 It's often been said that about three-quarters of the Earth's surface is ocean, about 72%. And that's true, but I think an even more important statistic perhaps is that 98% of the biosphere, 98% of the livable, habitable planet where life can exist on Earth, is water, is ocean. Half of the air that we breathe, every other breath that a human being takes, comes from the sea. So it's in our own best interest, if for no other reason, to learn more about this watery world and to protect it. My job then is traveling around the world's oceans with a camera and trying to tell stories about these places. And I've had the privilege of doing that at one end of the spectrum to the other. I've worked in polar regions in icy realms like the frozen seas off Hokkaido, Japan. It all sort of began for me, and this is I know why you came to see pictures of me as a child. But it all sort of began for me, as Susan said, as a young boy in my parents' backyard swimming pool near Boston, Massachusetts. I can remember being four or five years old and dreaming about being an ocean explorer inspired by Cousteau. And today I get to travel around the world dressed like a Marvel comic book character and my snazzy camouflage wetsuit here off of Nova Scotia thinking I was going to sneak up on a leatherback sea turtle, which in hindsight was not such a great idea. I think the ocean is really the greatest place I could possibly work because there's no end to the amount of stories that you can find there on any given day, on any dive, you might find yourself with a giant animal like a whale shark that we see here swimming in Mexican seas off of Isla Holbash. And another day you might find a tiny little creature like this little tiny yellow goby living inside a soda can in the bottom of Suruga Bay. A big part of my work these days is also about getting close to animals and sort of peeling back the layers of mystery that exist with animals. Animals like sharks, for example, that are still villainized. They're still painted as monsters in many places in the world and I want to show that they're not that at all. That they're just one very important part of whatever ecosystem they happen to inhabit. I'm actually currently working on four new stories for the magazine that will be published next year about sharks as a way of showing the latest science and how valuable these animals are to the oceans. I brought along just a little one-minute video clip of some behind-the-scenes so as we learned from finding Nemo sharks are our friends, right? Well, they really are and they're critical to the importance of the health of the ocean. Well, you know, having these experiences over these many years is rather addictive. I typically spend about eight or nine months a year in the field shooting these stories and never cease to be amazed at what I'll find when I go out there. You know, I come to realize and come to know that if I spend time on or under the ocean I will see extraordinary things. But over these years I've seen some pretty horrible things as well and as I mentioned in my opening remarks, these are things that may not be apparent to many people. So I want to tell these stories as well. Much of the work that I do these days has environmental themes as a way of telling a broader story about the ocean. A story I did a few years ago, for example, talked about climate change through looking at this animal, the harp seal, the endearing little animal that lives most of its life in the polar regions comes down to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada for a few weeks each year. But these are animals that are facing serious challenges today because of the loss of sea ice due to climate change. Another story that I did a few years ago was about the most endangered species of large whale on the planet, the right whale. And I wanted to compare and contrast two populations, the beleaguered North Atlantic species, which only about three or four hundred remain on the planet. And I compared that with a pristine population of southern right whales that we see here that I found in the sub-antarctic of New Zealand. This is my assistant standing on the bottom next to this 45-foot, 70-ton whale that chose to let us into its world. You know, we couldn't possibly swim fast enough to make a picture. This animal had to want to let us in. And that's what I found with so many animals in the sea. I also spend time looking at ecosystems in the ocean to give a broader picture of what's happening down there. And the story I did a couple of years ago for the magazine was about sea mounts. These are areas that are mountains in the sea, essentially. There are far more mountains underwater than there are on land, but yet most of them remain unexplored. There are areas of tremendous biodiversity. This is a photograph from a mountain range called Cortez Banks, located about a hundred miles off San Diego, California. It's a spectacular kelp forest environment here. And although most folks have no idea that these places exist, you can be sure that fishing fleets know that they're there and they are fishing them as we speak. Many of these are being targeted as some of the last hot spots in the ocean. A few years ago, I proposed a story to the magazine about the global fish crisis, the problems of overfishing in the world. And this came about largely for two reasons. Throughout my career, I had seen a lot of degradation. I saw fewer fish, less