For as long as I can remember,
I've been drawn to sharks.
They're the most amazing and mysterious animal on Earth.
I thought if I studied them, I could learn about life.
About balance in the ocean and how to survive on Earth.
That the one animal that we fear the most
is the one we can't live without.
Predator of the sea,
terror of all men who enter the ocean,
the very symbol of lurking danger:
That is the shark.
What is he really?
We know little, except the shark was here
before the continents took their present form,
before the dinosaur lived, and he is still here,
essentially unchanged.
One of the oldest living things on Earth.
How has the shark survived,
when almost all that lived in the beginnings
has either perished or changed?
Man must know all there is to know about this enemy.
Whether the shark is really an enemy.
If he is,
how to protect against him.
If he isn't,
how to live with him.
- You're told your whole life, since you're a kid,
sharks are dangerous.
You're warned about venturing too far into the ocean,
but then finally you're underwater,
and you see the thing you were taught
your whole life to fear, and it's perfect,
and it doesn't want to hurt you,
and it's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen,
and your whole world changes.
Ever since I was little, I've loved the ocean.
Like many kids, I tried fishing,
but realized I was much happier swimming with fish than catching them.
Sharks were my favourite animals on Earth,
but all I'd heard about
was how dangerous they were.
I hated being afraid and realized the only way
to find out the truth about sharks was to meet one for myself.
I became an underwater photographer
and a biologist,
and from that point on, I followed sharks.
So little is known about what they really are
and how important they are to life on Earth.
Two-thirds of the world's surface is water,
and over 80º/º of life on Earth
lives in the ocean.
I learned to dive so I could get close to sharks,
but photographing sharks was harder than I thought.
They're so afraid of us.
Sharks can see us with more than their eyes.
They can sense our energy,
and they viewed me as a threat.
Sharks have been here for more than 400 million years,
150 million years before the dinosaurs,
when life had just begun on land.
There was little oxygen in the atmosphere,
and only two continents.
Sharks were shaping this world.
Life on Earth evolved from the sea.
The first animals were tiny, single-celled organisms
that gave rise to algae, coral,
and tiny planktonic animals.
More invertebrates followed, including squids and mollusks.
One of the first vertebrates with jaws,
and the only large animal that's remained unchanged
for 400 million years,
is the shark.
New animals to evolve in the ocean have been shaped by their predators,
the sharks,
giving rise to schooling behaviour,
camouflage, speed, size and communication.
Sharks control the populations below them,
eliminating species that were easy prey
and creating new ones.
Even though sharks have very few young
and take up to 25 years to reach sexual maturity,
they've managed to survive through five major extinctions
that wiped most life from the planet.
They're architects of our world.
Most of what people know about sharks
they've heard from the media.
The more time I spent with sharks,
the more I realized that they're nothing like what we're told.
They are perfect predators
that hold the underwater world in balance,
the lions and tigers of the seas.
I spent so much time underwater
so I could gain their trust
and get close enough to film them.
Everything moved together,
lived together,
and died with a purpose.
This shark and his relatives
are long-established enemies of man.
He is a wicked, unpredictable opponent.
If sharks are in the area,
you can repel them with sounds,
by striking the surface of the water
with your cupped hand.
Or you can shout underwater.
Among the visual methods of preventing attacks
are directing a stream of bubbles
from your life preserver in his direction.
Tearing up paper into small pieces
and scattering them
all around the raft.
If a shark threatens to attack you or damage the raft,
do not try to shoot or knife him.
Chances are you would only slightly injure and infuriate him.
Remember,
his front end is practically all mouth.
Once in your raft,
stay there and remain quiet.
Remember that as a human being,
you are smarter than a shark, if you use your head.
- Elephants kill more people each year than sharks do,
so there's some deep-seated psychological revulsion
about a cold-eyed monster coming out of the deep
and picking you to pieces, but that is the myth, not the reality.
- It's weird that white sharks have such a bad reputation,
because they really hardly bite.
If we go into the statistics, they are not the ones
who bite the most. Definitely not.
And it's very hard, actually, to approach a white shark.
It's much easier to repel him than to actually lure him in,
bring him in, and then trying to interact.
So I think the main reason why people are still afraid
of a white shark is based on the movie Jaws,
and the misconception is still floating around.
And I think a big part of the media still tries
to present the white shark as Jaws.
- Three people were hurt Saturday in another shark attack.
- Time magazine is calling it the "Summer of the Shark. "
- And of course the question being asked by some is:
When will it be safe to return to the water?
- We love to have a monster, we love to hate. So...
And it's not good television
if, you know, this monster that we presented all these years
actually is a very shy, hesitant animal
that has a hard time, like any other animal as well.
So we like to have the monster,
and that's why it's still portrayed this way.
I was on an assignment,
photographing the Galapagos Islands,
600 miles from Ecuador,
in the middle of the Pacific,
in total isolation
from the rest of the world.
It's a world heritage site,
full of species found nowhere else on Earth.
This is where Charles Darwin
developed his theory of evolution.
What I believe is the whole planet was like this.
I think animals were amazingly abundant;
I think whales were amazingly abundant,
fish were amazingly abundant; turtles, birds, everything,
before man got in there
and really hacked the whole thing to pieces.
- I travelled 160 miles from the centre of the Galapagos
to Darwin and Wolf,
two remote undersea volcanoes
that barely broke the surface.
