( intro music )
Most people, when you say Arabia, they think
camels, terrorism,
pirates?
Oil and gas.
They don't think coral reefs.
Or sharks.
So, I proposed a story to
to kind of change that.
You know, 'cause Arabia is home to some of the most
incredible marine ecosystems on our planet.
You know, fortunately the story was approved
and off I went.
And at the same time as the Arab Spring was going on.
So, my timing on these stories is not ideal.
But, nonetheless, you know, the Arabian Peninsula
and we covered parts of the African coast as well
the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden,
the Arabian Sea and then the Persian Gulf.
We began in the Gulf of Aden on the Somali-Djibouti border.
Sandwiched between pirates and
the Western Naval forces hunting the pirates
there is an aggregation of whale sharks.
Which nobody knows about and every year
these young, juvenile whale sharks
aggregate to feed.
Whale sharks have finger prints, just like us.
And you can identify them
by looking at the spot pattern on them.
And each whale shark is completely unique
with the spot pattern.
So, after a week or two, I think there was almost more than
a 100 different whale sharks feeding in that larger area.
The biggest danger for a photographer here
is becoming a whale shark's sandwich.
And then you get this sort of
you know, these guys actually suck the water in.
It's an incredible stationary feeding-gulping behavior.
I also spent a lot of time with the local Somali Afari fishermen.
'Cause I wanted to document their
relationship with the ocean.
I spent many nights out at sea with them
and then one night after midnight, they go
"Hey, you know, we sometimes have
lots of whale sharks around our boat at night."
And I go, "Whale sharks don't feed at night."
They go, "Yes, they do."
These guys have these sort of lights on their boats
and with those lights they attract small plankton
which attracts bait fish.
And they catch these bait fish with nets.
And then they use the bait to catch
on a hook to catch larger fish.
And the whale sharks love the free meal of plankton.
And they rub up against the boats and I'm going
"I have to take this picture."
No one had actually documented this before.
So, I go in the water and I'm using my flashes
and they ruin the complete night time ambience.
And the whale sharks don't like it.
And then I shoot without them
but the lights on these boats are just way, way too dim.
You know, luckily, I come prepared.
And you know, at night, you know, we park the big boat
next to the small fishing boats and we turn on the light.
And the light attracts little plankton
which attracts big plankton
which attracts little fish, which attracts bigger fish.
And then after an hour or two it attracted
the world's biggest fish.
It's kind of weird because it's hard to, you know
get a perspective of size with whale sharks.
But these are actually juveniles.
This is an aggregation of sub-adults.
Now at first I was disappointed.
"Oh, they are just small whale sharks
just a hundred of them. That sucks.
I wish they were bigger."
( audience laughter )
When I was taking the images,
having them small actually made all the difference.
Because you know, you're under water,
all you have is this very thin cone of light
and you're in the dark and all you can see is
these whale sharks moving in and out of the light
like ships, you know, looming in and out of the fog.
And then you get pictures like
this.
You know, just kinda just coming out of the gloom.
But I really wanted a picture of the whale shark
more interacting with the light.
I did this for day after day and at the end I got
this frame.
( audience captivated )
You know, the whale shark was vertically suction feeding
for about half an hour in that position.
So, this was, you know, anybody could have taken that picture
because he stood there for that long.
( audience laughter )
Not much to point and shoot, not much skill to bear.
But with a larger whale shark
I would have gotten a fin or half a head.
So, it's only 'cause these guys are juveniles.
That is the only reason I was able to get this picture.
You know, from the Gulf of Aden, Saudi Arabia.
You know, my interest was mainly up on the
Iraq-Iran-Kuwait border. My mother despairs.
Every time she finds out where my next assignment is.
And, of course, armed guards wherever I went, you know.
And, this is a world of mud.
Mud, mud and more mud.
And we had to use a hovercraft.
Star Wars,
In a hovercraft, it was just like the crazy...
And why did I go there?
Well, I wanted to photograph the animal that made these.
Now these are very, very tiny mud walls.
But, in a desert environment like this, they are life savers.
Because basically they retain water.
And the animal that made them
are mud skippers.
( audience gasps )
Not your normal garden variety mudskipper.
Arabian mudskippers.
That big and this thick.
And they do these incredible courtship displays.
They leap as high as they can
whichever male leaps the highest gets the female, I think.
They also have these cool fighting displays.
( audience surprised )
They puff each other up and they raise the dorsal
and then they just stare at each other and they do all these sort of...
You know for these pictures, you lie in the mud for an hour
before these fish come out of the hole.
So, you are stationary for days to get
you know, these little glimpses.
But, yeah, I love these guys.
Like, "Oy!" You can hear him screaming right?
"That's my female mudskipper, or whatever."
( audience laughter )
Anyway, let's move on.
You know, I moved on to turtles on the Arabian Sea.
And as I was shooting all this great bio-diversity
I'm going, "Hang on, I'm not seeing any sharks."
After the whale sharks, I hadn't seen a single other shark.
I'm like, what's going on here.
And I figured it out when I was you know, in Oman,
photographing seasonal kelp forest communities
at Salalah.
And one evening I was in this little place called Mirbat.
It's this place that kind of time forgot.
It's this sort of old school Arab fishing village.
And there's this wall of people at the port.
And I kind of, you know gently elbow my way through, you know.
And as the crowd parts
I see this.
( audience sighing )
This is about 93 silky sharks.
This is one boat's load.
And every hour another boat arrives
and offloads exactly the same number of sharks.
So, the one night I was there
I think there must've been a 1,000 silky sharks.
And then they auction everything off.
And at the end of the auction
all the sharks are loaded into these freezer trucks.
And they're taken away.
And I wanted to know where
so I started following these trucks.
I ended up in these ice-houses.
Now these trucks are not freezer trucks.
They are insulated but they are badly insulated.
So, every, you know, few hundred kilometres
they have to restock with ice.
And that's where they kind of, you know
barter the sharks and resell them.
And there I found out, and an actual fact
all these sharks are going to Dubai. So...
I went to Dubai.
And there I saw, you know
dozens of Omani trucks offloading
large Arabian Sea sharks.
And you know, fins are only cut off there.
And the meat goes to Bangladesh, goes to Pakistan,
it goes to Sri Lanka for consumption.
It's the cheapest sort of meat protein there is.
And the fins are exported to Asia
for royal sums and princely sums.
And it appears that, over the last couple of years
Dubai has become the fourth largest exporter
of shark fins to Hong Kong in the world.
And that is, you know, had really sort of bypassed
most of the scientific literature that I had reviewed.
So, this was a massive surprise to actually be able to
document this trade route across the great Arabian Desert.
And, you know, went to Hong Kong afterwards
and I tried to track these fins all the way to Hong Kong.
There's a street in Hong Kong
that basically is dedicated only to shark fin and dried seafood.
I think it was 140 different shops, you know, Shark Fin City.
And that's where I found my sharks, dried in shops.
You know the article was published 2012.
A lot of conservation issues were addressed in it and
you know, it kind of really began
a conversation in the Middle East as well about
how to better manage shark fisheries.