sharks in the places I used to see sharks. I also read a scientific paper that was published in the British Journal Nature around that time that stated that 90% of the big fish in the ocean have disappeared in the last 60 years post World War II due to commercial industrialized overfishing. When I read that paper, I thought this was going to be headline news in every media outlet, but it really didn't get that much attention. So I proposed a story of the magazine and it became a cover story. I spent about two years going around the world and there are so many issues associated with overfishing. We couldn't cover them all, but I wanted to focus on a few. And a lot of it was just getting readers to get a grasp for what this means, what commercial fishing is really all about. I mean, they're using Star Wars kind of equipment here and the fish truly don't have a chance. These are absolute factories at sea. This is a picture of one of these ships. They're 450 feet long and they do everything at sea. They catch the fish, they process them, they package them, they freeze them and then when they hit the dock, they immediately unload them less than 24 hours. They're back out there at sea. I really, with this story, wanted to approach it not like a typical underwater story. I wanted this to be more like war photography. I wanted readers to get a sense of what was happening to marine wildlife around the planet because this is not like other things that we eat in many cases. It's a harvesting of wildlife. This is one of the most common methods of fishing in the world, something called a bottom trawl. This was a small one that was being used in Mexico to catch shrimp. It's used on a much grander scale all over the world and essentially the way this works is you've got a net with buoys on the top and a lead-weighted line on the bottom and two big steel doors. This entire assembly is towed behind a boat and as those doors meet resistance to the water, it opens the mouth of the net. As you can also envision, it's quite effective at catching everything else in its path as well and because this was a bottom trawler being used to catch shrimp that would bounce into the net, it was also effectively clear-cutting that precious benthic layer on the bottom all the little corals and anemones and all these things that are not intended to be caught but inevitably do get caught. This photograph shows the fisherman's hands. I made this picture after he towed that net for one hour and he had a handful of shrimp, seven or eight shrimp, and all those other animals that are dead on the deck of his boat are called bycatch. These are animals that are unintended catch that will be thrown back into the sea as trash. This is in many places in the world. This is the true cost of a shrimp dinner. A handful of shrimp and maybe 10 or 12 pounds of other animals that have no commercial value. And to make that point even more visual, I swam under the shrimp boat as they were shoveling this bycatch back into the sea and photographed this cascade of death, if you will, you know, guitar fish and bat rays, baby flounder, that only an hour before were alive on the bottom of the ocean. With this story, I also spent time looking at shark fishing worldwide because right now, today on Planet Earth, we are still killing in excess of 100 million sharks every single year. You know, we cannot kill 100 million apex predators and expect any ecosystem to be healthy. Before I went out to photograph this component of the story, I sort of wrestled with how do you make a picture of a dead shark that will resonate with readers because, you know, there's still this conception that these are bad animals. They're monsters and, you know, the only good shark is a dead shark. And I made a number of images like this that were technically fine and could have worked. One morning when I jumped in the water and found this thresher shark that had just recently died in a gill net and because it's a pelagic animal that lives out in the open ocean to have these big pectoral fins and its eye was still open and as I framed it up in my viewfinder, it sort of struck me as a crucifixion and I thought that maybe this would give some empathy to that issue of 100 million sharks. It ended up being the lead picture or cover story on the global fish crisis and I think, you know, it's had a life since then in 2007. It's been used by a number of NGOs to sort of get the attention about the need to cease this sort of slaughter of sharks. One of my most recent stories, I was published in the magazine last year, was about the Atlantic bluefin tuna, an animal that is quite enigmatic that I've been chasing for decades, very difficult to get close to. I really wanted this story to help readers understand what a magnificent creature this is, not just, you know, something that we eat. I want readers and folks to understand what you're eating. You know, I think we all go to a restaurant with friends and somebody orders a steak and we know where a steak comes from and somebody orders chicken and we know what a chicken is, but when you're eating bluefin tuna sushi, I often wonder does anybody really have an appreciation for this magnificent animal? This is an animal like nothing else on the planet. This is an animal that continues to grow its entire life. If we weren't so efficient at catching them, there'd be 30-year-old bluefin out there that weigh a ton, but they don't get anywhere near