One of the few places on Earth
where hammerhead sharks congregate in schools.
We're just getting ready to go in for a dive
where there's supposed to be congregating hammerhead sharks.
The undersea currents come up,
bringing nutrient-rich water to the surface,
which causes a ton of tiny plankton feeders to school here,
and the hammerhead sharks come up as well,
and they circle in the current
and go back down at night to feed on squid.
So we're gonna go down to maybe 130 feet
and see if we can find some schooling hammerhead sharks,
possibly a silky shark or two.
The Galapagos hosts
one of the largest marine reserves on Earth,
where sharks are cherished and protected.
Hammerheads are some of the most misunderstood species.
They are incredibly shy animals.
Hammerheads, like all sharks,
have two more senses than people.
They have lateral lines running along the sides of their bodies,
that can detect movement in the water.
Their heads are a giant sensory system
that detects electro-magnetic fields,
enabling them to find food that's hidden from view
and to feel my heartbeat.
They can feel me
and know if I'm excited or scared.
They're so afraid of us,
that if I'm not calm,
keeping my heart rate low,
they won't come anywhere near me.
Hammerheads use the Earth's magnetic field
to follow undersea ridges like road maps,
navigating thousands of miles through the oceans.
Sharks are normally solitary,
but hammerheads come together
only at a few undersea pinnacles
to socialize and mate.
The schools are made up of mostly females,
with the largest vying for position in the centre,
where the males come to look for mates.
Dominant females, which can be 12 feet long,
control their position in the school
using aggressive displays,
pushing subordinate females to the fringes.
The schools break up at night,
when they descend into deeper water to feed.
We know so little about sharks
that a new species of hammerhead
was just found in the Atlantic Ocean in 2006.
The shape of their head
makes them one of the most manoeuvrable and feared sharks.
But the truth is,
there's no record of a hammerhead shark
ever killing anyone.
When we surfaced from the dive,
we found two fishing boats
trailing 60 miles of long lines.
A line with 16,000 baited hooks
that would stretch from Earth to outer space.
The boats fled,
because long-line fishing is illegal in the Galapagos,
and we were left with the lines.
I hopped in the water as soon as I could
and brought my cameras in and tried to film,
whatever I could find on the long lines,
and we swam for probably two or three kilometres,
pulling ourselves along the lines,
and unclipping every baited hook we could find.
The first fish I found was a seven-foot-long sailfish,
and it was dead.
It suffocated because it wrapped itself up in the long line.
So it couldn't keep swimming to keep breathing.
Farther along the line, I found a dorado.
It was still alive.
It was swimming in a circle,
the largest it could
considering the long line attached to it.
I slowly pulled myself close so I wouldn't scare it,
and I cut it loose.
Then I found the sharks.
For 60 miles,
sharks were dying on those lines.
They struggle so much
that they entangle themselves and suffocate.
There were only a few left alive,
and I cut them loose.
In total,
we found 160 sharks,
five sailfish,
four dorado and a tuna.
It felt like part of my family was dying.
Something shifted that day,
and I changed.
This is just a line,
a long line with baited hooks on it,
but many, many animals -
most animals swimming around in the surface waters
are interested in those baited hooks,
so take the hooks and subsequently get caught.
And they may or may not be what the fisherman are looking for,
and things like leatherback turtles or some marine mammals
can simply get entangled in that line of gear.
There are more selective ways of fishing,
there's a lot of waste that goes on out there.
And I think one of the big reasons
it continues to go on, is because we don't see it.
- We know that predators are fundamental in controlling
the structure and the functioning of the ecosystems.
So basically if you cut off the head of the ecosystem,
if you wish, the top species,
the top carnivores that control a lot of the processes
lower down in the food web,
you're removing a really important controlling agent,
and that could cause upheaval in the lower tropic levels
like the plants
and the zooplankton.
The ocean is basically the life-support system
of the planet.
To change that life-support system
in any major way is a risky thing.
We know from the past that when oceans have changed
that life on Earth has changed.
- I needed to know why people were killing sharks,
and what I could do to stop it.
So I left my job as a photographer
and set out to make a film about them,
but they were gone.
In places where I'd always found hundreds of sharks,
I only found a few.
Shark populations have been decimated all over the world
and the last sharks were being hunted down
in the few remaining sanctuaries.
Nobody noticed.
Everyone wanted to save pandas, elephants and bears,
and the world was afraid of sharks.
- I read this story about this boy who was 13, in Japan,
and got swallowed whole. It didn't even bite him,
it just swallowed him. Yeah?
- And they cut out and they found his body.
And it wasn't even bit, and that's scary.
So if you're not seeing sharks here,
why are you so afraid of the water?
Because they'll still bite you
and I... I panic, I always panic.
I'm such a wimp.
Well, what are your chances of being bitten by a shark?
They must be so small. - No, not really.
- No, it's small. I've never seen a shark here in my life.
- I've never heard of anywhere else
getting bit by sharks as much as here.
That's true.
- Not even in Daytona. Here is like the worst.
- Sharks rarely bite human beings, but never because they're hungry,
and say, "Ah, look, there's something juicy over there. "
They try to figure out what we are.
They don't know what we are, so they explore us.
On the very rare occasions they come that close,
they actually can just do an exploratory bite
and that's why the majority of all bites are very, very superficial.
You hardly have really serious bites.
