographic because we had heard some fish tales about oceanic white tips being seen there. Now oceanics hadn't been seen. I didn't know any diver that had seen one in 20 or 30 years in the Bahamas. But these sport fishermen said they were catching yellow fin tuna, and as they were reeling in the tuna, they said that oceanics were stealing the fish off their line.

So on that gamble, I went out there for 16 days and in 16 days only found one. But I brought a cage along because we didn't know what we would find. This is Wes Pratt, a shark biologist inside. Turns out we were there at the wrong time of year, but if you go at different times of year, you can see more oceanic white tips. But oceanic white tips, as recently as about 1970 or in the early 70s, were described as the most abundant large animal on the planet. Most abundant large animal, large meaning anything bigger than a hundred pounds. So think about that; there must have been zillions of 'em out there.

Today, they're 99% in decline. They're on the verge of extinction, largely because of their fins. Their fins are highly priced in shark fin soup. Cat Island in the Bahamas is one of the only remaining pockets of oceanic white tips that's left on the planet. You can find them in Hawaii, a little bit, sporadically. You can find them in the Red Sea, but this is really one of the only concentrations. This is my friend Jerome Arrow, a shark cameraman, swimming with one of them here. So it's one of the only places you could go to photograph them, and for this story, it's where I spent my time.

We have two of 'em here. It's like one is saying to the other one, "Don't look now, but there's a guy taking our picture over there." But it's all done with free diving; we're not using scuba with this, we're just snorkeling. Mask, snorkel, and fins, and a wetsuit. And it can get a little interesting when there's several of 'em around; there's three in this particular frame, especially when the ocean is a little rough. They'll come in, and oceanic white tips, as Gimbel mentioned, will often bump.

I've never seen their teeth, but unlike some of the other species that are a little bit more standoffish, they are quite curious, and they will come in and bump. And when they do that, the nictitating membrane, that white membrane goes over their eye to protect them. So if they were attacking prey that might scratch their eye, it's an evolutionary thing that they've developed. But beautiful animals.

And on one of my last days there, I photographed this pair. And the one in the foreground, as you see, has a satellite tag on it near the dorsal fin. And these are researchers that have begun to tag these animals and try to track their movements. They don't stay at Cat Island, and we're not quite sure, I think, where they're going, so we need to know that information if we're gonna be able to protect them.

The Bahamas has protected all sharks, which is a very good and progressive thing to do. But if they go somewhere else and get killed, that wouldn't be good, so it's gonna be helpful to have that sort of information. So I have another little video of what it's like diving at Cat Island with me here. Oops, maybe we don't.

Alright, well we'll just go right to Great White Sharks, how's that? So the last species, of course, is Great White Sharks that I wanted to share with you tonight. And as you may know, Great Whites are the largest predatory fish on earth. An absolute ultimate predator. This is an animal that can weigh well over a ton and has more than 300 big serrated teeth in its mouth, and it can grow to lengths of at least 20 feet—some anecdotal reports of bigger ones out there—but we know at least 20 feet.

But it's an animal that is largely enigmatic. We know very little about great whites. We don't know how many there are or very much about them in the places that we even get to see brief glimpses. Now you can imagine a terrestrial predator the size of a pickup truck hunting along the coast of California. You know, we would know everything there is to know about that animal. But in the sea, that's not the case. We don't get that kind of access. So they do remain largely enigmatic and very mysterious.

For this story in the July issue of National Geographic, I worked in two locations. The first of which was South Australia. And I went to Australia because it was a place where I thought I had a pretty good chance of seeing sharks. The first job in doing these stories is to be able to see the thing you want to try to photograph, and sometimes underwater that's not always so easy. But it was also a location where Great White Sharks have been observed and studied for a very long time. And there are some new theories emerging about them.

There's various hubs. It was always believed that Great Whites were loners, that they pretty much wandered the ocean alone by themselves. But we know now that there is some social behavior; there are these hubs where they tend to congregate often for feeding or mating. But not much is really known about those social behaviors. This is a photo that I made at dusk when we see two great whites sort of moving in in this hunting behavior. They often get very frisky at sunset time.

