UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL
Filmmaker dives deep to shine light on endangered sharks
Sharkwater Extinction sounds like a bad deepsea horror-movie sequel, complete with the frustrating lack of a colon in the title. But the only part of that description that fits is that it’s a sequel. OK, it’s also a horror movie, in that it hopes you will be horrified to learn what’s been happening to Earth’s top marine predator (not counting humans) since the original Sharkwater documentary came out in 2006.
Director and de facto star Rob Stewart has had a lifelong love of the beautiful creatures, which he notes have been plying the world’s oceans for 400 million years.
So not only are they older than the dinosaurs, they’ve lived through four major extinction events, although as the title suggests, the Anthropocene era could prove to be their final curtain.
Stewart’s original documentary helped create change in the finning industry, whereby millions of sharks are killed for their fins, which are then made into soup. More than 90 countries now ban the practice. Unfortunately, this means it’s now gone underground.
And since finning is outlawed but trade in fins is not, that
leaves a loophole wide enough to sail a refrigerated freighter through.
The filmmaker heads to Costa Rica, Panama, Florida and his adopted hometown of Los Angeles (he’s originally from Toronto) to document the shark trade, often playing a wide-eyed tourist to get footage: His good looks open many a door. And while the thousands of fins he finds are frightening — each one represents a dead shark, many of them not of breeding age — more terrifying still is the news that shark meat is sometimes relabelled and sold to consumers as other fish.
This is a twofold catastrophe. On the one hand, many shark species are endangered. But as apex predators they also tend to be full of lead, mercury and other toxins that get concentrated as they work their way up the food chain. Stewart works with a biologist who finds traces of shark DNA in everything from pet food to cosmetics. Or as he memorably puts it: “We’re smearing endangered super-predators on our faces without knowing it.”
Ever the optimist, Stewart believes that if people knew more about this, they’d work to stop it. But he must also battle the bad press that sharks receive, in part by filming himself underwater, hanging out with placid hammerheads and other shark species. In fact, only five people worldwide were killed by sharks last year, which is fewer than elephant and tiger deaths. (Also cow and horse deaths, since we’re on the subject.) And no one is suggesting those creatures don’t need our help to survive.
I’ve been writing of Stewart in the present tense, but in fact he died in January 2017 during a dive to document deepwater sharks. No, the sharks didn’t do him in, and neither did poachers, although he has been shot at more than once; the film shows him fleeing bullets off the coast of California. Stewart was killed by lack of oxygen in a re-breather he’d never used before.
His passing is handled with great emotion but not exploitation by his colleagues, who stepped in to finish the film.
“It was an amazing journey,” Stewart says of his adventures just before the closing credits, eerily as though speaking from the beyond.
The sharks have lost their greatest fighter and advocate, but Stewart’s message, even had he lived, is clear: It’s up to all of us now.