So that tells us something, 60 to 100 bites every year
out of these millions and millions of encounters
that we have with these animals.
So just based on that, sharks cannot be dangerous.
People think: Well, they're dumb,
they're stupid. That's not true.
Their intelligence is quite amazing.
They have short-term memories, long-term memories,
they can learn by observation.
So nothing is stupid or primitive in these animals.
So all the ideas, well, they just follow a blood trail,
they just bite everything that is shiny.
Well, pretty quick you realize, hey, that is all wrong.
- In just one year, crocodiles around the world
wiped out as many people as sharks have killed
over the past 100.
The crocodile is protected.
No?
The sharks not?
Yeah?
So I should not...
Like, it's not a good idea to go swimming with sharks?
- They're the scourge of the ocean and everyone should go and catch one.
All the greens can come around and say that these things,
"Let 'em live, let' em live. " Okay? We can live on land too,
but we don't go out there and bite the bums off them, do we?
But they come in here and get us.
How bad is the shark as a predator?
You make it sound as though it really is a direct threat
to human beings who dare swim in the water.
- Well, you try swimming, with a shark like that
in 8 feet of water and you'll find out,
because we got no hope, if they decide to eat us.
But don't you think that one effect of you going out
and capturing sharks and talking this way
is that you bring about an hysteria in people,
they're going to panic?
No, I've saved a lot of lives.
If it wasn't for me and what I've done in the last 25 years,
there'd be a lot more people killed.
- The fact is, sharks do not eat people.
If they did, I would've been eaten a long time ago.
Most sharks have teeth which are ineffective cutting tools,
and can't effectively remove flesh
from something larger than their mouths.
One hundred needles in your leg
would have a tough time removing a chunk of flesh.
Most sharks lack the equipment they'd need
to go after large animals like us, and they know that.
They've evolved to eat certain prey items,
and most sharks are picky eaters.
They won't bother wasting energy
going after something they know they can't eat efficiently.
When a shark mistake does happen,
the person inevitably ends up back on shore.
In most shark attacks,
flesh is never removed.
Even in the odd case where someone dies,
it's usually because of blood loss,
not because the shark ate the person.
A twelve-foot or even a six-foot fish
could do anything it wanted to a human,
and they don't.
It's a huge testament to sharks' sensory systems
how few people are attacked each year.
You wouldn't go for a run next to a pride of lions,
but we do this with sharks all the time.
There are millions of people entering the water every year
in areas where sharks hunt,
and very few people are bitten.
If they wanted to eat us, they would.
The mythology about sharks has traditionally been,
uh, they're kind of the embodiment of evil
and they have sharp teeth and they kill people.
But the fact is, people used to think of whales that way,
whales used to be dangerous Leviathans.
I mean, just read Moby Dick, you know.
Moby Dick was portrayed by Captain Ahab
as being a monster of the deep.
You know, a man hunter.
But everything in the environment,
everything that exists, eats something else.
We tend to be afraid of spiders and snakes,
but, you know, we love puppy dogs and seals.
Once people see whales or sharks in a different light,
they can change their mind.
These are beautiful creatures,
absolutely beautiful creatures
that have every right in the world to live on this planet.
- I went to all the major conservation organizations
and there was virtually no one doing anything to save sharks.
- Are you really concerned or you just wanna call names?
- Oh, / am very concerned, extremely concerned.
- Well, then, let's see some action instead of all of this whining.
Then I met up with Paul Watson.
What is my type, sir?
- The renegade of the conservation movement.
He sunk a whole Norwegian whaling fleet
and ended pirate whaling in the North Atlantic
when no one else could.
Paul was one of the original activists in Greenpeace
and he's been at war against poaching for 30 years.
- I set up the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in 1977
as an organization to intervene directly
to uphold international conservation laws, regulations and treaties,
so it's not a protest organization,
but an organization to really fill a vacuum,
because there really is no enforcement agencies anywhere in the world
to uphold these international laws and treaties.
They're trying to sink the ship;
they are trying to sink the ship.
- So part of the role of the activist, like Paul Watson, is:
"Don't let them get away with it,
or make 'em do it in the light of day. "
He's a hero,
someone who just does
what the politicians haven't got the guts to do.
Captain Paul Watson
leads possibly the most violent,
and radical, green movement in the world.
- Well, if you kill anybody, I'm holding you personally responsible.
You have no authority over us, we're in international waters. Over.
Move aside, get 'em!
Launched from the gunboat, police attack Sea Shepherd
with tear gas bullets and tear gas canisters.
It's the first time in history that an unarmed conservation vessel
has been fired at.
- No, really what we're here to do is to, you know,
to rock the boat, to make noise; to make people think.
That's really the main objective
of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
Why aren't you people doing anything?
The only violence that's being committed
is the illegal slaughter of whales,
and that is violent and that is the crime. Over.
- Paul and Sea Shepherd were launching a campaign
against poaching in two of the world's last sanctuaries for sharks:
The Galapagos, Ecuador,
and in Cocos, Costa Rica.
Cocos is a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific,
360 miles from Costa Rica.
It's a national park and a world heritage site
with the greatest concentration of sharks in the world.
But Costa Rica has no money to protect it,
and poachers raid the waters every day.
No, it's been cut in the head!
The sharks were being wiped out.
Well, Jesus Christ, put it out of its misery.
- So the President of Costa Rica asked Sea Shepherd for help.
Why, it's illegal as well.
