Seven Oaks Magazine.

UBC Fisheries expert Dr. Daniel Pauly stood in front of an audience of international scientists and journalists last October in Montreal, and succinctly explained how our oceans are being reduced to giant “balls of snot.” The problem, he explained, is our hundred-year-long habit of “fishing down the line.” As catches of large piscivorous fish decline, our fisheries adapt to catches of smaller and smaller species, eventually exhausting the entire fish supply down to the smallest plankton-eating fish. Already without a balanced food chain to control the so-called ‘lower species’ of the sea, the microbial and algae populations in some areas are blooming, smothering larger plant forms, consuming oxygen, and taking over in large snot-like accumulations of sludge.

Sharks, arguably the top-notches in the seafaring food chain, play a crucial role in the maintenance of the health of ocean populations we have come to know and love. Like wolves, vultures, and hyenas, sharks sweep in upon sick and injured beasts and clean up the mess, freeing up resources for the healthier fish and mammal populations.

Along those lines, attendants at the Vancouver Aquarium noticed something distinctly fishy last year: some of their wards were going missing overnight. For years, a dozen or so dog-sized reef sharks had peacefully co-existed with a few handfuls of cat-sized bluefin trevallys – better known as skipjacks. But then suddenly, out of the blue, every another skipjack or two would go missing every night. An autopsy performed on a partially-nibbled-on skipjack revealed that the aged fish was full of tumours. The reef sharks, using their specialised ‘sixth sense’ which involves detection of bioelectric fields, realised that the bluefins were reaching the ends of their lifecycles. The sharks simply did their jobs and began the cleanup process: within a week, the entire dying stock of tumour-ridden bluefins was consumed.

In the newly-released Sharks 3D, diver and filmmaker Jean-Jacques Mantello created an IMAX feature that didn’t spotlight on technology, humans, or personalities; the entire film is ostensibly narrated via dubbed footage of a sea turtle, a swimmingly situated guide who explains over and over that he objects to becoming a shark’s lunch. Though the term “shark” plausibly originates with the German shurke – a word meaning scoundrel, villain, or basically one who preys on others – Mr. Turtle (or at least the several turtles who swapped in and out of the role) didn’t realise that not only hadn’t he signed a release form, but also that the humans filming him were more likely than the sharks to have him over for lunch.

Mantello spent more than 500 dive hours in a handful of ecosystems spanning Mexico, Columbia, Egypt, South Africa, and French Polynesia. His goal was to re-cast the ‘shark’ from his unfortunate over-the-top character in Jaws and the like, back to a more classic role as the beautiful, lithe, ancient creature with a deserved kingdom in the sea. Using digital filming techniques to first capture over 100 hours of footage and later convert it into a 45 minute long IMAX über-screen stereoscopic 3D projection, Mantello created a film that places you, the audience member, swimming underwater next to spectacular occurrences; picture a few dozen pregnant female hammerheads as they migrate, writhing, in a school to their birthing grounds.

Mantello’s approach made the filming technology useful within its invisibility. Except for one brief shot that shows a diver in the murky background, there are no humans featured either preparing on the boats for the dives, or interfering with the wildlife underwater.

During the film, you forget the world of humans and swim alongside a wall of sardines, get ignored by a great white, discover that sea lions will stare you down when you’re on their turf, and peer right into the five-foot-wide open mouth of the plankton-eating whale shark. The footage also features cameo appearances by a host of cartilaginous fish: a silky shark, a couple of sawtooth sharks, grey reef sharks, black-tip sharks, sand tiger sharks, and a meditative gliding bird-like black manta ray.

And the trip, is well, trippy. The admission price of $11.50 CDN and the irksome scratchy plastic 3D glasses should neither of them be daunting enough to keep anyone away from Vancouver’s Canada Place for a potentially substance-enhanced experience that could easily replace the tired H.R. MacMillan Space Centre’s pot-a-palooza laser light shows. Though you’re likely to get kicked out and arrested for combusting anything within the theatre proper, you might get away with discreet ingestions before you sit down and float forwards through an enveloping jellyfish field.

As with the plotlines of M. Night Shyamalan’s popular films, you’re kept on the edge of your seat wondering who is going to ‘bite it’ and when, only to find that the real twist comes unexpectedly in the end. During the credits of Sharks 3D, we learn the names for all of the members of the lovable and oddball cast – along with their endangered species classifications.

The filmmakers noted that it is becoming more and more difficult to locate some these older-than-dinosaur species. Due to by-catching and over-poaching for their fins – for the delicacy known as shark fin soup – most of the shark species we know today are endangered or, like the hammerhead shark, whale shark, and the pitifully ugly sawtooth shark, critically endangered.

If we continue along our present course of overfishing the ocean stocks and killing the estimated 100-200 million sharks every year, some scientists warn that we have only to look forward to a very large serving of what Dr.Pauly expressed as “plankton soup.” Which is fine, if that’s what we like. With all the daily dire warnings for our oceans and the appearance of gut-wrenching masterpieces like Sharks 3D, it is hard not to start thinking that humans might be the true villains of the ocean – the real shurkes. After all, we did invent the word.