I was fortunate to be invited to a media day on board the MV Ocearch when they were here in Simonstown.
If you've arrived here after reading the abridged interview on Zigzag, I'd hoped to capture the essence of everything said there. Some things which I felt didn't contribute to the discussion were edited out, so there's nothing too revelationary here that you haven't read already.
If you're here because you want to have a go at Chris, me or my stance on the matter: awesome, that's what the comments section below is for. Go nuts.
Here is the full interview with the man some people call controversial:
On the foredeck of the MV Ocearch, moored at Simons Town on
the 21.05.2012
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| Like right there, a few minutes after this photo was taken |
Anton Louw:
So, do you surf?
Chris Fischer: I’m not a good surfer. I
try to surf now and again. I do spend tons of time in the water. I’m a free-diver. Definitely bodysurf and
stuff like that. I love to play in the ocean with my kids. But, there are lots of surfers on the
ship. Almost everybody onboard surfs.
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| Pictured: a not good surfer |
AL: I’ve heard. They
tell me the boat is unkind to their boards. They put their quiver away and it
comes back all dinged up. Do you find
having worked with sharks you’ve become less fearful of them?
CF: I’m a really data driven individual. It’s more dangerous to drive to the beach
than to go swimming in the ocean. You’re
more likely to get struck by lightning twice before getting bitten by a
shark. So, the data is the data. So, no, you should be afraid to go swimming
with sharks because the statistical likelihood of you having an interaction is
minute.
AL: So, you find the more you know about them the less scared
of them you are?
CF: Yeah, it’s more dangerous to hang around in the parking
lot than to go swimming in the ocean.
AL: Tell us
how you got involved in this and what are Ocearch’s and Fischer Production’s
goals?
CF: This whole journey started for me back in about 1999. I was spending a lot of time on the water
with my wife, and we would come back – we were living in Southern California,
and we would tell people these stories about what we saw on the ocean; both
good and bad. And people would be like: ‘So what, let’s go party and have
dinner.’ And my wife and I were just
shocked that even the people who lived on the beaches didn’t really care and
weren’t very connected with what was going on in the ocean. And if the people who lived on the beach
didn’t care, what about the people who grew up in Kentucky, like me, or other
places inland? Well, it was completely
out of sight, out of mind for those people. So why would they care? So, in about 2000 I decided to start Fischer
Productions, to pour the world’s oceans into people’s homes so they could form
their own relationship with the ocean.
Otherwise, it would just be out of sight, out of mind. And I was an ocean person already, I’d been
on the ocean all my life. So I was someone
who’d been on the ocean, who tried to leverage the scale of TV to help the
ocean. I’m not a TV guy who decided to
get on the ocean. I’m an ocean guy who
tried to use TV to try and do good for the ocean. So, that’s how it really began for us. I really began a mission to just pour the
ocean into people’s homes through their TV sets.
AL: What have been your greatest achievements to date?
CF: We’ve learned so much, we’ve completely rewritten the
White Shark life-history puzzle of the Guadalupe White Shark. So, in the past they had an idea of where
they were feeding, breeding and giving birth, and they were all wrong. And our researchers have completely rewritten
that and now we know exactly where and when they’re giving birth, and where and
when they’re breeding, and where are and where they go when they feed. So, we have just rewritten White Shark
life-history biology in the Pacific.
We’ve also been able to leverage that to affect policy to put pressure
on the shark finning mafias, and we’re hurting them in Central America quite a
bit. With the Mote Marine laboratory,
with Dr. Bob Hueter – I brought the ship round to the Gulf of Mexico, even though
it wasn’t what our plan was. When the
Gulf oil spill happened, we just felt an obligation to do something. So we took the ship round to Boca Grande, and
we caught large Bull sharks and Great Hammerheads to give the scientists who
were collecting all the toxicological information on all those sharks that roam
the open gulf for the federal BP lawsuit, so we could learn if the oil and the
dispersants had gotten into their body and was affecting them. I think this was a great contribution to the
body of knowledge for the Gulf of Mexico.
