I had just obtained my diving certification a few months prior and was visiting my mother who was working in the region for the UN. I remember chugging out in the small boat to an area north-east of Ras Muhammed, the southern-most point of the Sinai peninsula where the Gulf of Aquaba meets the Gulf of Suez in the Red Sea. We were told that our drift dive would take us past a wall and onto a platform where we would ascend. The current took us flying past a stunning wall that I subsequently found out plunges to a kilometre in depth, only to slow and nearly halt once we had passed it. There out in the blue, were sharks. I’m not entirely sure what got ahold of me but it was the first time I had seen sharks in the wild. I swam towards them. There were only a few at first, and then 10, then 20, then 30. They were all whizzing about me within feet, some within inches. I was transfixed. I laughed into my regulator and clapped my hands with delight. I lost count after more than 50 sharks appeared. They were all grey reef, Carcharhinus amblyrhynchos, were all fairly beefy and approximately six feet in length. I turned to look for the others and saw them far away very close to the wall or near the platform. I was completely alone amid my very own sharknado and I couldn’t have been happier. That is when I knew sharks would play a part in my life – one way or another.

I was extremely keen on sharks and the sea from the age of four years old. I was seven when I witnessed the fishing of tuna during their annual migration off the coast of Tunisia, and saw fishers herding them with nets and clubbing and gaffing them. The water ran red with blood and I could see that the fish, which were swimming on top of one another, were petrified as they tried to escape. That experience struck me hard and shaped a concern for the seas and marine wildlife that took many more years to form who I am, what I now do for these animals and how I work with those whose livelihoods depend on them.

The largest threat to sharks and rays today is overfishing. Every other threat at this stage is secondary. And although there is a large western focus on finning, the demand for fins and the act of finning are not the threats, the actual act of fishing is the threat, whether it’s targeted or not. The outlandish level of fishing effort using highly unsustainable gear and extremely advanced technologies has ensured that fish can’t escape. Globally, governments have a collective goal to protect 10% of the world’s seas by 2020. However these protected areas, both established and proposed, do not encompass all species and all populations during all periods of their life cycle. But they can help to protect them during their most vulnerable stages in life such as post-birth, feeding predictably, and are therefore one of several solutions to enable populations and species to persist, along with time closures, gear bans or restrictions and species capture bans. Being migratory, some highly so, most shark and ray species use a range of habitats and sites and are therefore constantly subjected to fishing pressures. Another aspect that plays against these animals is their slow life history. Most people do not realise that many large bodied sharks reach sexual maturity around the same age as humans or far later (over 20 years for a whale shark, over 100 for a Greenland shark) and generally have few young, where species such as manta rays or sand tiger sharks only have one pup after a year’s gestation. Add in a reproductive pause following pupping in many of the species to the equation and you have species that are intrinsically unable to recover populations, even those that are subjected to relatively low levels of exploitation.