WWW.MY-SUBS.COM ﻿1
I got lost in the ocean.
I was underwater.
Took a wrong turn, got stuck in some currents.
By the time I surfaced, I was a mile and a half
away from where I should've been.
I thought I was gonna die.
The only option I had was to not give up.
That was very much a metaphor for what we're going through now.
'Cause if you give up, 100% you're dead.
I think we're in that situation right now.
You can't give up.
So we just snuck into Costa Rica.
The first time since 2002, 14 years ago,
to check out what's going on with the fin industry here
and what we might be able to do about it.
And we had a local contact set up to do interviews for us.
So, the word is already in the Costa Rican government now that...
I'm here and that Sharkwateris here,
and we're making Sharkwater 2.
We're not here without a filming permit, we already know the country.
So we gotta watch our back.
15 years ago,
I began a quest to save sharks from shark fin soup,
a Chinese delicacy.
Millions of sharks were being finned,
where they were pulled out of the water, their fins were cut off,
and were thrown back into the oceans to die,
destroying the populations of some of the most important predators
the planet has ever had.
And I thought that if I could change the public's view of sharks
if I could make them love these animals like I did...
See that they're beautiful and amazing and magnificent and important,
then maybe they'd wanna fight for their protection
like they fight for pandas and elephants and bears.
Well, the movie, you know, it took me five years,
and nearly killed me half a dozen times.
We had to run from the country while the coast guard
was firing machine guns at us.
And it, you know, turned into this crazy story
that shows you how much money there is in the exploitation of sharks.
The film, Sharkwater,
brought the plight of sharks for shark fin soup into the spotlight,
resulting in the creation of conservation groups,
government policy changing all around the world,
and an empowered youth that knew they could change the world.
Today, shark finning is banned throughout most of the world.
But now, sharks are in more trouble than ever before.
We're killing up to 150 million sharks a year,
but scientists can only account for 70 million of those.
There are 80 million sharks every year that are getting killed,
and nobody knows why, or where those sharks are going.
And what's changed in Costa Rica in the last ten years?
Well, it's changed dramatically from Sharkwater.
We're actually turning into marine conservation leaders
in these conventions.
The Costa Rican is doing a great job.
Unfortunately, we had a new president step in,
and in the matter of a stroke of a pen,
in one year, many of these policies were reversed.
We saw Costa Rica export 900 kilos of hammerhead shark fins
against the CITES convention.
They actually did two exportations, um, to do this.
The government of Costa Rica just decided to ignore its commitments with CITES
and the international community,
and Costa Rica just decided,
"We're gonna export these hammerhead shark fins
"because they're public interest."
And they did.
And they even got the president of Costa Rica
to sign a statement saying that the government was no longer going to protect sharks
in international conventions.
And that's when we really flipped,
because the work that we had done for ten years over three presidents,
in a matter of months, it's all, you know, torn to pieces.
Costa Rica's not going that way anymore.
Um, is shark finning still happening in Costa Rica?
Uh, it's happening, but without the permission
and without the support,
and without the, uh, willingness of the Costa Rican government.
Finning is happening simply because it's an illegal action.
And just as it happens with narcotrafficking
or any other action, it continues to happen,
and I regret it.
And the authorities of Costa Rica
are taking all the necessary steps to prevent it.
It's always the same with them. Say one thing and do another.
We're headed to Puntarenas
because we'd figured out that if you want to bring illicit fins into Costa Rica,
all you have to do is land them in port on the weekend
when the fisheries body that looks after fish
isn't working.
So we're gonna rock up to Puntarenas, pull out our cameras,
and see if we can film anything illegal
happening on the weekends and happening without any official body watching.
Are you going to be your real name?
No.
I'm gonna be Laurette.
How about when they ask you for your ID?
So do you think they'd have to take my ID?
Just trying to watch your back, Regi.
People don't realize there's so much money in the trade of animals,
there's so much money in the trade of fins.
It's a billion-dollar industry.
There's multimillionaires playing mafia rings
like puppeteers trying to exploit the resource.
You've got to be kidding me.
I'm not surprised.
We're gonna meet Williams Flores,
who, when we were last in Puntarenas,
told us about these mafia warehouses
drying shark fins.