- Paul was my kinda guy, the only one I knew
who was doing anything to save sharks.
He asked me to join the campaign to stop the illegal fishing of sharks.
Okay.
I joined Paul in Los Angeles
aboard the Sea Shepherd ship, the Ocean Warrior,
and we started our journey south,
3,000 miles to Costa Rica.
They repaint and rename the boat on every new campaign
to avoid being recognized by the poachers.
The Ocean Warrior has been in battle against poachers
dozens of times and proudly displays its kill flags,
the flags of boats it has rammed or sunk, on the side of the ship.
It's equipped with a can opener,
a hydraulic steel blade
that extends from the side of the boat in case of battle.
We traveled south on the open ocean for 12 days straight.
2,500 miles from Los Angeles and 50 miles inside Guatemalan waters,
we found a pirate long-lining boat illegally poaching sharks.
Doesn't take much to catch illegal fishing around here,
I'll tell ya.
Jesus Christ,
they're going slower.
The Varadero was from Costa Rica and had no permit
to fish outside of Costa Rica or inside Guatemala.
Which way?
We radioed Guatemala,
who asked us to escort the boat into port for arrest.
We asked that they bring in their lines and release any sharks
that were caught,
but they weren't releasing the sharks.
They're not answering?
We were racing them to the lines;
every time they got ahead of us, they killed more sharks.
- All these boats, from many countries,
when they go fishing -
and that's actually everywhere in the world -
all they want is profit.
Once they've left port,
it's like the ocean is a free place;
you do what you want out there.
They got another shark!
Got a shark?
Tell that guy to release that shark.
Tell him that if he doesn't release those sharks,
we're gonna sink his line.
Hey, Rob, did you get a picture of that shark?
If he doesn't stop, we'll run up ahead and grab the line.
Actually hold on, I'm gonna stop right here.
Bring it up to the bow and see if you can get it on the winch.
Got their line? Grab the line.
If you can grab the line on... Where's the next one?
Get it? Goddamn, as fast as we get up to it,
they're pulling it off.
- They wouldn't stop killing sharks.
The sharks were incredibly important to them.
They were killing them for their fins.
Shark-fin soup is a symbol of wealth
and served as a sign of respect.
The soup has been around for centuries,
but only in the last two decades has it boomed in popularity.
The fin is tasteless,
adding only texture to a soup flavoured with chicken or pork broth.
It became a status symbol,
served at weddings, banquets,
and expensive dinners.
A single pound of fin is worth more than $200 US,
and the shark-fin industry
is a billion-dollar juggernaut.
Every year, an estimated 30 to 70 million sharks
are killed to support a growing worldwide trade
in their fins and other products.
But the biggest prize is the shark fin.
Half a world away, in Hong Kong and China,
shark-fin soup is a delicacy.
It sells for up to $90 a bowl.
It's a royal food;
it's the food of the emperors.
They make a soup out of the fins,
and any Chinese chef that's worth his weight
has to be able to make great shark-fin soup,
as strange as that may seem, and this is causing the demise
of the populations of sharks in the ocean.
The word was out
that fins meant money,
and sharks were being killed solely for their fins
in virtually every country with a coastline.
There's so much money in fins,
that only trafficking drugs rivals fins for profit.
- People thousands of years from now, if we manage to survive,
aren't gonna have much respect for cultures
that deprived them of the things that we now have
that diminish their world for them.
They're not gonna have any respect for those cultures at all,
just as we don't have any respect for the culture of slavery.
- For the first time in over 400 million years,
sharks were prey.
They were even killing whale sharks.
The largest fish on Earth
that eats only microscopic plankton and has no teeth.
They are the gentle giants that roam the warm waters of the world
following plankton blooms.
We know nothing about their life cycles,
where they mate,
or how long they live,
though they're thought to live as long as us.
And now the whale shark, along with their relatives,
the great white shark and the basking shark,
are endangered.
A large fin like this
can now sell for more than $10,000 in China,
and conservationists say the growing trade in shark fin
has become a serious threat not only to whale sharks,
but also to other shark species almost everywhere.
By the time it gets to Asia,
it's gonna be up to $200 US a pound for the dry shark fin.
So it goes from 80 cents here to a myriad of middlemen,
ending up at $200 US from 80 cents,
so it's a magical little process
that we've gotta figure out how it gets there.
Yeah, it's the fin, fish.
They make some kind of pills of a shark fin.
- In Asia, they think because sharks don't get sick
as easily as other animals do
that sharks have some magical power to heal,
and it's all false information
because sharks get cancer, sharks get problems.
- He doesn't want us to film. - Not allowed to film?
He tells us to leave.
Uh, we just went in restaurant Lun Fung and got kicked out.
They do serve shark fin, you can get it in a takeout form.
You can even go to pharmacies to buy shark fin in pill form,
because of its powers to make you strong.
That shows you the misconceptions everyone has about sharks,
that they think because sharks are resilient to some parasites,
and they don't get sick as often as people do,
that if you eat sharks that power's gonna transfer to you.
- Some companies have capitalized on the sharks' resilience to disease,
marketing shark cartilage as a cancer or arthritis treatment.
But there's no scientific backing to this at all.
It's actually been proven
to do nothing to cure disease,
and now sharks are so contaminated with mercury and other pollutants
we've put in the ocean
that eating shark products
is more likely to cause disease than cure it.
