I expected to meet a dreaded “man eater”, but when I saw it, I realized that it was a defenseless animal, more afraid of me than me. This moment aroused my curiosity, and I decided to know more about the sharks. I traveled on the island of Guadalupe off the Côte du Pacific de Mexico to see large white sharks, and I took a small point camera with me. When I managed to photograph a large white shark, I realized that the camera was more than a tool, it was a way to reach my goal of meeting sharks.
The films have reduced sharks to one or two descriptions for many people: they are terrifying and insatiable. What are you learning by being with them and why do you defend them?
From a very young age, I dreamed of being a diver because my parents were divers. While my mother died when I only had a year, my father used to talk about me his adventures with sharks. He said they were bad. When I was seven, I saw the film Jaws, And I was attracted to the character Matt Hooper, the scientist. At the end, when the shark destroys the boat, Hooper enters a cage, the shark breaks it and everyone assumes that it must have been eaten, but in the end, it survives. Shortly after seeing the film, we went to a toxpan beach, in the eastern Mexican state of Veracruz. My father bought a small shark dead from a fisherman, and I played with on the beach with my half-brothers. These moments led to my love for sharks. For me, living alongside animals is my safe space. It is then that I feel calm, when I am really myself. I feel free, comfortable.
Wired has covered how overfishing reached the deep seas, threatening rays and sharks. During your 20 years of meetings with these creatures, have you seen changes in their populations and what does it look like first on our oceans?
I have seen two phenomena. Without going too far from my home, near the island of Cozumel, off the coast of the Maya Riviera in the Caribbean, there was once again that there is now. But I also saw places like Cabo Pulmo, at the forefront of Baja California, where 20 years ago, there were almost no sharks, and now he was teeming. When sharks are present naturally, without someone supporting the population and nourishing them, it is a sign that the ecosystem is healthy. In Cabo Pulmo, they have created protected areas that have become hope points. There are not enough of these areas, but you can find the whole food chain, sharks to the smallest plankton. When you remove the sharks, the whole ecosystem becomes unbalanced.
Lately, I saw more and more dead and bleached corals, and it’s very sad.
What is it like?