And so now we're back in Costa Rica, we're gonna go meet him
and see how the situation has changed, where they're drying fins,
and what we might be able to do
to help save sharks in Costa Rica.
- Hello. - Hi.
- How are you? - Good. Come here.
- Thanks. - That's yours.
Get a life jacket. It's better.
- For what? To look like a tourist? - To seem more tourist.
Sure. Good idea.
Which one is the Varadero?
That one, right there, Franju.
Sharks are worth an enormous amount of money,
and it's mostly for their fins.
And, you know, a single pound of fin is worth over $200 US.
So, to fishermen around the world in third-world countries,
you can pull up a shark, cut off its fins,
throw the rest of the body back, dry the fin.
You don't need refrigeration systems on your boat,
so even the most decrepit boats can go out there
and make enormous amounts of money.
And it's... Sharks are being fished everywhere.
Oh, look, he's got something.
What is it?
Looks like a hammerhead to me.
So, you wanna buy it off him?
He looks like he's interested in...
Blacktips?
Ehm, no, this is a little hammerhead.
They have 30 of these ones.
30, and they're little blacktips, right?
- Yeah. - Yeah. Okay.
You have to be careful.
Okay.
That's a must.
You cannot go... Especially if you're gonna be shooting in Puntarenas.
You already know how dangerous it is right there.
You guys run for your life.
I remember one shooting... You were meeting,
or you went into a warehouse, I think so,
and you saw the shark fins on the roof.
And you guys were running, literally.
So we have to be careful.
Costa Rica is a good country.
Unfortunately, there's very bad layers in it.
Ready, Rob.
Holy shit, there's one clear panel
and I think there's fins in it.
When we realized how much money there was in fins
and all of these operations,
and how much money was going to Costa Rica for the fin industry,
that was a major eye-opener.
Wow, that's a lot of fins.
You think of Costa Rica and you think, you know, lots of conservation happening.
You don't expect one of the most progressive countries
down there to encounter that, but we did.
We have to leave this place right now.
What's going on?
This hotel is from the owner of Mariscos Wang.
It's Diego, so it's one of the big mafia
in Puntarenas.
That makes perfect sense.
We have been sleeping here,
so it's not nice.
You know, we've been here thus far.
Yeah, but we were flying drones off the roof yesterday.
What do you mean?
We're being a little more conspicuous today.
Taking off remote control helicopters
off the roof and flying over the ports.
So, now,
a few people have seen us do that.
I think we have to check out and go our separate ways.
For sure.
After that, I got death threats,
and I had to leave Costa Rica.
The next time I saw Rob was just before the last dive.
I was a fish nerd when I was a kid.
I was chubby, I stuttered,
and I ended up liking animals more than people.
I had a goldfish bowl, I think, from the time I was zero,
and just fell in love with fish,
and looked into that world and saw these creatures
that I didn't really understand, that could breathe water, that could fly.
I had the opportunity to go underwater
and hang out in the Caribbean as a kid.
Because I was so young, I wasn't allowed to dive.
The only way I could go down there and hang out with these fish
was holding my breath and swimming down.
And it just... It was the most magical world possible.
You know, you're in a three-dimensional world, you can fly.
And, uh, as a kid that just enthralled me.
I met my first shark when I was nine.
I saw the shark out of the corner of my eye,
and it swam in my direction.
And the second it made eye contact with me, it freaked out,
and swam the other direction.
For me, that whole experience,
five-foot Caribbean Reef shark
terrified of a nine-year-old kid,
removed all the fear I had of sharks in the ocean
and allowed me to go explore it further, fall deeper in love.
And I'm here in Cat Island in the Bahamas
because one of the most amazing sharks in the world,
the oceanic whitetip shark, come here only in the month of May.
Now, the oceanic whitetip shark was once the most abundant large predator on the planet.
They were everywhere, but because they have massive fins
that are highly valued in the fin industry,
oceanic whitetip shark populations in the Atlantic and Caribbean
have dropped 99%.
When I heard these creatures were spotted in this area,
my team decided to take a chance
and see if we could capture them on film
so others could see the reality
behind what Jacques Cousteau once called,
"The most dangerous of all sharks."