The Varadero continued finning sharks
and throwing the bodies overboard.
We tried to talk with them:
They are illegally fishing and they have to come with us.
- It was easy to see their motivation - money, big money -
but they were poaching sharks illegally.
On instructions from the authorities in Guatemala,
we ordered them to stop killing sharks
and follow us into port. Yeah, ask him.
He's got to make a decision,
whether we're gonna tow him or he's going in under his own power.
- They're dragging a shark! - But they refused and took off.
Now they decided to run from us.
They know that if we take them there,
they're gonna lose their boat there, that's pretty sure.
So we're gonna have to go back and force them back.
- We chased them with water cannons,
in hopes of flooding or stalling their engines.
So we can arrest them?
We gonna hit 'em?
Unless people are prepared
to devote their lives to solving these problems,
nothing's really going to change.
But you don't need everybody.
You just simply need a small percentage.
Five, seven percent is starting to make a big impact.
Okay, let's get ready. This is gonna be close.
- The Varadero finally agreed to follow us into port,
where we could deliver them to the authorities.
About three hours from port, we got word
that Guatemala had sent a gunboat out to come and arrest us.
The Varadero had pulled some strings.
With so much money in the fin industry,
and much of it on the black market,
we knew something had gone terribly wrong.
Lives have been lost over shark fins
and we had no interest in battling a Guatemalan gunboat.
So we ditched the Varadero,
and continued south to Costa Rica.
- The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization,
based in Rome, is really the top UN body,
the top international body that deals with fisheries;
they don't have any rule-making authority
over the international waters.
Guess what? No one does.
So until the countries of the world come together
to create some kind of body that can actually make rules
over the catch limits
and conservation for the deep seas,
they're not going to be regulated in any effective way.
It's just basically a hunting-and-gathering operation,
and, in fact, a pure exploitive operation,
with people just taking and not giving anything back.
- Imagine if you went into the forest and laid down some kind of trap line
that caught, you know, moose, deer, skunks, porcupines,
squirrels, dogs,
you know, caught all these species -
when really what you were only after was one or two,
or perhaps three or four, but you had all these other species
that were caught, or dying or dead.
I mean, clearly it wouldn't last a day.
I mean, you know,
nobody could put a trap line down for 30 miles
and throw away half the animals he or she killed or caught.
Nobody would tolerate it for a minute,
but it's going on out there on a massive scale every day.
Oh
Can't anybody see
we've got a war to fight
Never found our way
Regardless of what they say
How can it feel this wrong
From this moment
How can it feel this wrong
How can it feel
This wrong
From this moment
How can it feel
This wrong
- When we got to Costa Rica, we were all over the news.
The crew of the Varadero, the illegal shark-fishing boat,
claimed that we tried to kill them.
Okay.
I don't know what this is, either.
- You know... you know what this? - I don't know what it is.
- Yeah, uh... - It's the order.
It's the order of the judge,
it's the official order to come on board
and to make...
- We were charged with seven counts of attempted murder.
- Crowded in here. - We do what we normally do,
and the tapes went to Canada for processing.
- They were after Paul because he's the captain of the boat,
and me because I filmed it
and they wanted my footage.
Do you have any form to get your original information
since the beginning of this situation?
Do I have any way to get that?
- Yeah. - No.
- Someone else got it? - Someone else has it.
Okay...
Arrest?
Did you ask them?
Can I ask them? Yeah, probably.
What you have to do,
you have to call them by phone or what?
- Uh, yeah. - Could you call them, right now?
- Right now? - Yeah.
It's important to get that information.
It's better...
They set the fishing boat free...
and we were being arrested
And, uh, we have all of the law, in all of Costa Rica here,
talking to us.
They want to see...
- They're totally blank, there's no pictures on them yet.
- You sure they're not in here? - Yeah.
Not everyone's gonna fit;
there's about this much room in the whole room.
It didn't make any sense why they were arresting us
and ignoring the fishing boat.
We were invited here by the President of the country
to protect Cocos from illegal fishing.
What do you think they're gonna do?
I have no idea;
I don't think they know what they're doing.
What kind of weapons do you have on the boat?
A shotgun.
Can we see them?
Oh, yeah, sure.
There's just one.
Yeah, but there's one that's...
- It wasn't an issue between two boats anymore.
They were going to stop us from protecting sharks.
The authorities left us under house arrest,
but we had to fight the charges in court.
Questions I need to know is, one:
What are the chances of them seizing the ship,
and what are the chances of them arresting me, today?
- We were summoned to the courthouse,
where we met with Milton, our lawyer,
to figure out our options and try and find a way out of this.
- How come everybody's ignoring that the Varadero,
one: Violated Guatemalan law, Costa Rican law,
and international law, and we have the evidence on that.
They cannot take sharks for fins alone,
they cannot fish in Guatemalan waters,
they cannot fish outside of Costa Rica
without a permit. That's illegal!
Everybody's ignoring that.
Paul's been in this situation before,
and he knows we're in big trouble if we don't fight back.
- Well, the fact is, if we were in any Central American country
other than Costa Rica, we wouldn't even try this.
One other thing: If they have a trial, is it in Puntarenas;
and if they have a trial, is it a jury or a judge?
- Three judges. - Three judges?
- Yes - Is it in Puntarenas?
Oh, geez, you don't have a chance there.