So, it’s been just countless scientific achievements. But most importantly for me is we are leaving
a wake of PhDs behind us. When I support
research in Costa Rica, and Mexico and California as I have in the past, we bring local PhD candidates and students,
and those projects become the projects that they use to become the next PhDs –
people who then counsel the government on how to take care of the resource after
we’re gone. So we’re leaving a wake of
PhDs around the world that are all marine biologists that become the leaders in
looking after the ocean when we’re gone.
So when I support research in Guadalupe, I leave a Mexican PhD
behind. Costa Rica – Costa Rican
PhDs. Galapagos – Galapagos PhDs. South Africa – there’s over 30 researchers
involved in this project. There will be
over a dozen PhDs that people will get using the data set that we have funded
and we have enabled them to get. So
that’s powerful when you’re looking for a global legacy. As we move from community to community, all
the work that we enable continues on for the rest of our lives. It’s not one-and-out. And that’s powerful when you’re trying to
move the needle on a global scale.
AL: So, what’s the best part of the job if it’s not that?
CF: Well, that is probably the best part of the job. You know, it’s been two generations since
anyone rose up on a global scale and truly gave the ocean a voice and levelled
a global scale to affect policy worldwide and command meetings with
policymakers. As the next generational
ocean explorer, we have a truly global operation now. We can command those meetings. We’re funding and enabling the collection of
previously uncollectable data, so that we can affect policy correctly – that’s rewarding. But, generally speaking, the job is hugely
stressful and very draining. It’s not
fun.
AL: Really?
CF: I mean there’s a thousand ways to die each day. This is not a ‘woo-hoo’ type thing. It’s emotionally draining. It’s mentally draining. It’s physically draining. This is not just for fun.
AL: So, you’re driven by your passion for the ocean?
CF: Basically, the ocean has no time left. We’re killing up to seventy million sharks a
year – mostly for a bowl of soup in China.
And the sharks are the great balance keepers. They keep everything clean, and everything in
balance. If we remove the sharks from
the ocean, we will lose the ocean. If we
lose the ocean, then we’ll lose the planet.
And so we have the capacity to tell a compelling story about sharks and
to create awareness about shark-fin soup.
At first we shut down the finning mafias, and if we do that we can go
long way to redressing that balance.
AL: So where else in the world have you studied sharks?
CF: We did work in Guadalupe, the Fallarones – a little bit,
the Rivillagigedo Islands off Mexico, Costa Rica, Boca Grande, here, from here
we go to Cape Cod, Cape Cod to the Galapagos.
AL: How does your research differ from other projects done
in South Africa to date?
CF: Number one: when I’m funding research, I do things a
little bit differently. Typically, when
you look around at research that’s going on on the ocean, you’ll have an
individual researcher from this institution, and an individual researcher from
this institution, and sometimes they’re competing for a finite amount of grants
or funding. And so it’s not often that
you get the individual researchers working together. More often, they’re competing for the same
pool of money. When I come in and
support research on a project like this, I come in and support the whole country. So we have 30 of your top researchers from 12
institutions, not just one institution, with one dude, with two projects. So we’re forcing everyone to collaborate and
share all the data. So, we have the
smartest people in the world with access to everything, so we can learn quicker
so the ocean can recover sooner. So that’s
one of the things we’ve done and because we’re funding, and because I’ve seen
the frustration when different researchers have different parts of the puzzle
with collaborating – and in the end the ocean suffers. Now, when I come in and fund, I say: ‘We all
collaborate, because I’m writing the cheque.
Everyone gets access to all data around the world. Because I want every smart guy and lady
around the world to see this data so that we can solve the ocean puzzle soon,
so the ocean can recover now. And so
we’ve completely shifted the model of research.
It’s not the individual institution or researcher trying to get
ahead. This is a national programme for
the people of South Africa.
AL: Is there anyone else in the world that is doing similar
tagging research?
CF: There have been some people who have been doing SPOT
tagging on smaller sharks. What we have
is a unique capacity to deliver the real ocean giants to the researchers. All the other researchers who are studying
the real giants of the ocean are mostly stuck because they’ve never been able
to get their hands on a mature specimen and let it go alive. And they have a multi-year migratory pattern
and until you can get your hands on a mature one and tag it and then track it,
you can’t solve the puzzle of its two year migration. So what’s happened is our ability of bringing
world class fisherman together with world class scientists is just exploding
the body of knowledge forward on the giants of the ocean. And that’s where our knowledge gap is. If it was small and little, they would have
been caught and tagged already, so we understand those smaller creatures
better. It’s the giant things that
they’ve never been able to handle before, that is our big gap in knowledge in
management. And if you can’t look after
your mature breeding stock, you can’t look after the future of any
species.
