While many of us are terrified of the idea of man-eating sharks, what we should really be worried about is man fishing sharks into extinction, argue conservationists. Ryan Biller sinks his teeth into the issue on a shark-diving excursion in the Bahamas.
The chummed water was alive with dorsal fins. I watched, wide-eyed, as they circled the boat, heart hammering away in my chest. The Jaws theme song was playing in my head. And Jim Abernethy, a zealous conservationist and a pioneer of cageless shark diving, told me to stop wasting time and just jump in.
I muttered some expletive-laced gibberish to myself as I, clad in scuba gear, lumbered to the edge.
“Okay, go!” he yelled again.
And I did.
The frenzied shiver of lemon sharks mostly ignored me, thank God. As they continued swimming, I began my descent towards the ocean floor. Below, in the depths, a much larger fish was waiting for me—the notorious tiger shark.
“I didn’t have a normal childhood,” Jim told me. Homeschooled and raised on the shores of Florida, he was more fish than human for most of his youth. His free time was spent snorkeling—until he learned to scuba dive at the age of nine. That deep connection to the water, he believes, laid the foundation for his inner-conservationist.
“It’s hard for me to think about anything other than conservation,” he said. But diving so young also meant coming face-to-face with the reality of an imperiled ocean. Pair an early love for the underwater world with the urgent alarm bells of its decline, and you get the Jim Abernethy of today: A fiercely outspoken conservationist, sometimes controversial eco-tourism operator, author, and award-winning photographer and cinematographer.
“The misconception that sharks are mindless, man-eating monsters is a farce. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
- Jim Abernethy
Second only to the great white, tiger sharks—with their fearsome size, serrated teeth, and voracious appetite—are broadly considered to be among the most deadly predators in the ocean.
But Jim—in his shark-themed swim trunks and on his shark-themed boat, the Shearwater—had casually assured me that diving with these enormous, meat-eating fish, with no protection other than a small PVC pipe, was in no way dangerous.
In fact, he even considered it safe.
Jim likes to point out that statistics are on his side of the argument. Dogs, he reminded me, kill more people in the United States every year than sharks. Even vending machines are more lethal.
“What about being bitten?” I asked. Jim clucked his tongue, disappointed. He then said that New Yorkers bite more people a year than sharks do. “The misconception that sharks are mindless, man-eating monsters is a farce. Nothing could be further from the truth,” he told me onboard. “Statistically, being with sharks every single day like I am is actually one of the safest things you can do on the planet.”
Jim was right. Though I didn’t realize this until I was on the ocean floor, face-to-face with a 15-foot female tiger shark, who it seems, was about to challenge all my preconceived notions of sharks as the mindless man-eating monsters they’re so often portrayed as.
She glided right past me. With her enormous eyeball, she gave me a curious sidelong glance, but otherwise didn’t seem too interested. Jim, meanwhile, was busy scratching lemon sharks’ snouts as though they were golden retrievers. When a tiger passed, he’d reach out his finger and pet their soft, white bellies.
This kind of interaction is partly why Jim is seen as controversial in some circles. He’s adamant that sharks are sentient, that they feel affection, but also that interacting with them is part of his conservation style to build trust. Once they’re comfortable with him, he’s able to pull nets, fishing hooks, and other items off of their bodies. It should also be emphasized that on these dive trips, divers do not touch the sharks and have to keep their distance.
Cageless diving is considered somewhat controversial wherever it happens. Of course, that doesn’t mean that shark diving without a cage can’t lead to accidents or pose danger, but equally, Jim’s interactive approach is seen as necessary in some conservation circles, and not in others. I myself have explored controversial conservation efforts elsewhere, for example, in the Congo, where a group of ecologists have been trying to vaccinate wild gorillas against diseases like Ebola. While it may be necessary to save the species, it’s regarded as extremely controversial within the field of conservation in Africa.
Magic. That may be the most apt description of this otherworldly, underwater place. There, in the depths below the Shearwater, a tornado of sharks—lemons, nurses and tigers—churned in the water against a backdrop of red, yellow and purple coral.
