National Geographic Live! - David Doubilet & Jennifer Hayes: From Islands to Ice

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♪ (soaring string music) ♪
♪ (ambient music) ♪
David Doubilet: Unseen, unknown, mysterious.
Beautiful and existence,
city in the sea.
The richest part of our planet.
It was paradise.
(applause)
Good evening!
What we want to show tonight
is basically a year.
A year in photography.
And we will take you on a journey,
mostly under seas,
from the boiling hot tropics,
the volcano-laced tropics,
to the cold water, to the ice,
to the arctic.
And I think I may share
a little bit about us.
We work as a team. We're together 24/ 7,
which is--
We are married, you know.
Yes, we are married.
But it's a good partnership.
Jennifer has always said
that I have this teenage crush
about Papua New Guinea.
But 18 years ago, it's now 18 years ago,
I was in a place called Kimbe Bay,
I was there for the total of six days.
And in those six days I made
some very serious, wonderful pictures.
And I had to go back, I had to go back.
But the years passed and suddenly...
The phone rang and it was...
It was the office
and they said to me,
"You. You have been selected
to participate, to contribute
in the 125th anniversary issue,
David: the photography issue
of the National Geographic magazine ."
They said, "You can go anywhere you want,
shoot anything you want."
And I said to myself, "Kimbe Bay," ding!
And so we had an assignment.
But here's a problem that all of you share right now
and that problem is 'Where the hell is Kimbe Bay?'
(audience laughter)
David: Well, Kimbe Bay is in the Coral Triangle.
And the Coral Triangle is where, on this planet,
the most bio-diverse, the most numbers
of fish, coral and of course, invertebrates live.
This was a perfect assignment.
What could possibly go wrong?
Hmm.
The whole story's had a cloud over it.
Boiling dark cloud.
The monsoon is still going on.
The wettest March and April since 1970.
The batteries are smoldering, stinking and burning.
Your camera's on fire.
It nearly burnt the place down.
Strobes flood.
A GoPro floods.
Gone.
We lose another light.
The electronics are scrambled.
Torrential rains.
And kaboom!
Another $3,000.
Charger blows up.
Like this place has it in for us.
Mosquitoes are buzzing around our heads.
You don't have to worry about the bends,
you have malaria.
And as of two days ago, a cyclone.
Guinea is eating us up and spit us out.
And this story was supposed to be a gift,
an easy, beautiful story.
Funny, all these years, all these stories,
every place we've gone to we're sort of
reluctant to leave.
But it's over now.
So say goodnight Buffalo Bob.
Goodnight Buffalo Bob.
Well, the one sunny day.
David: This is what this place looked like.
It's an absolute paradise.
Deep water with these wonderful sea mounds
rising from thousands of feet, almost to the surface,
and surrounded by volcanoes.
And here's this mysterious lake
called Dok Toek, the forbidden lake.
No foreigners, nobody but tribesmen
can go to this lake because it's full of spirits
and crocodiles.
The offshore reefs, like this incredible place
called Kimbe Bomi and they were far offshore,
two and a half hour boat rides every day.
Hundred and twenty-five feet down at the top of the reef.
They were like absolute gardens,
these deep, underwater volcanoes.
♪ (melodic music) ♪
David: Bradford is the most spectacular dive here.
There's a sea mount called Bradford Shoals.
It rises up from the deep,
it is rounded, steep-shouldered
and has an immense school of chevron barracuda,
which swim around in great circles,
almost making funnel-shaped clouds.
Around they go, spooling upwards.
When fish move in a circular pattern,
they create the rarest thing in the sea
which is a geometric pattern,
a place that has no corners, no edges.
Geometry in a place of weightless chaos.
♪ (melodic music continues) ♪
And then the barracudas would form these immense,
circular tornado-shaped towers,
David: going from basically the bottom of the reef
all the way to the surface,
sometimes 70, 80 feet high.
Look at this.
And here's Jennifer on the side
of one of these towers.
The first time we landed on this sea mount,
called Joelles, it was raining fish.
Jennifer Hayes: They were isolated, they were unfound,
they were untouched.
And they were de facto marine protected areas.
They just had no sense of humans
and one of the scariest things
and in-your-face conservation I have ever seen
was a group of fishermen in a single boat,
what they call a banana boat
and they had found Joelles reef
and they had anchored on it
and they had been on it all night fishing.
And the minute they saw our boat coming,
they cut their line and they sped off.
And it turns out when we went down,
all we found were hooks and fishing line,
and half or more of the fish were gone.
