I’m fine with that, because there’s so much that a recreational diver like me can experience. It’s just that my limits are much narrower. Yet, he said with a grin, “I dive within my limits, just like you.” True. He’s completed other extreme feats, such as descending to depths of 803.8 feet while searching for the source of New Zealand’s Pearse River. It can be but doesn’t have to be.Īt a recent dive conference, I met Richard Harris, an Australian cave diver best known for his pivotal role in the 2018 rescue of a youth soccer team from Tham Luang cave in northern Thailand. There’s a common assumption that diving is hard-core and dangerous. More than 80 percent of the world’s oceans are uncharted, and every dive is a new experience, never to be repeated. Witnessing them underwater, however, is a gut punch. Am I so accustomed to seeing humanity’s far-reaching effects on land that I’ve become complacent? Perhaps. Although this Okinawan reef was still in relatively good condition, it was surrounded by 50-caliber bullets, remnants from World War II.ĭiving has given me an appreciation for the interconnectedness and delicacy of life on Earth, greater than what I’ve experienced topside. The reef life continues, but there’s less of it, and the living seems harder. Plastic wrappers drift through water turbid with runoff. Rays and sharks swim past with mouthfuls of fishhooks. It reminded me of a lively city, each inhabitant going about its daily routine, just as we humans do.Īll too often, though, these coral cities are polluted, choked by an overgrowth of algae, or tangled in fishing line. Cleaner shrimp were removing parasites from waiting fish, and a pair of yellow-lipped sea kraits swam gracefully by, disappearing together into a hole in the reef. Garden eels poked their heads out of the snow-white sand. I was in the Kerama Islands-about 22 miles west of Okinawa, Japan-finning from one coral outcrop to another, all of them bustling with reef life. As an aquanaut, I experienced something similar. Astronauts report feeling awed and overwhelmed when seeing the beauty and fragility of our planet from the inhospitable reaches of space. We tend to take the Earth-our shared life-support system-for granted, unless a profound new perspective rends our point of view. Though I grew up in a nature-loving family, it wasn’t until I started diving that my conservation awareness kicked into overdrive. The ocean supplies more than half of our oxygen, absorbs carbon dioxide, regulates our climate, and supports much of the world’s economy. How strange that we call our planet “Earth,” derived from a Germanic word meaning “the ground,” when more than 70 percent of its surface is covered by ocean. You gain a unique perspective.Īny image taken from space confirms that we live on an ocean planet, vast stretches of blue cradling scattered green-brown shapes. It’s past time to flip the script and focus on sharks as endangered, not dangerous. Over the past 50 years, oceanic shark and ray populations have collapsed, declining by 70 percent. In 2017 a Chinese fishing vessel was captured there carrying more than 300 tons of endangered marine species, including 6,000 sharks likely slain for their fins. But even protected places like the Galápagos aren’t safe from the devastation of illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing. It’s no coincidence that the Galápagos Marine Reserve-one of the world’s sharkiest spots-is also one of the most biologically diverse marine protected areas, home to nearly 3,000 species. Sharks are also a talisman of sorts: An abundance of them in an area often signals a healthy ecosystem. Occasionally they are inquisitive, but in the hundreds of dives Chris and I have been lucky enough to share with sharks, we’ve never had a negative interaction. They are spectacular creatures to be around. From zippy reef sharks to enigmatic tigers, sharks have charisma. You aren’t afraid of seeing sharks.ĭivers are afraid of not seeing them. Some 30 years later, I landed my dream assignment for National Geographic- a story about diving with great whites-and it was on this assignment, in Port Lincoln, Australia, that I met Chris, who was a dive supervisor and shark wrangler. As kids, we were both obsessed with sharks. The seeds for our maritime meet-cute were planted when we were children, me in Minnesota and Chris in Greece. As an aquanaut, I experienced something similar.ĭiving is how I met my husband, Chris Taylor.
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