Having never filmed them before, and with a serious reputation,
I'm a bit cautious as I learned to understand these sharks.
Oceanics turned out to be absolute sweethearts.
They had the most expressive and curious eyes I've seen in any shark.
And you can really feel them reading you.
They're also a little cheeky and very intelligent.
The most important thing for me when filming sharks
is to try to understand what life is like for them,
how they see the world, and what makes them special,
because my goal is to make people fall in love with sharks.
And for that, people need to see a bit of their softer side,
a bit of their intelligence,
and maybe see a bit of themselves in the sharks.
Something big today, baby. Something big.
Stand by, we're gonna hang 'em high.
I got a good feeling today, baby.
Oh, do we have to?
Well, they say 100,000, but I don't think that's true.
I say more like 50.
- 50,000? - Yeah.
What kind of shark you'd like to catch today more than any other?
Right now? Uh, I'd like to catch, uh, either a mako or a tiger.
Hammerheads are probably the most common sharks we catch out here.
No. Negative.
No, hammerheads aren't endangered.
There's plenty of them out there and we catch them every trip.
That's all Shark Weekpropaganda.
I mean, you know, you gotta put it in perspective.
I mean, this is just an animal that's on Earth
for... For what reason?
For man to eat.
I mean, sure, there's a decline in the sharks
because of the commercial guys are whacking them pretty good.
And there's a demand for them.
So, you put a trophy price on something, it's gonna die.
Simple. Show me the money.
We normally get a bite right about now.
Sometimes, you know, you're gonna wait a long time for a bite.
Like today, when there's no current.
Water's kinda dirty.
A lot of trash in the water.
And, uh, you just have to wait.
What do you think it is people like about going and fishing for sharks?
Sharks are the apex predator, you know.
They always had been and they always will be.
What was that? You got a bite there?
Watch out! Get the nose Ryan.
Getting a bite right now.
I got a bomb. I got a bite here.
He got a bite.
Take a line. Take a line. Big fish here. Big fish.
All right, get set up, guys. Get set up.
Oh, yeah. Big fish here. Whoo!
Right in his head.
Easy now, easy. Very slow is good.
Cheer up. Cheer up.
Get ready to get it here.
I am ready.
How long is this going to take?
Sometimes, they'll come right up to the boat,
you get an identification on them,
and it might be another hour after that,
it's really, really, uh, average fight
with this setup, with this type of rod and reel combination.
Average fight on your average shark,
which is a lot of different variables, obviously.
It's about half-hour or 45 minutes.
They could go a lot quicker or go a lot longer.
People tell you your whole life to be afraid of sharks.
Pretty well everything we've been receiving from the media,
from just about everybody, is that sharks are dangerous,
and they're gonna kill you and they're gonna eat you.
But the reality is totally different.
You know, they've been here for actually 400 million years.
They survived five major extinctions on Earth
that wiped out most life on the planet.
They've seen life on Earth rebuilt from scratch five times.
450 million years of shark's presence on Earth,
we've decimated them 30 years.
Shark populations dropped 90% in 30 years. 90%.
How could this be happening? How could this be happening?
Sharks, in particular, a lot of them in particular,
- hammerheads seem to not survive... - After you catch 'em?
After you catch 'em.
If you just keep by the boat for a few minutes or so,
their chance of survival is really, really slim to none.
- Yeah? - Yeah.
You almost have to cut 'em off at the boat
and let them keep going swimming.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
You stop and take a picture,
and try to get their hooks out and all that stuff.
It's probably not gonna survive.
Yeah. And that's okay with you?
- If the sharks don't... - Well, what're you gonna do?
You can't, um, put a sign on the hook and say,
"Hey, I don't want any hammerheads biting this bait."
I mean, how're you gonna do that?
Well done.
Pretty work, guys. Pretty work.
Maddie, what's happening?
Grab the other side.
Nice work, Maddie.
It's a wrap.
By the time you released, he swam away really good.
Good job.
Hey, you gotta break a couple of eggs if you wanna make an omelette.
Remember that, all right?
Good job.
That was really fucked up, bro.
