Movie: "Sharkwater" - The shark's place in Nature.

Sharkwater Web Site

I've seen so many documentaries this year.  Documentaries are probably my favorite kinds of movies.  They are very honest ... in that someone is trying to sell you on an idea that they have put a lot of time into developing.  Some real communication takes place, agree or disagree.  This is the case in the new documentary movie "Sharkwater".

Sharkwater is a movie by Rob Stewart, who tells the story of how his life intersects with the lives of sharks, and by extension alerts us to another huge problem on the planet that most of us do not know anything about.  First Stewart tells his life story.  How he always thought sharks were cool and decided to study them.  The only way he could study them was to go down into the water with them and see how they live.   One of the first image we are shown is Rob cuddling a shark on the bottom of the ocean, petting and stroking it -  which from our Hollywood image of sharks we expect to turn around and rip his arm off or something.  The shark does not.  When the embrace is over the shark darts off into the abyss.

After telling us that sharks are totally misunderstood, and that there are fewer shark attacks that we are led to believe, 5 deaths a year worldwide, and that most attacks are mistakes.  Sharks have some extra senses that Stewart says most of the time can tell it that they are in the presense of a human and they swim away, but something they make mistakes.  Mostly people are hurt when the shark spits them out.

Finally we get to the meat of the documentary.  In places like the Galapagos, and some other internationally protected areas there were fishing boats that would motor through trailing lines that were miles long with thousands of hooks on them.  The boats rip through the sea and snag as much as they possibly can mostly in search of just a few species they can sell.  One person in the movie made the comment about how if hunters did this is a forest to go out deer hunting but draggged out a thousand other animals that they did not need, hunting would be banned immediately.  Not so with the ocean, it is so big and so out of our view that this continues to go on.

Next we were taken an a voyage by some marine activists to try to stop this practice in protected waters.  A pirate fishing ship off the coast of Costa Rica is found in protected waters "finning" sharks.

This was the heart of the movie.  "Finning" sharks is the practice of pulling hundreds of sharks out of the deep, and cutting off their fins, and then throwing them overboard to die.  This is a major worldwide business because Chinese people apparently like to have sharkfin soup, and they need millions of sharkfins to satisfy this need.  The Chinese believe, wrongly, that sharks do not get cancer, so if they eat sharkfin soup ... and they do not even eat this soup, they just put it in the broth, that they will become cancer restistant.  The Costa Rican government was found to be complicit in taking bribes to allow this practice, and they were making hundreds of millions of dollars from allowing these pirates to kill millions of sharks.

Now, the shocking part is that 90% of the world shark population has been decimated in the last 10 years.  In the time it take you to read this article 1000 sharks have been killed in the world.  Sharks which have survived unchanges for tens of millions of years are being killed at a huge rate.

The shark is at the top of the ocean food chain as a predator.  By killing off so many sharks, the plankton feeding fish will no longer have checks on their population, and the whole world ecoology can be thrown into chaos.  Consider that about 70% of the oxygen in the air is generated in the oceans by plankton, and if the planktons eater's numbers rise without bounds the plankton population will fall drastically and so could the oxygen creation in the atmosphere, according to the movie.

This is another way in which mankind is just not used to thinking globally and in our individual search for riches to impress each other we are playing with things we do not understand.

"Sharkwater" was a very nice movie, and it was filmed from a very human point of view, as opposed to a scientific documentary .. which I would recommend the BBC's "Blue Planet" series on the oceans.  What made "Sharkwater" so good and so unique was that it was done as a labor of love from a shark lover and one who loves and respects the Earth and cares about its future as I do.  Here is someone who has had the time and the drive to spend his life in this study and taking action.  I respect and support what Rob Stewart did with this movie and would have to rate it a 10/10.

Sharkwater Web Site

Sharkwater on IMDB