Biting commentary

>> Rob Stewart and Captain Paul Watson dispel the myths about nature’s most fearsome fish in their new documentary Sharkwater

by MARK SLUTSKY

Sharks are our friends. Or, at least, they’re not our enemies, despite what movie and TV portrayals of the underwater predators might have you believe. Rehabilitating the scary, toothy fish’s image is one of the goals of Sharkwater, a gorgeous new documentary from Canadian director Rob Stewart.

The underwater photographer and first-time filmmaker isn’t afraid of sharks; in fact, he plainly loves them. “They are so beautiful, so perfect and so cool,” he tells the Mirror at a sitdown at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. “There have been times when I’ve spent 200 days a year underwater with sharks, and I’ve never felt threatened. The more time you spend underwater with sharks, the more comfortable you become with them, and the more you realize they’re not going to hurt you.”

What he has to say about their eating habits may surprise you. “The most common misconception is that sharks eat people,” Stewart says. “That sharks are dangerous predators of humans. They’re not. Sharks have been on the planet for 400 million years eating things that are in the ocean. They’re pretty good at eating what they do. Most of them eat what fits in their mouths, and not things that are enormous and gangly and weird-looking like we are. So they don’t want to eat us.”

In fact, Stewart says, “I think shark attacks should be called ‘shark mistakes.’ Because sharks don’t ever intentionally eat people. They don’t actually eat people, ever. Every time a shark bites a human, the human pretty well ends up back on the shore, right? A six-foot, 10-foot fish could rip a person to shreds if it wanted to, but they don’t. They bite and realize they got who they weren’t after, and they let go.”

“Usually, when you look at shark attacks, there’s one or two reasons for it,” says Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherds Conservation Society, who appears in the film. “One is mistaken identity, primarily with surfers, because sharks think they look like sea lions or seals. And those people are never really eaten by them—they take the bite, they realize their mistake, and they’re out of there. The other thing is if you go underwater and you do something really stupid. People go into habitats where they don’t respect the animals that live there, and they get in trouble. Or it’s sometimes just an accident, where you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, like swimming over a stingray, like what happened to Steve Irwin.”

FISH-FRIENDLY: A hospitalized Stewart

Preying on the predators

Humans actually pose a much greater threat to sharks than the other way around, a point that Sharkwater repeatedly makes. “The biggest threat to the shark population is shark fishing for shark fin soup,” Stewart says. “It’s a delicacy in Asia, and it’s become a ubiquitous dish, served at weddings, banquets and business dinners. A single fin can get $200– 400, so the word is out around the world that sharks can bring in an enormous amount of money. They pull the sharks up, take just the fins and throw the rest of the body back, which wastes 95% of the animal.”

Watson hopes that Sharkwater can raise awareness of the predators’ plight. “A lot of people who have seen the film have said that it was eye-opening for them,” he says. “So if you can reach people, I think you’re making a contribution here. Because we have to fight this on both the supply and the demand side. Sea Shepherd’s working on the supply side, going after poachers. But on the demand side, we’ve got to get the public to stop buying shark fin soup.”

Investigating the less ethical (and legal) side of the fin trade, specifically in Costa Rica, landed Stewart and his crew (as well as the crew of the Sea Shepherd boat Ocean Warrior) in some hot water. “I had no idea the corruption would run so deep and how much money there actually would be in these countries,” he says. “It turned out that Taiwan had invested a seriously large amount of money in Costa Rica and had finning operations all over the country that had special privileges. They were the only ones who could land their catches in private docks. Costa Ricans have to bring their fish into port, where people check it. But they don’t check the Taiwanese.”

Another kind of flesh eater

Fighting legal problems (including charges of attempted murder for intercepting an illegal fishing boat) and threats against his life, Stewart unbelievably found himself up against another of nature’s notorious flesh-eaters. That is, flesh-eating disease, which struck his leg in the middle of filming. “That was quite a difficult point,” he says. “By that point, we had been through so much. We’d been through court cases, we’d been charged with attempted murder, we were fleeing countries left, right and centre and being chased around by mafia. Everything that could go wrong at that point did go wrong.” Amazingly, he managed to recover and complete the film without significant loss of limb.

Both Stewart and Watson see Sharkwater as necessary counter-programming. “Thanks to Steven Spielberg, we have this image of sharks as horrible monsters, although the animal depicted in Jaws wasn’t even a white shark,” Watson says. “That animal’s been extinct for 100 million years, it’s called a megalodon. These are scare stories. But the fact of it is, it’s more dangerous to play golf than to go swimming with sharks. More people die on the golf course from being struck by lightning than [being] attacked by sharks.”

Sharkwater opens this Friday, March 23

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