I have seen, like, a hammerhead like that once in my lifetime,
in the distance, on the Great Barrier Reef,
for about 15 seconds before it swam off.
And that was the closest I've ever been to a hammerhead,
and that was terrible.
He's thrashing around at the end, thrashing around.
And he just, like, gave up.
That's the worst thing about it,
like, you can film that on a commercial fishing boat,
and it's still messed up, which I understand why they do it.
But when people do that kind of stuff for fun,
I have absolutely no contemplation of what's going through that person's head,
why that's fun for someone.
Rob said
it was good to see me having so much care and sadness over an individual.
And I could still cry over one animal after all we have seen.
It was like an older brother.
The killing of sharks is, I think,
is one of the biggest concerns that we should have
on the planet ecologically today.
We depend on ecosystems for survival.
We depend on other species.
They're part and parcel of ourselves, of our daily lives.
Removing sharks is removing part of the framework
that allows life to exist on land.
It's the animal that sits on top of 70% of the oxygen
in the air that we breathe from phytoplankton in the oceans.
If you remove once species, the consequences ripple through entire ecosystems.
And right now, we're removing, you know, the most important predator the planet has.
And the consequences are going to not just affect oceanic ecosystems,
they're going to affect our ecosystems and ourselves.
We're now killing up to 150 million sharks a year,
and it's not just shark fin soup anymore.
Sharks are now being killed and renamed and fed to us,
so we don't know we're eating shark.
This is a massive scandal representing tens of millions of sharks every year.
Eating sharks is a bad idea.
We're eating endangered super predators.
We're eating animals that can take 40 years to reach sexual maturity.
They can have very few young.
Most of the pollution we've ever made as a species
has gone into the environment untreated.
And that accumulates in living animal matter
and concentrates as you go up the food chain.
By the time you get to sharks, they're enormously toxic.
With things like lead and mercury and even neurotoxins.
So it's important that we keep sharks out of our food.
They're enormously toxic.
Let's recommend to women and children, don't eat them at all.
It's really important to bring this message to the public.
Here are the fins.
- It's worth a lot of money. - Here, it's $5.
- $5? - Yeah.
- This is $5 here. - Max.
- So $5 here, and in China, 200 bucks? - Yeah.
A pound of the little ones, it's 50 cents.
- 50 cents? - Here in...
Baby hammerheads.
As we have learned,
there has been two confiscations.
I checked the confiscations.
Why do they keep the fins here?
Because this is the coast and ocean department
of the environment ministry.
Okay.
And it's in their custody.
We're here in a parking lot in Panama City
with hundreds of thousands of dollars of shark fins
confiscated from people that were trying to check these into airlines
and fly them to Asia.
This is a seizure of 800 pounds of shark fins in Panama
representing $300,000 in shark fins.
Uh, many of which are illegal and on the endangered species list,
including the scalloped hammerhead shark, our favorite species.
These are all Scalloped hammerheads?
Yup. In essence, they should.
They are huge hammerheads.
And there's 40,000 fins here?
38,868.
Oh, my God.
So we've seen many different shark species,
um, of many different sizes.
Among these, probably the largest hammerhead fins
that, at least, I have seen.
So, the newborns, the lighter ones.
They seem to really get a little bit depressed
when they see these little, small...
- Just the tip of the iceberg. - Yeah.
This is a lot of shark fins.
Yeah, I've never seen something like that before.
When we started making Sharkwater,
there were four countries that have banned shark finning.
When we were finished, there were 16 countries that have banned shark finning.
Now, there's more than 90 countries around the world
that have banned the process of finning,
but none of them have banned the importation of fins,
which means you can fin as many sharks as you want
as long as you put the fins on a shipping boat
before you bring them into port, not a fishing boat,
which is a massive loophole.
So those are reefer containers
that Rob's identified as being full of frozen shark.
Think Rob's gonna get pinched?
That guy's obviously playing close to security, right?
Yeah.
I'm a little bit surprised he is.
Yeah, he is. He's not afraid of anything.
Holy crap.
That's a fin.
Just laying on the wharf.
So we're all shark biologists here. Any idea what species?
Not shark would be the guess.
Oh, God. Holy...