But I find it amazing that the Costa Rican judicial system
is coming at us so viciously
when what they're defending is an illegal fishing operation.
And, of course, when you see
the number of long-liners that are operating,
including Taiwanese long-liners operating in Costa Rica;
and the judicial system in Puntarenas,
they are certainly not interested in anything to do with illegal fishing,
but they seem to be very determined to stop anybody
who's going to interfere with illegal fishing.
Then I met William,
a conservationist who believed that the authorities
were being paid out by the Taiwanese Mafia,
who ran the shark-fishing business in Costa Rica.
Finning sharks is illegal in Costa Rica,
but huge shipments of Costa Rican fins
were turning up all over Asia
and no one knew how.
William believed that the Taiwanese
had private docks
where no one would know if they were finning sharks.
I needed to know if William was right,
if they were really finning sharks.
So we broke house arrest and went undercover into town.
In all our time filming sharks, we've never been so scared.
There was a whole street of shark-fishing operations
along a secluded bay,
all with private docks.
These plants process, pack and distribute shark fins
coming mostly from Costa Rica and Ecuador.
They dry the fins on the roof,
behind huge cement walls, so no one can see them.
Virtually all of the fins are shipped to Asia,
making it out of Costa Rica
without being noticed.
This operation had fins from nearly a dozen different species of sharks.
There were millions of dollars in fins and dozens of illegal operations
that the authorities must have known about,
all controlled by big business in Asia.
The fins were bringing Costa Rica millions of dollars
and we were trying to stop it.
Now I knew why we were being arrested
and I knew we were in serious trouble.
I couldn't believe how big the shark-fin trade was,
especially in a country that depends on ecotourism.
At another fin operation, I found a trailer
sitting next to the building and climbed on top
to film the fins in broad daylight.
There were at least 10,000 fins
drying on the roof, and the employees ran out,
trying to push the fins out of sight of my camera.
Then they stormed out of the building and headed straight for us,
so we jumped into William's car and took off.
The corruption was real;
we'd uncovered a huge illegal-fin industry in Costa Rica
that the authorities ignored.
Taiwan donated millions of dollars
to Puntarenas - building major highways,
bridges and buildings - and they didn't want any interference.
One hundred million sharks are killed each year
to support a billion-dollar shark-fin industry
that Costa Rica was profiting from.
I knew we were in serious trouble.
We'd be lucky to get out of Costa Rica.
William told me not to go back into town;
the shark-fin Mafia would be looking for me.
Oh Sinnerman where you gonna run to
Sinnerman where you gonna run to
All along dem day
well / run to the rock
Please hide me / run to the rock...
When we got back on the boat,
we heard from our lawyer that the Coast Guard
was on their way to arrest us and we would be detained indefinitely.
We had to get out of there, so we pulled anchor
and made a break for international waters.
/ said rock
what's a matter with you rock
- I think it's heading this way. - How fast? 10?
Within minutes,
the Coast Guard was chasing us with machine guns,
telling us that they will shoot if we don't stop.
/t was bleedin' / run to the sea
/t was bleedin' / run to the sea /t was bleedin'
- I don't like guys waving machine guns, demanding to come on board.
No, just the barbed wire right now. It'll make it difficult for them...
But we knew we couldn't stop.
So we strung barbed wire around the sides of the ship,
so the Coast Guard couldn't jump on board, and kept running.
We're not stopping.
Please hide me Lord
Don't you see me prayin'
Don't you see me down here prayin'
- Tell everybody to be very careful if those guys got guns.
If they shoot, they're gonna be really stupid.
Well, tell 'em to shoot.
We're not stopping. He said go to the devil
All along dem day
So / ran to the devil
He was waitin' / ran to the devil
He was waitin' Ran to the devil
He was waitin' We did everything right,
we did everything we were told to do.
Uh, what do they want to do?
Start another international incident over this?
Tell 'em we have to call our lawyer.
See if we can call Milton on the radio and tell him they're chasing us.
Sinnerman you oughta be prayin'
Oughta be prayin' Sinnerman
Oughta be prayin'
All on that day
/ cried power
Power
- Finally, we made it out of Costa Rican waters
and the Coast Guard stopped.
We continued southwest
to the Galapagos,
leaving Cocos to the poachers.
The fins were worth too much money
and there was a whole industry behind it.
We knew we could never go back to Costa Rica.
Four days from Costa Rica
and 800 miles later,
we arrived in the Galapagos Islands.
Sea Shepherd was invited by the national park
to protect the marine reserve from illegal fishing
and we were making our way through the archipelago
to the main town of Santa Cruz,
where we would meet with the navy
who control the park.
Although the Galapagos is a marine reserve,
some fishing has always been allowed
to provide the island residents with food.
The fishermen soon realized
that their underwater treasure was worth a fortune
and started shipping their catch overseas.
The government noticed and started imposing quotas
to protect the resource,
but the fishermen rioted,
destroying national-park offices,
holding national-park officials hostage,
and threatening to kill the last giant tortoises.
The government gave in
and raised the quotas.
- Ecuador is on the side of conserving the Galapagos,
but laws written down and laws applied
are something very different.
And one of the problems with the extraction of resources
is that we really often don't understand how ecosystems work.
At this present moment,
sharks are protected within the marine reserve.
It is not legal to take sharks.
One of the very strong pressures at this time in Galapagos
is to open long-lining.
Then you're really talking about a shark fishery.