But besides things that, complex behaviors like social behaviors, as I said, we really don't know very much about anything else with these animals. We see some patterns in their migratory behavior; some seem to follow certain little highways in the ocean, but others are very random. It's not really understood, and we've never seen them mate; we don't know where Great Whites are having their pups, where their nursery grounds are. Again, there are some theories. There's one off in New York that was described this year, but a lot more has to be done on that.

And as I mentioned earlier too, we don't even know how many there are in the world. We can't decide if they're endangered or not. Most scientists would think that they are, but there are those who think the population's increasing while others think they're declining. Until recently, it was believed that great whites only live to about 35 years old, but a new paper came out last year that said that they live well into their seventies.

So imagine this predator that's wandering thousands of miles in the course of a year and living well into its seventies. You know what kind of wisdom might an animal like that possess. I don't know that we'll ever tap into that, but it's certainly fun to think about. For me, photographically, Australia was a place where I could get close and make pictures of these animals and try to show that grace and power. It's nothing like a great white—it just exudes confidence—and to the degree that I could show it through photography their personality.

I think all animals have personalities, and sharks certainly do. Tigers have a different personality than great whites, but even within a single species, you know, some sharks are a little more bold, others are shy. This was an animal that had a broken dorsal fin, and her personality was pretty mean. She was not very happy; I think she didn't like having that broken dorsal there. But it was also, South Australia was the only place in the world that I knew of where I could make bottom pictures.

Most of the white shark photos we see are up in the water column in the blue water. But this was a place where the operator I was working with had a bottom cage, and we could send it down 60 to 80 feet or so and have a chance of seeing sharks over the benthic region. Now it was a tricky thing to do because the cage was always moving. As the boat moved, the cage was bouncing along the bottom, so, and there was also this big wall of silver jacks, these fish that would just—like a curtain of mirrors—all around.

So in order to make this photo, which I hadn't really seen anything like this before, I had to open the door of the cage and sort of lean out and punch through that wall of fish, scatter the fish, and then for a few seconds, I saw this white shark swimming through this forest, coming towards this ray. They do predate on rays; this one didn't get eaten. But they're also there to eat seals, but a different view that might engage the reader of the magazine to wanna know more about these amazing creatures.

I also worked in surface cages out there as well. I didn't ever get out of the cage because there were always a lot of sharks. There was usually at least three or four of 'em around, and they were checking you out. I mean, they would come right in. This was one on sort of a rainy rough day at the surface. And the operator I was working with had a single-person cage that he didn't usually use, but he let me use it.

The reason he doesn't let most people use it is because it has these big openings in it, and sometimes the white sharks can get a little curious and they'll start poking their nose in. Now usually when they get curious, you just poke 'em with your camera housing, and they get deterred and they swim away. But I had one day when about a 14-foot male was a little over anxious and sort of just started coming in, and he ended up getting caught between my strobe cord and my strobe arm, and he ended up ripping the strobe cord off the camera housing. I almost lost the entire rig; it's about a $25,000 rig.

I ended up just losing a $3,000 strobe, but Trevor Frost, who's in the audience tonight, was assisting me there, and he had a GoPro in the water. So I'm gonna show a little clip that shows me try to wrestle this shark to get my camera back. At the end, I didn't have fins on, so I was walking up the side of the cage. Can't see it that great, but anyway, we'll have a look.

(soft music)

• Oh well, I'm pretty sure I got it.

• Yeah.

So I lost the strobe, but I kept the camera, so that was the good news. Well, the other location for this story, the last location for the evening here, is Cape Cod, Massachusetts—my home waters where I live and where I started out. What's happening in Cape Cod is actually unique, I think, in the animal kingdom. What we have is a newly emerging hub for White shark activity. There's about five known hubs of white shark activity in the world. But Cape Cod is the newest one. And it's only started happening since about 2009 when the white sharks have re-emerged here.