Yeah, that's not blue shark, Brother.
No, that's not a blue. We've seen plenty of their fins.
What do you think?
That's a dorsal from something, I'd say.
What's this?
Blue shark tags.
Tiburon azul, yeah.
Stating that blue sharks that were landed here were caught in Spain.
Oh, creepy.
We're nowhere near Spain.
So, apparently, they're not really trying to hide it.
Does this shit make you nervous?
No.
What's happening?
Where's the Japanese boat?
Right there.
And you can see the trans-shipping boat.
They're right now with each other,
and the freezer container ship has got a crane
over top of the Japanese boat right now.
Oh, shit, dude. They're unloading right now.
At the end of the dock, they're unloading blue sharks.
Fuck, what are these boats? There's tons of them.
A car has pulled up behind ours,
just randomly beside us.
He looks Costa Rican.
Oh, great.
Hello. Hi, nice to meet you. What's your name?
- Roden. - Roden.
- Slippery. - Slippery.
Wow.
So much money.
Is this full or it will be all the way full?
All the way full.
All the way. Wow.
They're all big blue sharks in that container.
Blue sharks are cute, they're dopey, big eyes.
They don't really ever bite people.
They're loading the shipping container
full of tens of thousands of pounds of blue sharks
onto a shipping boat to leave the country.
The word is out around the world, that sharks mean money.
You know, we spent four years, 15 countries,
trying to figure out what the biggest environmental issues were out there,
only to discover that one of the biggest destructors of our life support system
is in our own backyard.
I think the biggest issue we have on the planet right now
aside from the environment, is our lack of awareness of what's going on.
We don't know about our individual actions, about our consumption,
about our government and corporations
destroying our life support system.
If we did, our morals would engage,
and we'd be guided to a world that works.
We'd hold our friends and our family,
and our governments accountable for this stuff.
We just don't know what's going on.
It's 3:00 in the morning.
My parents were here all the time, yeah.
What I've always told them, I just have this belief that I'm gonna be okay,
and I'm sure I'm gonna be okay.
I mean, I had times that I almost died and ended up okay,
and sort of reinforce that belief that I'm gonna be okay.
I know exactly how I'm gonna die,
when I'm gonna die.
Uh, it's sunrise,
and we're about to jump in the water in Santa Monica Bay,
on the other side of Catalina Island...
To go see what is caught in drift nets,
nets that are a mile long,
that just hang as a curtain at night
and catch anything that swims into it.
It's a hugely destructive method of fishing
that kills dolphins, whales, turtles, sharks,
and all sorts of things under
the guise of catching swordfish.
So, knowing how we've already so decimated the oceans,
this method of fishing should not be happening,
and it definitely shouldn't be happening in Los Angeles.
The only reason it's happening is 'cause people don't see it.
They don't know what's happening here.
And we're gonna change that.
Some fisheries will waste 85%
of what they bring to the surface as bycatch.
Right now, we're wasting 54 billions pounds of dead fish every year
that's brought out of the ocean and killed and thrown back
because it wasn't our target fish.
We wanted the more expensive ones.
We threw back all these amazing animals.
Come on, let's go.
- Are they shooting? - Yeah, yes.
Let's go!
Let's go! Go, go, go!
So we just filmed a thresher shark and a blue shark
on a drift gill net
right outside of Los Angeles.
And while we were doing that,
all of a sudden, the boat was immediately on top of us.
They were firing shots at you guys on the boat.
Um, both the blue shark and the thresher shark were still alive,
so you can see their mouths opening and closing and then struggling,
and the blue shark had the mesh caught in its mouth.
And the thresher shark, it was mangled, all messed up
from thrashing around within the net.
Really sad to see
an endangered majestic superpredator
stuck in a primitive fishing method
in the town that I'm living in.
It's crazy.
- How do you feel? - I don't feel good.
It's super emotional, it was really hard to watch that thresher just dying.
But we're gonna stop this.
That was the last time Rob and I went diving together
in our own backyard.
Sure.
Make sure it's fresh.
Hey guys, this is Ashley, how can I help you?
Yeah. Hey, I was wondering, do you guys have any sharks in stock?
