Ocean Researcher Debunks Ocean Myths

If you look at a lot of ancient civilizations,

they worship the sharks, they were like their Gods.

But then some silly movies came out,

creating fictitious stories about sharks

that have territories and are lurking around for people

and we know from our work, that is just not the case.

[light music]

Hey everybody, Chris Fischer here,

founding chairman of OCEARCH.

We're preparing to head out on our 38th expedition

in New England to tag and track great white sharks

in an effort to make sure they have a bright future

and there's lots of food in the Atlantic ocean

for our grandkids, I'm here to debunk some ocean myths.

The ocean can absorb anything.

The ocean is absorbing a lot of things

that we put into the environment, CO2, a lot of plastic,

and it definitely has a finite ability

to be able to handle all the stuff we're throwin' at it.

One of the biggest misconceptions we face around this

is the concept of these gyres in the ocean

or the Pacific garbage patch.

In fact, there are five gyres around the world

in the ocean that are all collecting debris.

Now people think you're gonna drive out there

and you're going to see an island full of garbage.

That's simply not the case.

So you've got to think about it more like

a big swirling bowl of pea soup

and the capacity to clean that up

has not been discovered yet

because the plastic is so small

and it is so vast that filtering it out

would require filtering out all the life

that's in the ocean in that area as well.

And it's tough to just grab and get it out of the water.

We got real problems when it comes to plastics

and this is something every single one of us

can contribute to the solution.

No more single use plastic bottles.

Look after your plastic,

make sure it's recycled and make sure it stays on land.

And I hate to be the downer,

but no more balloons at the birthday parties.

We find them scattered all over the ocean

when they get free from people, they drift out,

end up on the ocean and then a poor turtle

thinks it's something they like it can eat

and it does bad things to turtles

and ends up polluting the future.

Plastic is one of the single biggest threats

to the future of the ocean.

Sharks are better dead than alive.

Replace that fear with facts.

Sharks are the key to the future abundance of the ocean.

They prevent the second tier of the food chain

from exploding and wiping out all the fish we need to eat.

An apex predator is the top of the food chain.

They prevent the second tier of the food chain

from running wild and consuming everything below them.

So everything is connected

and the apex predator sets the tone for the system.

When you lose that predator, you lose the system.

White sharks have been around for millions of years.

How have they survived that long?

How have they evolved to heal wounds rapidly

because they have very violent lives?

We're doing a lot of work on the ship where

we take the bacteria off white sharks

and we're developing new antibiotics

for things like staph and MRSA.

Not many things have survived on earth

for millions of years and if we can learn

how they've done that it could

have tremendous medical benefits for humans.

The Bermuda Triangle is an actual phenomenon.

I don't know what's going on there.

We spent a little bit of time in that water

on the edges of the Bermuda triangle,

and we've never seen anything happen,

but there seems to be too many crazy stories

over too long a period of time

to not wonder about what's going on in the Bermuda Triangle.

Maybe it's beyond all of what we know

and there is no natural explanation.

Sharks can smell blood from a mile away.

We work on the ocean all over the world,

if it were that easy to attract sharks,

we would have them swimming right up to our research ship

and we will be able to tag as many as we like

quickly for our science teams.

Most of the time when there's a shark human interaction,

it's just mistaken identity because we put on a wetsuit

and we're swimming with seals and we fool them!

Once they realize they've touched the wrong thing,

they swim off.

So being worried about sharks or a shark interaction

is something that doesn't really make any sense.

If you're going down to the ocean

and you're wondering if sharks are around,

it's a very simple thing to figure out,

take a look at the ocean.

If there's a lot of birds diving on bait

and there's game fish eating the bait,

and there are seals and dolphins eating those game fish,

the sharks are gonna be there.

The food chain is going off right before your very eyes.

There's plenty of fish in the sea.

Unfortunately it is totally possible to over fish the ocean.

As we've developed bigger and bigger scale

around our fishing operations,

we're seasoning the type of gear

that can absolutely wipe out fish stocks.

With the development of super long lines,

mega trollers, and massive staining that we now know

we do have the capacity to tap the ocean out

at a level beyond which it can reproduce itself.

Just to give you an idea on how this works,

what you're going for is sustainability.

That means we harvest enough food for people to eat,

but we leave enough fish in the water

that they can make more fish.

So we can do the same thing the following year.

Now there's certain species that

it's easier to do that with.

But if you think about a white shark,

if you start taking any of those,

they have to live 20 years before they can have babies.