We know relatively little
about the general ecology of the ocean
and to risk removing
a large number of predators from the area
may have consequences
which we have absolutely no concept of.
Shark finning is a very profitable and cheap way
to make a lot of money,
and it has the similar sort of ring, financially,
to sea cucumbers.
And even with the humble sea cucumber,
we're already changing situations.
I doubt very much there'll be a sea-cucumber industry,
simply because the resource is gone.
- A few men from some of the cucumber fishing boats -
they're actually fishing here illegally -
just came up to our boat to ask if we had any advice,
because they had two of their fishermen that were bent.
One man had been bent for four days,
he'd had severe pain in his shoulders
and it hasn't gone away; another guy got bent today.
He went back down, did some in-water recompression,
came back up and feels fine.
If he's been bent four days and has severe problems
in his shoulder, he needs to get into a chamber.
The bends is a disease caused by diving too deep
and surfacing quickly.
It's incredibly painful and you can die
if you don't get to a recompression chamber.
If someone's paying them to go diving for cucumbers,
someone should be able to pay to take them back
to Santa Cruz to get to a chamber.
Because he's really sick.
He could die if he doesn't get to a chamber.
But the problem is, they have 12 days left of fishing,
so they don't want to go back to Santa Cruz to go to the chamber.
Lose four days of fishing,
or lose your man?
The cucumbers were worth more than the lives of the fisherman.
With the cucumbers nearly gone,
the fishermen are pushing to legalize long-lining,
which catches mostly sharks.
Sharks have always been protected in the Galapagos.
Now that Costa Rica was finning sharks,
the Galapagos is one of the last strongholds for sharks.
Legalizing long-lining here
would wipe out more than just sharks.
Every animal and ecosystem in the Galapagos
depends on the ocean for survival.
Sharks have a really tough time
catching seals and sea lions.
They shaped these animals, putting pressure on them
so they evolved ways of avoiding sharks.
The seal evolved hyper-mobile backbones,
making them extremely agile in the water
and a difficult target for sharks.
The sharks have to ambush the seals or find an injured one.
To ambush a seal, they swim below,
out of visible range,
looking for the silhouette of a seal -
a very similar silhouette to a human on the surface.
A healthy seal moves through the water
without any noise or bubbles.
But an injured one will flail about,
creating a disturbance in the water,
just like humans when we swim.
It's amazing how few people are attacked each year,
considering how much we look like shark food.
- We treat animals differently, but they're all doing the same thing.
So the cute little baby harp seal grows up and goes out and eats fish,
just as viciously as a shark.
But we think of the seal as sort of cute and cuddly,
and we think of the shark as something vicious,
but that's just human mythology.
Then my mission stopped cold,
I had a pain in my leg and was taken to the hospital.
It was diagnosed as flesh-eating disease.
Doctors said I was lucky to be alive,
that I would only lose my leg.
I had a pain in my lymph gland to the right of -
to the left of my groin -
and I came to the hospital, asked them what's wrong;
they said I got Staphylococcal bacteria in my leg.
Staphylococcus, or flesh-eating disease,
infects the body through any wound,
even a tiny cut, like the ones I had on my feet.
It destroys tissue, consuming the body,
and if untreated, can kill you.
I was hospitalized, fighting to save my leg.
Watching the IV of antibiotics and saline solution
drip into my arm.
Now that I couldn't be in the ocean,
they were dripping the ocean into me.
I'll be fine, okay?
I promise.
I lay there, watching the red line creep up my leg.
It was halfway through my thigh and if it made it to my hip,
I would lose more than my leg.
I'm probably way more likely to die working in Toronto than here.
Dude... Brian, don't get stressed and don't get upset, okay?
It's fine, it's just... it's just another bump, alright?
Then I heard from Paul.
He said there was nothing they could do,
Sea Shepherd was being kicked out of the Galapagos...
...because the Galapagos had legalized long-lining.
The fishermen wanted more money and had turned to shark fins.
The government gave in,
and long-lining was legalized.
Now we've lost Cocos and the Galapagos
to the fin industry.
I think the world needs to know
that sharks are probably
the most threatened group of species
that we have in the ocean right now.
And that a lot of shark species are declining very rapidly;
that this is not a natural phenomenon.
It's because of fishing and other human impacts
and that there's a lot we can do about this to change it.
- Sharks are going to be difficult to conserve,
because on one hand, you have people afraid of them
and not really wanting to go anywhere near them.
People can sort of fish them with impunity.
There's nobody looking after the sharks.
There's no campaign,
like a Greenpeace campaign,
to save the sharks.
Paul left to start a campaign
against illegal whaling in Antarctica.
And I was alone.
Two of the world's last sanctuaries for sharks
were going to be wiped out.
During my last six days in the hospital,
more than 1.5 million sharks had been killed.
Everyone told me to go home,
forget about sharks,
and try and save my leg.
I didn't know if what I was doing made sense anymore,
but all I could think about
was getting back underwater with sharks.
Sharks' presence in the ocean has provided a framework
for the populations below them,
including phytoplankton,
tiny aquatic plants that consume more carbon dioxide
than anything else on Earth.
Carbon dioxide is the global-warming gas,
and plankton converts it to oxygen,
providing 70º/º of the oxygen we breathe on land.
Without sharks to prey on them,
plankton feeders below sharks could grow out of control,
consuming the plankton that we depend on for survival.