So they could recommend going to this one over this one?
Could you tell me what kind of shark you have?
Black-eyed shark.
I am just curious as to what you might have in stock for shark.
Yeah, hey, I was wondering what sharks you guys have in stock.
Awesome. And it's fresh-caught daily in this time of year, right?
All right. Thanks a lot.
All right we'll be by in a bit. Bye.
I'm wondering if anybody back there knows
what this species of shark is.
Yeah, it's a wild shark.
Hi, can I have one of your vegan meals, please?
Thank you, thank you. Bye.
Do you know what this is?
Do you know what swai is?
What the heck is swai?
Iridescent shark.
What do you have that's got fish in it?
It's Alaskan Pollock.
Alaskan Pollock.
- That's in a box. - In a box, okay.
Okay, we are in Florida,
and we just bought a bunch of pet food,
and fast food, and fish products,
and we're gonna test them to see if there's shark in them.
We're right now at FIU.
Florida International University.
My name is Diego Cardenosa,
I'm a PhD student from Stony Brook University in New York.
We collect shark fin samples
and we do generic bar coding on them,
so we assess the composition
and the proportion of species in the shark fin trade.
All right. Let's do this.
Okay.
So, right now, we're testing your samples of pet food,
um, some shark fillet purchased in supermarkets,
um, some tuna salad.
So the idea's to try to see if we can find any trace of shark DNA in those products,
um, and to identify, if there's any shark DNA in those products,
try to identify it at least to a species or genus level.
So basically, what this does, is once we put it in the thermocycler,
- it will boil to 100 degrees. - Okay.
So that destroys the tissue, or whatever the sample is,
- and breaks the cell open. - Yeah.
And captures everything that is not DNA
and leaves you, like, a clear...
A clear, um, liquid, let's say, with the DNA.
This is the one you're gonna use for it,
for your PCR afterwards.
Okay.
If there's a shark DNA in this thing,
- it will let us know. - Yeah.
Now just mixing a little bit of, uh, shark DNA cocktail.
33% of the pet food product tested positive for shark DNA,
including blacktip and mako shark,
which is a vulnerable species known for very high mercury levels.
We also found traces of blacktips, scalloped hammerheads,
milk and blue shark DNA in the beauty care products we tested.
Fishing study have showed
that shark populations have dropped
an estimated 90% in the last 30 years.
100 million sharks get killed every year, and nobody notices.
It is astronomical.
And this is a huge consumer awareness issue
that can be fought and can be won.
We're not just killing sharks for shark fin soup,
we're killing sharks for a myriad of crazy reasons.
Sharks are now being killed and renamed, and fed to us,
things like rock salmon and flake,
so we don't know we're eating shark.
Sharks are also turning up in pet food,
live stock feed, fertilizer, and even in cosmetics.
We're smearing endangered superpredators on our faces without knowing it.
So it's important for all of us,
if we want to ensure a healthy environment into the future,
to make sure that things we buy,
the foods we buy, the cosmetics, are shark-free.
Insist in a world that's shark-free,
and insist that your cosmetics, your fertilizers,
your pet food, your livestock feed,
doesn't contain shark or shark parts.
These are rebreathers.
They recirculate the air that you breathe
and inject the quantity of gasses that you want,
depending on the depth that you're going to.
In that way, you get a lot closer to fish and sharks
because you don't make bubbles,
which are very scary for animals like that.
Uh, and you could stay a lot longer.
You could stay down for six hours almost.
As long as you want or need to.
So we're gonna use this new technology to go deeper than we've ever been before
to film a creature that people have rarely seen in the wild,
the sawfish, one of the most endangered sharks in the world.
So, I'm... I'm gonna save a splash.
Still sitting 46 feet off my mark,
so I think we're secure as I can get us.
Let's do it.
Mayday, mayday, mayday.
This is United States Coast Guard
communication station sector key west.
We request a boat. We need assistance. Over.
Watch standers at Sector Key West Command Center
received a report of a missing diver.
The diver is identified as 37-year-old Robert Stewart
from Toronto, Canada.
Canadian filmmaker has gone missing
while diving in Florida.
The US Coast Guard is searching for Rob Stewart right now
off the coast of the...