This type of animal can't handle any pressure

because it doesn't live long enough to replace itself

if you're over harvesting, it.

There's lots of good ways to restore fish populations.

Number one, we can use things like slot limits.

You can only catch fish of a certain size.

That means you can't catch the babies

and you can't catch the big ones.

The funniest thing about fishing is people

always want to go out and catch the big one,

that's not the one you want to take home.

Oftentimes that's not the one that even tastes the best.

You'll want to let the big ones go.

That's our broodstock, they make lots of babies.

If you want to take one home for your family,

take a nice small one home.

Anytime you over fish one species of fish in the food web,

it affects everything because it's all connected.

You over fish one species,

the thing that they used eat, maybe it was jellyfish,

explode in numbers because nothings eating them anymore.

Then you end up with an ocean full of jellyfish.

The idea that there's an unlimited amount of fish

and we can't over fish it in the ocean,

might've been true a hundred years ago,

but it is no longer true today.

The great barrier reef is dead.

While the great barrier reef is struggling,

there are many, many people doing great

work to help restore it.

One of the things you'll see when you see a dead reef

is it lacks all the colors, it lacks all the life.

When you see an abundant reef,

like a place like Ningaloo Reef off of

Northwestern Australia, it's full of colors,

full of fishes of all size.

There are also marine mammals.

It is possible to bring the reefs back.

There's great projects in Florida

bringing back the coral reefs of the Keys.

And there's great projects in Australia

doing the same thing and the Great Barrier Reef.

One of the things we should all do

if we want to help out our coral reefs

around the world is to make sure

we use reef friendly sunscreen.

These sunscreens don't have any chemicals in it

that will hurt the reef.

Whales can hear each other from thousands of miles away.

One thing we do know is whales do have

the capacity to communicate across very large areas.

[whales communicating]

Different whale species have different sounds that

they make and sometimes they can determine by a given sound,

what individual of that species it is.

Like humans, they all got their own tone

and their own story to tell.

The ocean is largely unexplored.

Much of the very deep of the ocean is unexplored,

but there are lots of parts of the ocean

that have been well explored,

especially those parts that are around the surface.

So you got to think about the ocean

almost like you think about land.

There are mountains in the ocean.

There are valleys in the ocean.

There are rivers in the ocean.

Some of our great currents like the Gulf Stream

or the Agullus Current in Africa.

The sea floor is not flat.

When you go down to the ocean bottom,

you have all sorts of different structures.

You have continental shelves that drop off

into the ocean abis.

There are mountain ranges everywhere,

valleys throughout the bottom of the ocean.

There are certainly a lot of species

that are yet to be discovered in the ocean.

Most of which are in the very deep, deep ocean,

but don't get all carried away.

There's no giant creatures down there like

a Megladon or something else that

you might see in the movies.

You can swim against a rip current.

Well, while you might be able to swim against a rip current,

you're probably not gonna make it back to shore.

You're just gonna get real tired and washed out to sea.

Rip currents are really dangerous.

If you spend a little time looking at the ocean before

you can get in, you can avoid them most all the time.

But if you get caught up in one,

don't swim against the current swim across it

till you come out of it and then swim on into the beach.

A rip current or a riptide is when two currents collide on

the beach and then they both turn against each other

and push straight out to sea.

It's very, very powerful

and they're typically not that wide.

It's like a little narrow river shooting out

into the ocean right off the beach

because of the collision of these two currents.

Most of the time you can see rip currents from the beach.

When the two currents,

maybe one coming down the beach and one coming up collide,

they both bend off each other and push out to sea,

most of the time when you see that

they're sucking out a lot of sand

and there's also sometimes foam in the water.

Remember when you head to the ocean,

that once you're two or three feet into the water,

you are deep into the wilderness.

So make sure you look at the ocean.

If you see a lot of jellyfish,

you may want to avoid that area.

If there's huge waves and rip currents,

not a good place to go swimming.

And even if there's just a lot of bait,

seals and birds diving,

there's likely gonna be sharks in that area.

Look for quiet places where the waves aren't too big,

and there's not a lot of life in the area.

Thanks so much for tuning into Myth-Busting.

Remember, we're just passengers on this planet

and the ocean is the primary regulator of our planet

and all the fish and animals that live in it,

they are the crew, they are maintaining the very system

that we all depend on to live.

Let's be responsible passengers

and let's make sure all our great grandchildren

and future generations have a smooth ride as well.

And that's only gonna happen with a clean ocean

that's full of fish.