The ocean is the most important ecosystem,
regulating climate and feeding much of the planet.
Life on land depends on life in the ocean.
I finally realized that it's not just about saving sharks,
it's about saving ourselves.
There was nothing I could do to save sharks in the Galapagos,
but shark finning was still illegal in Costa Rica.
If I could get back into Costa Rica,
maybe I could finally get to Cocos
and do something to stop the finning.
I lay there, hoping the red line would stop,
and after a week it did.
The infection subsided and I was finally free.
I think the problem is,
that we don't really understand what we are.
In essence, we're, uh, you know,
just a conceited naked ape,
but in our minds we're some sort of divine legend
and we see ourselves as some sort of god,
that we can walk around the Earth deciding who will live and who will die,
and what will be destroyed and what will be saved.
But the fact is, we're just a bunch of primates out of control.
We're now in the midst of a Third World War,
but this time the enemy is ourselves
and the objective is to save the planet from ourselves.
There is no hope for the masses of humanity
to do anything.
They never have, they never will.
All social change comes from the passionate intervention
of individuals or small groups of individuals.
Slavery wasn't ended by any government or any institution.
Women got the right to vote
not because of any government.
The civil-rights movement, the same thing -
India with Mahatma Gandhi, South Africa with Nelson Mandela.
Again, it's always individuals.
You need those individuals
with the passion and the energy to get involved.
In fact, I don't know
of any governments or institutions
that are doing anything to solve any of these problems.
All over the world, though, I am seeing individuals
and non-government organizations that are passionately involved
in protecting ecosystems and species,
and that's where I see some optimism,
that's where results are happening.
Okay...
here we go.
As soon as I was let out of the hospital,
I started making my way back to Costa Rica.
Costa Rica was the last place on Earth I should go.
I would be arrested immediately
if they found out I was there.
So I had to sneak in.
I took a boat from the Galapagos Islands
to mainland Ecuador.
My friends in Costa Rica
told me not to fly back into the country,
that I'd be caught if I did.
I had to avoid any major ports,
the police and the Coast Guard.
Even if I made it to the coast,
I'd also have to avoid the shark-fin Mafia.
To avoid capture,
I travelled overland for days,
using public transportation and tour buses
to get back into the country.
Still going, this bus?
I only narrowly escaped arrest a few weeks earlier,
but I had to find a way in
and find a way to help the sharks.
Avoiding arrest and staying on public buses,
I made it to the coast
and entered Puntarenas.
Instead of the shark-fin Mafia I was expecting to greet me,
there were protests in the streets.
Costa Ricans were rallying against shark finning.
The publicity surrounding our case brought the shark-finning industry
into the spotlight.
We hadn't totally failed in saving sharks.
We helped awaken a country and the people.
Costa Ricans were outraged;
they held protests against the private docks
and spoke out against the corruption.
The world had started rallying for sharks.
The police were busy with the protest
and the Mafia was in hiding.
Now I knew I could make it to Cocos without getting caught.
I found my friends and we headed back out to sea.
Returning underwater,
finally I could swim with sharks again,
in one of the last places on Earth where sharks thrive.
Free diving...
I hold my breath and stay calm
so they're not afraid of me.
Ever since I was a kid,
I've loved sharks.
They taught me about life,
and that fear was something I made up,
and it wasn't real.
Sharks have been here since the beginning,
when there was only primitive life in the oceans
and the land was mostly desert.
They were the top predator,
influencing any animal to evolve since their inception.
Sharks have been gods
for 400 million years,
shaping this world
for the entire history of life on land.
Seeing them again,
I knew that they're almost gone.
The killing of sharks
is the biggest ecological time bomb we're going to face pretty soon.
We have to understand that sharks are the most abundant
top predator on this planet, at over 100 pounds,
so that tells you something. Nature created them for a reason.
Now human beings just... they don't care
they kill 100 million, 200 million. "So what?" You know?
"Sharks are a nuisance, a dead shark is a good shark,
let's kill 'em all. " But if we kill 'em all,
we destroy all food chains of an entire marine ecosystem
and, well, the majority of our oxygen comes from the ocean,
so we should be more careful.
- There is no species on this planet that has ever survived
by ignoring the basic laws of ecology,
and we're now breaking those basic laws every day in every way,
and that's going to mean our own demise in a very short period of time,
unless we learn to live harmoniously with the natural world.
- Future generations are gonna look back on us
and they're gonna think of us as barbarians,
the same way we think of slave traders.
That they're gonna look at us as barbarians for what we're doing,
the fact that we're burning all the fossil fuels,
in a few generations, that we've wiped out the oceans,
that we've driven species to extinction.
And worse - this is the worst part - we know what we're doing.
The scientists know, the environmentalists know,
the companies know and the general public knows,
and yet we're allowing ourselves to do it.
- Sharks have lived in balance with the oceans
as the top predator.
Now we are the top predator,
deciding which species we'll use
and which we'll destroy.
I wonder if we've evolved enough
to survive as they have.
We depend on the oceans for oxygen;
the oceans that sharks control.
If we lose sharks,
we'll disrupt the oxygen we need to breathe.
We've only been here for a few million years
and in the last 100 years,
we've greatly impacted life in the ocean.
But we also have the power to change it for the better.
People in Costa Rica weren't just rallying for sharks.
They were rallying for life...
and for us.
DVD Subtitling: CNST, Montreal