And this would be analogous to a new pride of lions emerging in the Serengeti. And I'm not aware of any other new group of predators just sort of taking up residency somewhere, but that's what's happening in Cape Cod. It seems as though there's some anthropological evidence that seems to indicate that there was a robust seal population in Massachusetts back in the 1600s around the time that the pilgrims came there, but they were wiped out by sealers. So they were gone for hundreds of years, but in 1972, with the Marine Mammal Protection Act, they were protected, and these seals have slowly come back, and over time, the sharks have come back as well.

Chatham is sort of the epicenter of all this activity in the middle of Cape Cod, and they have sort of embraced their sharkiness. All kinds of little knick-knacks and sharky stuff for sale in many of the gift shops, at least until something happens. But yeah, so this is where I worked. I spent two seasons out there trying to tell this emerging story. A very difficult place to work.

But this is why the sharks are there, as I mentioned, the growing number of grey seals. This is what's for dinner, at least if you're a great white shark; they seem to be singularly focused on seals. They're not feeding on fish or anything else; they just come here to feed on the seals. And this is an aerial photo I made of one of these great whites. You can see in the lower right of the frame and all those seals, they're hunting in very, very shallow water.

Most of the literature that exists—all of the literature that exists—says that for a great white shark to hunt a pinniped, a seal, it needs about 80 feet of water to ambush them. But we've been documenting predation in as shallow as five or 10 feet of water. So this is a unique strategy, unique in the world. Not all of their attacks are successful. This was a grey seal that was attacked and got away, but it did actually die later, so they're not always—I don't know what their success rate is; it hasn't been measured, but that's what's going on there.

In the years since 2009, the state biologist with Mass State Fishery, he's a friend of mine, Greg Schumble, has been conducting a population study. What he does is he goes out on a boat with a big pulpit like this. We use spotter planes to help find the sharks, and then we get our boat in position—or he gets his boat in position—and he'll put a little GoPro camera on the end of a long pole and try to get some video of it.

And each shark has unique markings; they might have scars or different counter shading patterns on them. So, he's been able to identify in just the last few years over 200 individuals. So, you know, Jaws was about one shark; we've got over 200 at least, and no doubt there's gonna be a lot more. But you can also see in this picture I made of Greg doing that study how close they come to the beach. This is Nauset Beach in Orleans, which is right near Chatham, the most popular beach on Cape Cod.

And I was out there for two seasons, and every day I'd see surfers and boogie boarders and people. One day, these guys saw me out there in the boat, and they scratched in the words "shark?" on the beach there. So I climbed up on top of the pilot house and I yelled, "Yes! There is one right here." So far we've been able to coexist, and the sharks seem very discriminating about what they're hunting.

But who knows? But photographically, this was one of the most difficult things I've ever done. These are completely wild sharks; they can't be chummed in. They have no interest as a rule in coming close to the boat. The researchers up there have used all kinds of attractants and things, and nothing works to get 'em close to the boat. So my first season up there, the best I could do was a pole cam picture. This is a picture I made while our boat was underway of one of these giant great white sharks in that very murky water.

There's lots of currents; you couldn't use a cage there—you wouldn't see anything—and the currents would blow it over. Pretty impressive tail though, right? Shark tail. But I eventually figured that what I needed to do was build a seal decoy. So I went back to my friends at Woods Hole, and we built this big great seal. We tried to make it as authentic as possible, like an adult grey seal.

I had the head sculpted by a model maker, and we put cameras inside with fiber optic cables, and I could watch in real-time and live view back on the boat. We had a little wetsuit carved like a seal body here, and we would deploy it day and night, day and night, day and night, and nothing. Sharks had absolutely no interest. They were laughing as they gave me the fingers; they just went by, and that was about it.

So over the winter, I went home dejected and wasn't sure I was gonna have a story. I didn't know if I'd get any pictures. But over the winter, I talked to a friend of mine who's a veterinarian on Cape Cod and also a shark researcher, and he had also been working on his own seal decoy design. And he had perfected it. He got it to a point where it was a much simpler design, a much smaller seal design, only about three or four feet in length. And he said he was having a little bit of success with this.