All of the pinjalo snappers.
Every pinjalo snapper was gone.
This is one night on one small piece
of real estate in the ocean that was wiped out.
And the next day when we were
in the Kimbe Bay market there were the pinjalos.
And it shows you how fragile,
first off it shows us how marine protected areas
work and function and then it shows us
how vulnerable these places are.
David: There's small things on this reef.
I have to tell you, anemones and clownfish,
it's one of the most beautiful friendships in the sea.
The anemones protect the clownfish's eggs,
protect the clownfish at night
with its stinging tentacles.
The clownfish protects the anemones
from being nibbled to death by butterfly fish.
But Joelles has this wonderful collection
of anemones and toward the evening
they ball up like this
and the clownfish begin to burrow in their stomachs.
I also managed to photograph spawning.
Here are the big female clownfish.
And the female is the dominant partner
in this relationship.
If the female dies, the largest male
turns into a female and begins to produce eggs.
They're producing eggs right now.
And that purple curtain in the background
is the side of the anemone.
We dove with sharks.
(ocean waves)
♪ (ambient chime music) ♪
♪ (ambient chime music continues) ♪
We were amazed and shocked
and pleased to see sharks in Kimbe Bay.
They would meet you when you rolled off the boat
and you were like, "This is the way
it is supposed to be."
So it was just another indicator,
another symbol that these reefs had survived
where other reefs throughout the Coral Triangle
had not done as well.
David: We dove on a place called Father's Reef
and we met a hawksbill turtle.
And she met us on every dive.
We could swim with her as she made her rounds
past schools of barracudas and schools of bat-fish.
I love this picture because it looks
like the turtle is flying.
And then she'd do this amazing thing:
instead of going to the surface
and going back down to another piece of bottom,
she would come and she would rest on our tanks.
And she would do this, she would take her flippers
and put her flippers around the tank
and rest there.
Jennifer: It was wonderful, she really was magic.
She met us on every dive
and she would follow you and when she was tired
she would rest on you.
And it was a magic moment.
But it was also a terrifying moment
in terms of that makes this particular animal
very vulnerable.
The local fishermen there, they fish the reefs
that they can find and they harvest anything
they can find on the reefs,
from reef fish to turtles.
And we would be diving, a local banana boat
comes up and with a group of people,
the young man swims down the turtle.
"How much, how much, how much?
You buy, you buy, you buy.
Would you like to buy?"
Your gut inclination is for a handful of dollars
is to buy that turtle,
take it to the next coral sea mount
and let it go.
But you can't do that
because you're setting up a trade, an economy.
They'll go catch another turtle
and they'll come back to you again.
Or they'll go catch the same turtle
and bring it back to you.
We were in a tiny empire.
A perfect, tiny coral empire.
And we needed, we needed to have an image
of coral.
A panorama.
A shot that said, "This is this coral world."
Built of tiny polyps, beautiful in existence,
city in the sea.
This picture isn't the one we wanted.
David: And we kept looking and we kept searching.
David: A place called an Ann-Sofie.
It's a group of islands at the tip
of the Williamez Peninsula.
And there's one little island,
it's not even an island,
it's an island with a bunch of trees on it
and sort of a lone palm tree.
And it has in one corner of it,
a field in very, very shallow water.
David: In less than a foot there is a field
of beautiful purple-laced coral intermingled
with a cropper coral and stagnant coral.
David: It's absolutely beautiful.
And we worked there and photographed
David: a picture half and half out of the water.
One of the things I particularly liked to do.
And as we were working a father and son came up
in a dugout, they were fishing there.
We give them lunch later on.
(indistinct chatter)
Jennifer: We'll see Anton and his papa again.
♪ (gentle guitar music) ♪
Whoa! Big fish!
(indistinct chatter)
It was one of those lovely days
where everything worked out.
We made another dive, we went home.
Boiling clouds, complicated skies of Walindi
and its tiny little island.
That's the kind of pictures I really like to make.
David: Here's the picture.
We recently published a story
in the National Geographic magazine
on the gulf of St. Lawrence.
Jennifer: It was a very challenging story
but very near and dear to our hearts.
We live on the St. Lawrence river
in a region called The Thousand Islands.
This is our neighborhood.
David: Yeah, this is not our house, incidentally.
Jennifer: This is, people ask us all the time.
We live in an area surrounded by 1,800 islands,
storybook castles and an amazing creature
Jennifer: called the sturgeon.
There are 27 species of sturgeon in the world.