Florida Keys. The US Coast Guard tells us they're using a helicopter,
a boat, a team of divers,
and in the last hour, they've just added a plane to that search.
The Coast Guard says...
Stewart and four others were diving into Florida Keys
off the coast of Islamorada.
As their dive came to an end,
he resurfaced and signaled that he was fine.
Stewart disappeared while the boat crew attended
to his instructor
who had exited the water but then collapsed on deck.
The friend said that he jumped in, but couldn't find him.
He wasn't seen again.
Three days later, the search continues,
including hundreds of volunteers in small craft, helicopters and airplanes.
His worried parents pray that he's found alive.
It doesn't look great.
But we've got... He's the kind of person that would survive.
He's super fit and he's a great swimmer.
And he's done thousands of dives.
T he body of missing Toronto filmmaker, Rob Stewart,
has been found in the waters off of Florida Keys.
Tributes have been paid to the Canadian filmmaker and campaigner,
Rob Stewart, who's died while diving off Florida.
Rob Stewart won many awards for...
Deep sadness in Toronto today
at the funeral of Robert Stewart,
an acclaimed filmmaker and ocean conservationist who died at sea.
Stewart's known worldwide for...
The family has received messages of support from across the world.
Family and friends say Stewart's job is not done yet.
We should be so thankful that in this little galaxy of stars
that our life is and our friends are,
that we had a son like Rob at the center of it.
I think his real legacy will be all of these other people
that he inspired who will carry his work forward.
It was an amazing journey.
It was very much a learning process for me
all the way along.
Because in the beginning, it was sort of, like, "What? We're all gonna die?"
All the way through, you know, trying to figure out,
you know, how we're gonna save ourselves.
But seeing all the destruction that humans had wrought
on ecosystems and species and the lack of care that was coming,
I sort of developed a distrust and dislike of humanity at times.
And then, through making this movie
trying to educate humanity about what's happening to sharks
and seeing them take that cause and fight for it,
particularly kids,
it really instilled a lot more hope,
and made me love humanity a lot more than I could before.
We still have a bright future if we want it,
but we've got to do something now.
I'm in to save the turtle! Whoo!
I'm standing in front of Darwin's Arch at Darwin's Island.
This is Darwin's Arch, right?
And Darwin Island?
Now this is the mecca of diving...
I lost it.
Like I ever had it.
When I started out, I wanted to bring people closer to sharks
than they'd ever been before,
so that, you know, they could actually see an interaction to sharks
they've never seen before and truly understand them.
'Cause when elephant falls for ivory in Africa
and the world goes crazy.
Elephants kill 200 people a year.
Sharks kill five people a year.
We kill 100 million of them, and nobody notices.
The reality behind sharks is that they're not predators of people.
If sharks, you know, ate people,
the oceans would be a really dangerous place,
and people would be getting eaten every day. But they're not.
I think what's unfair and irresponsible is wiping out 90%
of the most important longest-lasting predator the planet has
for the sake of soup.
Thank you, everyone,
for being part of the largest rally for climate change in history.
This cannot end today.
This energy is amazing,
and you've got to bring it forth into everything that you do.
That's nothing more important than conservation
because conservation is the preservation
of human life on Earth.
People don't understand how ecosystems work because they never taught it.
I mean, if you look at the education system,
why are taught Shakespeare and Algebra
before we're taught conservation
or we're taught how to survive on the planet?
Especially if we know by mid-century
that our survival is very much in jeopardy.
High-five.
This stuff's important.
We depend on the oceans to survive. We depend on life.
It's life that gives us our food, our water and our air.
This is it. This is it.
This is the generation. This is the task of your time.
Are we gonna save the ecosystems we depend on for survival
or are we gonna live in lack and starvation
and crisis and fight each other over what's left?
I believe entirely that we are all morally bound together,
and that if we are made aware of these issues,
we'll make different decisions.
Be conscious of what you eat,
where you put your garbage, and how you live your life.
Nothing is more important than this.
There's never been an issue this big,
and there's never been an issue that needs your involvement more than this.
So, everybody, thank you.
You've got an opportunity to become a hero.
To be a hero.