So I took his design and I adapted my cameras to it. What I needed to do was put a wireless underwater camera in there that I could trigger from hundreds of yards away; I didn't want any cables in the water. And I also had to have real-time video in there as well that I could see on the boat. So I deployed these last summer, and the sharks were interested. Now the trick was you wanted one that would come up and check it out, but you didn't want one that would eat it because that would be very bad.

And that happened on a number of occasions where the great white would come up and destroy the seal decoy. We had ones that didn't have cameras in 'em, but—So this is maybe 30 or 40 yards off Monomoy beach in Chatham. Well, this picture was published in the July issue. The Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce was especially pleased; they sent me thank you notes.

But it's an interesting behavior. What's happening here, it's not like South Africa where these animals are breaching out of the water and so forth, but it is unique in the world, and there's a lot more that needs to be studied. I have a little video that shows some of that decoy work.

(slow music)

So using that system, I was able to produce the very first underwater pictures of a great white shark in Cape Cod waters. One of these days where the shark just sort of was curious, came up to the seal, and using that rig on the boat where I had the video, I could remotely fire the camera, wirelessly fire it, and make these portraits.

You can see very shallow waters, a shadow on the bottom, maybe five feet depth here of water. And very murky, this one had pilot fish with it, and this one I named Mike Tyson because he had a little tattoo on his face there. I think those are scratches from the seal, but I think we certainly have a very long way to go in truly understanding these sharks. We may never understand 'em, but each year I think we're peeling back layers and learning a little bit more.

And I have to say that despite the devastating decline of sharks—all species of sharks around the planet—I think we're maybe at a point now where we're turning the corner, where we're beginning to appreciate these animals. Through photography and film, we're creating a new ethic, and maybe we're coming to the understanding that the world is indeed a better place with sharks in it.

So in closing, I think back to when I began looking like Liberace here. Many decades ago when I was spending time on stinky fishing boats, ladling churm into the sea in hopes of just seeing a shark, and I didn't know then, those decades ago, that in the years ahead, I would actually find myself in the company of many, many sharks. And I couldn't have known then that I would come to see these animals as a species in peril, that for all their strength, they remain fragile and completely powerless against the overfishing that's eradicating them from our oceans.

So all these years later, I find myself still on boats in less than comfortable conditions, decades spent at sea, which is the price I pay for just a few precious moments underwater in the company of these magnificent animals, where I try to shine a light on them and help to tell their story.

So to end, I started with my blue shark story, my very first, and I wanted to end with a little video that was done while I was on Rhode Island. It was a one-hour documentary in the National Geographic Channel about my shark work, and this was in Rhode Island when I was looking for Makos, but I found my old friends, the blue sharks. So that'll be the wrap up.

(soft music)

My Mako story continues. This is the third location in which I've worked. I started in San Diego, California. Then, earlier this year, I was in New Zealand. But these are my home waters. New England is where I first started diving. So over the last several days, we've seen some Makos, but they've been a little bit shy; they haven't really come in close to the camera.

But today was a spectacular day with blue sharks. Blue sharks were the very first species of shark that I ever photographed. I think it was 1982 when I was out in these same waters and spent an afternoon swimming with a blue shark. So I have a real fun place in my heart for these animals. They're also stunningly beautiful. They're shaped like an aircraft with these big pectoral fins that are like the wings of a glider in this long slender fuselage-like body, and their indigo backs and their discolorations is really quite exquisite.

To see one or two on recent trips was sort of the average, but today, we really hit the jackpot. We had over a dozen, I'd say maybe 15 or more. And it's a nice opportunity when the sun begins to go down to start making some dramatic pictures. So I love to work in low light where I have some control over the colors and the movement of the animals; a great opportunity for photography even though it wasn't the prime target.

And what I'm trying to do with this is bring readers into the world of the shark. When you see one, when you actually see an animal like a Mako shark underwater, you just can't believe that nature has sculpted something so perfect. Seeing a dozen or more blue sharks here today was a hopeful thing for me. I know that their numbers have been decimated throughout the Atlantic Ocean, and this is somewhat of an anomaly. But it does give me hope.

I believe we're at a moment where the traction is occurring; we're making some momentum, and if this continues—if we all keep beating that drum—I think the future could be bright. Thank you very much.

(audience applause)