that big these days. These are animals that can generate heat in their body. This is really a warm-blooded fish and because of that they can swim practically from the equator to the poles in search of their prey. To be underwater in the wild, like this picture in Canada with one of these animals, I wrote in my book, Ocean Soul, I wrote to be with a bluefin tuna underwater in the wild is to witness the sense of divinity in nature. They are so perfect and just an amazing predator. I believe they should be revered for their biology, but instead they're just prized for their flesh, the most valuable animal on the planet. Some fish have sold for as much as a million dollars in the Ski G fish market in Tokyo. It's sort of dawned on me that the ocean is not a grocery store. We can't continue to take like this without some serious consequences as a result, and that's what we're seeing right now. I think the only solution for species like this, highly migratory carnivorous animals like bluefin, is to just give them a break. We need to sort of reduce the effort that's happening in many places on both sides of the Atlantic, in this case, but all tenets really need to be given a break. But that's not to say there aren't solutions for fish, and there are solutions. The story that we did last year in the magazine was about aquaculture, and I have to admit that I went into this story with sort of some negative preconceived notions, and the story for us was really about mankind moving from being hunter-gatherers in the sea to being farmers of the sea, and this picture was sort of a metaphor for that that I made in Panama. What I wanted to do with this story was to see the various methods that are used around the world, some of the better methods that seem to be working effectively. I think it's a real opportunity for business and for healthy food going forward. Their actual farm is about eight miles offshore, and they employ a method of aquaculture known as open ocean aquaculture, which uses the current to distribute waste. One of the problems with raising finfish near land is that you often get the accumulation of waste, which can choke the coastal ecosystem, but if you're in an area of high current offshore, they're about eight miles offshore, it distributes that, and that's not a problem. They're raising a species of fish known as cobia, which are sushi-grade, very high-quality fish. They grow very fast. They go from about a 1.25 gram fingerling to about a 12-pound fish in just a year. Despite the gear and the environment, there are a lot of parallels to terrestrial farmers. You know, it's a farmer mending his fences. This guy's just cleaning the nets. They photographed another open ocean company in Mexico, but this one was a little bit different. It was a family business that for generations had fished for shrimp, and they used these trawlers that scraped the bottom of the ocean that was very damaging. The government had a buyback program, and this company had 17 trawlers, and at the time I was there a couple of years ago, they had sold 14 of their trawlers, were using the money to invest in aquaculture. So here we see the old technology towing out the new technology, and this is something called an aquapod. It's sort of a geodesic dome, like a giant soccer ball that has two hemispheres that'll be bolted together and then submerged under water, and they were raising shrimp. They were the only company in the world, at least at the time, maybe still, that was actually attempting this sort of open ocean shrimp aquaculture that I was aware of. The big thing is feed conversion ratio. How many pounds of feed does it take to raise one pound of whatever it is you're raising? At the time I was there with the shrimp, it was less than one-to-one, which was very, very good. They had also noticed that there was algae that was naturally occurring on the aquapods and that the shrimp were beginning to graze on that, so they were hoping that in time they might not even have to feed the shrimp, that the feed would just be produced naturally. Aquaculture, of course, is not new. It's something that dates back in some places like China over 2,000 years. China's actually the largest producer of aquaculture in the world, and their biggest product is carp, but it's all used domestically. They don't export, it's all done domestically, but it works well. It seems to be an effective way over there. Well, the world's largest producer of tilapia is in a small little factory in Martinsville, Virginia, a small place in Virginia in the United States. In this place they use a method called a recirculation facility where they pump artesian well water into these big cement tanks where they raise the fish. The work is throwing some feed in here, and they recirculate the water. They filter it and recirculate it. Those are the big tumblers, the big filters in the background that we lit up there. There's very little testing going on. They don't test for heavy metals. They don't test for a lot of toxins and things, but with aquaculture they can do that. They can deliver a high quality product as the world is demanding better quality and assurances. Aquaculture can certainly do that, and I think that's the future of these sort of directions. There are many issues that need to be considered, but they've come a long way in a very short amount of time. This is an aerial photo of a lake, Laguna Lake, where there's no regulation. There are