© Brian Skerry
Skerry shot this lemon shark pup with a Nikon D2X and a 16mm f/2.8D AF Fisheye-Nikkor lens. Click photo for more images by Brian Skerry and others.
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There's a desire by a lot of underwater photographers to portray sharks as something scary," says Brian Skerry. "Usually the shark is shown with big teeth and jaws, often biting on something, and those kinds of pictures sell pretty well. But I tried to resist the urge to do that."
When Skerry proposed a story to National Geographic on the shark populations of the Bahamas last year, he was thinking about the vulnerability of sharks, not their ferocity. "Right now there are an estimated 100 million sharks killed each year around the world," he says. Most are killed for their fins, which command $300 a pound in Asian markets; others die as the unintended take of commercial fishermen. "Sharks have only a few pups a year, and those pups are slow to mature," says Skerry. "The result is that in places like the Atlantic, shark populations are down anywhere from 50 percent to 89 percent."
But not in the Bahamas, where populations of lemon sharks, hammerheads, makos, and other species thrive. "It may be because they don't allow commercial long-line fishing there," says Skerry, who has been diving since age 14 and now specializes in marine wildlife photography, also lecturing on conservation issues. Skerry photographed a number of elusive species in novel ways, including a foot-long lemon shark pup in a mangrove swamp on the island of Bimini (left). The pup will spend the first two to three years of its life in the swamp before moving out to become an apex predator of the sea.
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