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| Just like that little table next to the dentist's chair. Only thing different is a glass of that sif pink mouthwash |
AL: From a South African context, what do we stand to learn?
CF: So there’s twelve individual projects going on today in
this – the world’s largest White Shark research project in history. Right now, we don’t know where the local
sharks are breeding or birthing – the two most vulnerable times in their
life. In two years you will know where
your White Sharks are breeding or birthing.
You will then have the data you need to affect policy to look after
those vulnerable areas. So from a
fundamental standpoint, the basic knowledge of their lives is not had here, and
we’ve just enabled the beginning of that.
AL: A lot of surfers are concerned about their safety. Could your research help make them safer?
CF: Absolutely. If
you go onto the Ocearch’s Facebook page right now you can see the latest on
where the sharks are. There’s an app
being developed for all of them. Right
now, your Sharkspotter programme gets an email directly into their office every
time a shark tag pings. So if a shark
moves in here, even if the spotters don’t see it, they know and they can inform
the people on the beach. So real time
tracking radically enhances public safety, especially in an environment like
False Bay.
AL: I know its early days still for the data, but have you
had unexpected revelations?
CF: Yes, quite a few already. We’ve had two sharks move down into the
roaring forties – way south, which we didn’t expect. One of them has gone to Namibia and back
already, which they didn’t expect. We’re
seeing wholesale movements of all the sharks. Like all the sharks are East of
Gans Bay at the moment. Why are they all
East of Gans Bay? We’ve never even had
the data to see these mass migrations of animals – loosely collected from maybe
over a hundred kilometres but all moving in similar directions. What causes that? Every day we are learning stuff. One of the projects we have we are scraping
bacteria off the teeth and their tongues and we’re developing the first
antibiotic for shark attack victims for secondary infection. A lot of people survive the bite, and then
lose the limb because they have secondary infection. So for the first time, we’re getting all the
bacteria off their teeth, gums and tongue and they’re culturing all that
bacteria right now here in a lab in South Africa so you won’t lose their leg
from infection two weeks after you’ve been bitten. And that’s really affecting public
safety. There are 12 projects going on
here, and everyone gets focussed on the tracking – because it’s kind of sexy –
but it’s the other projects that are kind of moving the ball forward.
AL: You mentioned earlier that in California you found
people had an ‘oceanic disconnect.’ Have you experience something similar here?
CF: No, that was just what inspired us in the
beginning. Here most people seem very
connected to the ocean. In South Africa
you’re surrounded by your ocean – to the south, the east and the west. What has
surprised me a little bit and caught me off guard was the lack of understanding
of how the system works. People here
have been making huge leaps of logic that are totally disconnected from one
another in the ocean. And I’ve never
seen that anywhere else.
AL: And can you speculate on why that might be?
CF: Education level? I mean in America, if someone was doing
research in, say Los Angeles and chumming and someone got taken in San Diego,
no-one would connect those two dots, because they are so obviously not
connected if you know how the ocean works.
It’s a different galaxy 70 miles away out on the ocean. And here they seem to have a problem making
that connection.
AL: Admittedly, I’ve hardly seen Sharkmen, so I’m not
familiar with it, but a lot of people accuse the ‘gung-ho’ aspect of the
programme. I’m sure it makes for better
TV, but you don’t think it maybe distracts from your message?
CF: For the most part, to those people, I say: grow up. I’m funding 2.7 million dollars’ worth of
research. If you want to write me cheque
worth that and I don’t need to make a show, I’ll handle it and not make a
show. I finished the TV here some time
ago, and yet I’m still here trying to finish the science. You’ve got be real, it costs a lot of money
to do this. So, I get people all the time
who throw ideas out. ‘Well, you know, you should do this, and this, and this,
and that.’ And I’m like, ‘OK, what’s the actual functional plan to that?’