other nearby lakes that are very well managed, but this one wasn't, and they're feeding. They're constantly feeding these tilapia, and what happens is you get these algae blooms that can really create a toxic situation. It can choke the water column and it's not a very healthy situation. I think this is something that we just need to be mindful of. It's easily corrected and easily solved if good management is put in place. The last method of aquaculture that I wanted to share with you today is one that I found the most interesting. It's something called integrated multi-trophic aquaculture, and this is basically raising multiple species that sort of work in harmony with each other, that all work together, each being a harvestable product by itself. And the company that I photographed here was started by a scientist on the west coast of Vancouver Island in Canada, a small startup company, and very clever. And as I mentioned earlier, raising finfish can be a problem because of the waste. It can create nitrates, which will do a lot of damage to the ecosystem. But in this case, just down current of the fish, he was raising scallops. These are Japanese scallops. He had about a million of these in these cages. Each one, he told me, sells for a dollar, so he had a million dollars with the scallops here. These are filter feeders that naturally filter the water, so that waste produced by the finfish is naturally being processed by scallops, and that's what they do. And just down current of the bivalves of the scallops, he was raising sugar kelp on these sort of underwater clothes lines, if you will. And the sugar kelp, also a harvestable product, was being sold to companies for pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals, and they were also looking for food products. The kelp actually continues to purify the water by taking nitrates and turning it into oxygen. So each of these is working in harmony with each other. Aquaculture is a great opportunity for investors and for businesses going forward because they can deliver a controlled product with high quality. We're at the point now with wild stocks where almost every stock is fully harvestable. You know, we've reached the limit, and most stocks are on the way down in many places. I think if we're going to feed 9 billion people in the time ahead, we're going to have to look to the ocean as a way to deliver protein, and it can be done. From what I can see, it is, in fact, a solution. I also wanted to spend a little time today talking about coral reefs, because right now, today, in the 21st century, we have lost somewhere between 40% to 50% of the world's coral reefs. To find truly healthy coral reefs, you have to journey to some of the world's most remote locations. I've done three expeditions to the central South Pacific, and this is what you can find there. You know, these are very remote islands. This is an aerial view of millennium atoll. And because of their remoteness, they have remained largely unspoiled. This is Enrique hovering over a newly discovered species of coral, something that was new to science. And it still sort of blows me away that we can go to places in relatively shallow water in the world and make these new discoveries. Historically, it was believed that reefs were comprised mostly of reef fish and very few predators, like sharks. But they determined, by essentially traveling back in time to these places, that a really healthy coral reef is a biomass of about 85% of predators, animals like sharks, that all has to do with the metabolism and the reproductive rate of these animals and how they generate food for each other. I saw that every animal played a vital role that the herbivores, like parrotfish, were vital because they managed the algae growth on the reefs that would otherwise choke it in places where there were upwellings of planktivores like soldierfish and surgeonfish milling around. After the global fish story a few years ago, I wanted to do a story that talked about hope and show the value of marine protected areas. So I went to New Zealand to do that because New Zealand had a variety of ecosystems and they were quite progressive in terms of protecting their EEZ. Every part of the ecosystem seemed to be healthy. The benthic level with little nudibranchs crawling over sponge and leather jackets, a type of trigger fish that graze on the bottom and allow new life to take hold. And I wanted to close with this picture that I call my primal ocean picture. This was made in a part of New Zealand called Port Nights Island. Before I made this photograph, I was having tea with an old-time Kiwi diver, a guy named Wade Doak, and over tea he told me that he believed that the marine life and the diving was better in this place today than it was when he began diving in the 1950s or 1960s. But here was a place that was better today simply because they protected it in the 1980s. So I think the message is clear, that the ocean is resilient and tolerant to a point, and we have to be wise about how we manage it. We don't need to put it in a lock box. It doesn't need to be kept in a safe and hands-off. I think the latest models of marine managed areas are showing that we can fish in parts of them, we can manage them, and we can use them for ecotourism and many different things. We just have to be smart about how we do it. But if left alone and given a chance, the ocean has the ability to heal itself. So thank you very much.