This interview has been edited to facilitate reading.
Wired: What meeting with a marine animal motivated you to dedicate yourself to underwater photography?
Gerardo del Villar: The first marine animal that convinced me was a cat shark. It was during a meeting in Belize, in 2005. They are very docile animals, but at that time, we did not have the information we have today.
I hoped to meet the dreaded “comus -bombers”, but when I saw him, I realized that it was a helpless animal, I was more afraid of me than me. That moment aroused my curiosity and decided to learn more about sharks. I traveled to the island of Guadalupe, in Mexico, to see white sharks, and took a small camera with me Point and Shoot. When I managed to photograph a white shark, I understood that the camera was not only a tool, but a bridge to share my end: to meet the sharks.
Wired: The cinema has reduced sharks to one or two ideas: that they are terrifying and insatiable. What do you learn to be with them and why do you defend them?
Gerardo del Villar: From an early age I dreamed of being a diver because my parents were. My mother died when I had a year, and my dad told me her adventures with sharks, she said they were bad. At seven I saw the movie Shark And Hooper’s attention, the scientist. In the end, when the shark destroys the boat, he gets into a cage, the shark breaks it and we all think they had eaten it, but in the end, he survives. Shortly after, we went to a beach in Tuxpan, Veracruz. My dad bought a dead tiburoncito from a fisherman and played with him on the beach with my media brothers. All those moments made my love for sharks born. For me, living with animals is my safe area. It is the place where I feel calm, where I’m really me. I feel free, comfortable.
Wired: A year ago, in Wired we count how overfishing reached the sea depths, threatening stripes and sharks. In your 20 years of meetings with these creatures, have you seen changes in their populations? What is the exhaustion of the sea in the front row?
Gerardo del Villar: I have seen two phenomena. Without going far, in Cozumel there was more life than now. But I have also seen places like Cabo Pulmo [Baja California Sur]where 20 years ago there were almost no sharks, and now it is full. When the sharks are present naturally, without someone feeding them, it is a sign that the ecosystem is healthy. In Cabo Pulmo they have created areas that have become points of hope. They are not enough, but there you can find the entire food chain, from sharks to the smallest plankton. When you take away the sharks, the entire ecosystem is unbalanced.
Lately, I have seen more and more dead and bleached coral, and it is very sad.
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