Jim found this spot years ago and called it Tiger Beach, a place some 20 miles off the coast of Grand Bahama’s West End, the oldest and most westerly town on the island. Because it’s shallow—no more than 10 meters deep—and because Bahamian water is warm, glassy, and clear as gin, Tiger Beach, now a PADI-classified dive site, is the idyllic spot to encounter these notorious marine predators.
As I ogled this underwater Garden of Eden, Jim busied himself by trying to remove fishing hooks from the sharks’ jaws. When our tanks were just about out of oxygen, we surfaced. Triumphantly, Jim dangled one of the successfully removed hooks.
“See? We had no reason to be scared of them,” he said. “But they certainly have reason to be scared of us.”
I was kneeling on the ocean floor when a tiger swam right toward me. She didn’t clamp down on my abdomen with her wide mouth and razor sharp teeth. She didn’t shred me to bloody pieces. Instead, she gracefully swam by.
On average, sharks kill 10 people annually. We humans, on the other hand, kill a little upwards of 100 million sharks each year. Overfishing is by far and away the biggest reason, according to The Shark Trust, as a result of bycatch, following encounters with fishing equipment and gear, and the number of large-scale industrial fisheries. They’re also deliberately killed for their meat and fins, but also to make beauty products, supplements and leather goods.
And the reason people ought to be concerned is simple: Sharks act as a balancing force in the world’s marine ecosystems, on which we rely heavily. Oceans feed a sizable chunk of the world’s population, play a major role in regulating our climate, and even generate the majority of Earth’s oxygen. According to the WWF, “More than three billion people in the world rely on wild-caught and farmed seafood as a significant source of animal protein.”
Tiani Dun, a marine biologist, scuba instructor and wildlife photographer, spends a lot of time in the water with sharks. She, like Jim, doesn’t fear sharks, but is worried about an ocean without them. “We’re often scared of what we don’t understand,” Dun told me. “Sharks get a bad rep because of their physical features, mainstream media and Hollywood movies.”
“Being at the top of the food chain means that these sharks are vital in maintaining the balance of our ecosystems,” she says. “Shark nets, overfishing and culling programs threaten the delicate balance of our underwater food chains, which can have cascading effects on the smaller animals. Eventually, this affects us and our food supply, too.”
Without sharks, scientists warn that the ocean would begin to unravel. As apex predators, sharks maintain balance by keeping smaller fish and marine life in check, preventing any one species from dominating. Take them out of the equation, however, and populations of rays and smaller fish would explode, decimating vital habitats like coral reefs and seagrass beds.
The ripple effect? A collapse of marine ecosystems that we on land depend on for food, carbon regulation, and climate control. Jim and Dun will both tell you: It’s not just about saving sharks—it’s about saving the ocean and, ultimately, ourselves.
The villainous role sharks have played in popular culture was thoroughly scrubbed from my mind at Tiger Beach. I was kneeling on the ocean floor when a tiger swam right toward me. She didn’t clamp down on my abdomen with her wide mouth and razor sharp teeth. She didn’t shred me to bloody pieces. Instead, she swam gracefully by.
And, for the first time, I understood why Jim feels so strongly about this cause: “I don’t think there are words capable of describing the feeling you get when you’re in the water with these beautiful, majestic creatures,” he said.
After several days on the Shearwater, spent mostly diving with the tigers of Tiger Beach, I felt somewhat foolish. In fact, I felt I’d been duped. Of course, tiger sharks are still a powerful predator that mustn’t be trifled with. But the monstrous, bloodthirsty killers they were depicted as in film and TV? Well, that wasn’t even remotely the case.
“People need to see what sharks actually are, not what they’re usually portrayed as,” Jim said. “Nobody comes out of a shark dive thinking that was a near-death experience. If everyone could do just one shark dive in their lives, then we would have already saved sharks.”
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Ryan Biller is an independent journalist who primarily covers climate issues, global conflict, and US and Middle Eastern politics. He's written about a wide range of topics, from Congo's effort to vaccinate wild gorillas against Ebola to water-driven war in South Sudan, to military occupation in Palestine and the wildlife black market in the Amazon rainforest. Most recently, Ryan was in Syria documenting civilian life after the Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham rebel group overthrew President Bashar al-Assad after his family's 50-year rule.