Because ideas are interesting, but execution is everything. And so I can tell you this right now: I can
go out now and sell 5 million dollars’ worth of TV. I can take half of that and fund two-and-half
million dollars’ worth of research and I can solve your White Shark puzzle so
that we can protect their future. I know
I can do that. You get all these people
who say, ‘Aw, you should do this that and the other.’ And they’re not actually doing anything. What are they actually doing? And so you have to make compelling content,
so that people want to watch, so that you can generate two-and-a-half million
dollars so you can fund the next research project, that’s a trade I’m willing
to make for the ocean. Grow up!
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| "You have to be this big to play with sharks". (credit: Ocearch) |
AL: There have been quite a few accusations bandied
around. Can we talk about National
Geographic and your relationship there?
CF: Sure.
AL: The word I’ve heard was that National Geographic has
‘dissociated’ them from your work. How
true is this?
CF: I don’t think that’s true. National Geographic had an option to pick up
the show last August for its fourth season and it didn’t pick up that option. And so I went out and sold the show to
another network.
AL: Which network is that?
CF: It will be announced in about a month. But it’s 10 times bigger. And that means I have 10 times the scale to
affect 10 times the people to make them love the ocean. So for me, when I’m on a mission to impact
the future of the ocean, the scale of awareness is part of that mission. So, if I have an opportunity to move to a
network that’s 10 times bigger, I have an obligation to do that for the ocean.
AL: There’s a perception that you were ‘kicked out’ of the
Fallarones and Guadalupe and that’s why you brought your operation here – where
they authorities are more pliant to your activities.
CF: That’s just not true.
AL: So why did you leave those areas then?
CF: No, what happened was our weather window closed, and I
had another expedition two or three weeks later and so we moved. Much like here, I’ve committed a window of
time and when that time is up, I’ve got to move, because I’ve committed to
helping the next set of people. We even
took the supervisor of the Fallarones National Park came out and watched us
catch a shark and tag it, and then said: ‘Proceed with your work as you like.
That was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen.’ And then we worked for the next few days, and
then the weather came up and so we moved to Guadalupe because we had an
expedition scheduled there.
AL: Have you noticed any difference in the Great Whites
behaviour here to other parts of the world?
CF: The biggest difference here appears to be that the
juvenile, sub-adult, and adult sharks all appear to be mixed together. Everywhere else I’ve been, the adults are all
separate from the sub-adults and juvenile sharks. Because big sharks eat smaller sharks. You don’t normally see them all living
together and here it seems you have two metre sharks living with 4.5 metre
sharks. And I’ve never seen that before.
AL: There’s a lot of tension here between the surfing
community and the cage diving industry.
Has the cage diving industry been supportive of your work?
CF: It seems that here, everybody that everybody wants a
piece of the White Shark pie. You’ve got
all these different user groups and I’ve never seen people like this who are so
opposed to one another before. Some of
the cage-divers have been amazing, some have not been.
AL: I heard an anecdote; it came via a friend from one of
the Dyer Island deckhands that the sharks were less interested in chum once you
had arrived in the area. Can you comment
on that?
CF: I don’t know where he gets that from, what sort of data
he has. That’s just speculation.
AL: Well, it’s anecdotal…
CF: I know that we just tagged six sharks there and they’ve
had record sightings since we left.
People are seeing 20 a day. And we’re using so little chum. In the end we’re using the same amount of
chum that they are.
AL: Your funding, does it all come from selling the footage?
CF: That and my own personal wealth. I’ve leveraged everything I have.
AL: Moving on to the most recent attack, it must be awful to
be blamed for a fatal attack?
CF: It was just so disconnected from where we were, what we
were doing. It was surreal.
AL: How did you respond to the public anger?
CF: It was impossible to understand. It’s a lack of understanding as to how the ocean
works.
AL: And what was the feeling on the boat immediately after
the attack?
CF: Everybody felt terrible for the family and the tragedy
that they were going through. I think a
lot of the guys felt really down. Here
you’ve got a bunch of guys who staying away from their families for months at a
time, putting their body parts on the line to helping your scientists to learn
so that they can look after the future of your resource after we leave. And people are making up lies, and death
threats and accusing them and it was emotionally draining and stressful for
them. Because, they’re here and are
actually giving an amazing gift to your country and to be accused of something
that they are totally disconnected with was something that we’ve never gone through
before.
AL: This sort of animosity, have you seen it anywhere else
in the world?
CF: In Nor Cal (Northern California) there’s one or two ‘eco-derelicts’,
as I call them. It’s the only other
place we’ve seen anything like this.
AL: But it’s more isolated there?
CF: Yeah, it’s isolated here. I think if you look into it, its half a dozen
vocal Facebookers.
AL: There is a new movement on Facebook – Ocean Lovers
against Chumming, who currently have almost 7000 members…
CF: I would say those people don’t know how the ocean
works. You understand how chumming
works, right? There’s an island out here
in the middle of this bay, with a chum slick that’s been coming off it from
millions of years. It’s like a massive
highway out into the middle of the ocean and it stinks like dead sea-lion, and
sea-lion poop, and bird poop. And so
these guys who are coming in and putting in 25kgs of sardines are having zero
impact on that system. What it really is
that the surfers don’t like the cage-divers, maybe because, when I talk to
surfers, they don’t like the fact that they’re making a business or making a
living off the sharks. But, their whole
pursuit of chumming and chum is baseless.
It’s emotional, and it has no data.
What they need to do is come out and go on one one day. They’ll see, if you’re putting 25kgs of chum
in the ocean right here, it’s like dropping an eye-dropper of water right in
the middle of your giant coffee cup. And
almost immediately it goes to parts per billion and is dissolved to
nothing. This whole chumming thing here
is so weird. I’ve never seen anything
like it. What you really need to do, is
get down to the real issue. What is the
real issue? You’re a surfer, and you
don’t like the cage divers, because they’re making money off the ocean – just
say it. Don’t try and find some reason
in chumming that doesn’t exist, because then you sound like you don’t
understand how the ocean works. If you
want say that people shouldn’t make money off White Sharks, and the tourism
money is not welcome here, have the guts to say it. And approach policy or public management that
way. But, don’t make up lies and make up
issues that don’t exist.
AL: Have you identified any aspects of South African policy
that needs to be addressed?
CF: Well, I think we’re still in the data collection
phase. I think the other problem people
have, is for the first time in history we’ve developed a system where we
generate the revenue, provide funding for the research, we enable in helping
your smartest people gain access to collect the uncollectable data, and then we
engage my non-profit (
www.ocearch.org) and
then we come back and close the door – with policy. Nobody else has done that. Cousteau didn’t do that. We go all the way
from generating the money, to helping the smart people get the data they need,
to taking that data to the governments or policy makers to put a long-term plan
in place. And I’m proud of that.
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| Research: the first step to changing policy (credit: Ocearch) |
AL: Another shark debate we are having at the moment
surrounds using Shark nets to protect surfing and bathing areas in Natal. Do you have an opinion on this?
CF: I had to see it with my own eyes. I flew up there. For me, it’s just unimaginable. I can see that it’s here because it’s kind of
a historical thing that happened so long ago that they’re having a difficult
time undoing it. Before I started
researching it, I thought that they were exclusion nets. No; they’re culling nets. What surprises me is when I go up there, and
talk to the surfers; they love their culling nets. They’ll only go surfing on beaches that have
culling nets. I’ve never seen a surfing
community that wants their sharks killed.
They love their culling nets! In
other places where I’ve been, surfers are like, ah, we’re one with the ocean,
it’s cool, we should all be here, they’re part of the system. So that’s the one thing that really shocked
me – was how the surfers love their culling nets. Because, normally when go around the world,
the surfers are surfing with sharks all the time. In California there are White Sharks, and
Baja and everywhere else, they’re not afraid them. They’re not calling for culling nets. I’m really surprised about the South African
surfing community.
AL: So how would you suggest the South African surfing
community get involved and help save the ocean?
CF: I think a great
way to start is just banning the possession of shark fins in your
community. If you came together and just
banned shark fin possession in South Africa and all the Asian restaurants – who
are the people who are trading in it – you would immediately save thousands of
sharks. So, the fundamental first step
is just get the possession of sharks fins banned where you live. And that’s not the case here. And anybody can do that, right? A surfer, a swimmer, a businessman can get
behind the banning of the possession of shark fins.
AL: Cool, Chris.
That’s all from me. Thanks for
your time
CF: Cool. Take it
easy.
Check out Chris' talk at a local TEDx
here.