They're all in the northern hemisphere.
All 27 of them are falling flat on their face
because they are long-lived;
they live to be over 100, sometimes 200.
Get this: they don't spawn until they're
about 25 years old.
And then, not even every year after that.
it's every five years.
So 25, 30, 35 and you can see,
all of a sudden, when you put the pressure
of fisheries on a species like this,
Jennifer: how these stocks are collapsing.
And these sturgeon are very shy,
they like deep water,
they're very rare to see underwater most of the year,
except for one week in the month of June,
thousands of them gather and they meet
on these spawning beds.
This particular type of rock, in very fast water.
This water is like washing machine water,
it is about a four knot current.
Right now I am behind a big giant rock
trying to stay out of the current.
And these girls, these are all girls waiting to spawn,
just ignoring me because they're
all pumped up on hormones.
Any other time of the year I couldn't get near them.
Jennifer: And the sturgeon are a unique fish.
They are so ugly, I think they're beautiful.
I would marry a sturgeon if I could marry a sturgeon.
-I married a sturgeon. -See their mouth and barbules.
-You did marry a sturgeon. -I married a sturgeon.
Oh my God, you did.
These barbules, see these four things.
Those are called barbules
and they have all these chemosensory ability
and they go along the bottom
and they brush past something
and they say, "I can eat that."
And womp! Down comes its mouth.
Have you ever seen a mouth like that?
(audience awes)
David: Past Quebec the river becomes an estuary.
And a little past there the Saginaw River
joins the St. Lawrence and there's a population
David: of beluga whales.
Beluga whales are the white whales,
the canary whales.
They sing and they burble
and they make a lot of noise.
And this guy came right up to me
and kind of blew me a kiss,
it went bloop!
A little bubble came out.
(audience laughter)
David: And then the whale did this marvelous thing.
He tried to eat the camera.
(audience laughter)
Jennifer: There used to be 10,000 beluga whales
in the St. Lawrence.
It can support up to 10,000.
And then they were fished; they were killed,
because all the fishermen thought that they
were competing for fish so they were slaughtered.
And then it got down to a handful of thousand.
And just weeks ago a report came out and said,
"No, no, no, no. We are down to 800."
And what is happening
is there's high infant mortality.
The problem is they don't know what
is causing the infant mortality.
So the Department of Fisheries
and the Canadian scientists
are now in scramble and panic mode
to figure out how to preserve these 800 belugas.
They are precious and they are almost
a symbol of the St. Lawrence.
David: And don't forget,
we are in French Canada, French Canada.
And I photographed crabs.
David: Crabs mating.
(French accent) In French Canada it is not just mating
but is L'Amour ; love.
(audience laughter)
They do this for weeks and weeks
at a time, you know.
(David laughing)
(speaking foreign language)
Après, après l'sex, after l'sex comes l'cigarette.
(audience laughing)
Jennifer: Gimme that.
Oh my God.
Jennifer: The gulf of St. Lawrence
freezes in the winter time
and it becomes the world of the harp seal.
They are nursed by their mothers
for about 12 days.
Then they're abandoned,
they're left on the ice to figure out
how to become a harp seal.
How to feed, how to swim,
how to do anything and everything.
Jennifer: In 2011, when this picture was made,
it took us three days by boat to get to the ice.
It kept moving, there was so little ice in the gulf.
And we located a patch and a field of ice
and it had 10,000 seals.
And this is what 10,000 seals begins to look like.
And we can give you an idea of what it's like
in the world of the harp seal.
That's its umbilical there.
A newborn.
Three days old, with the mother in the back.
(baby seal crying out)
A very nervous mother.
(baby seal cries)
Still a very nervous mother.
To me, they're one of the most beautiful creatures
on the planet.
For the first 12 days of their life,
when they're called the white coats,
they look almost like a stuffed toy.
(audience oohs and awes)
And once in a while you'll see a blind one.
And it's very sad because they'll come up to you,
thinking you're their mother.
They're desperate,
without that particular sensory.
And after 12 to 15 days they begin to molt
and they begin to shed their white coat
and become what's called a beater.
And at this point they are also eligible
to enter the hunt.
The Canadian seal hunt still goes on.
There's a lower quota
and they cannot take the white coats
but they can take the beaters.
Jennifer: And David has found a beater.
And I find a pup peering through the ice,
looking for his mom.
He sees me, he's like, "No."
(audience laughs)
Mom is behind me,
going a little crazy now because I'm between her
and her pup.
She rushes past me and she greets her pup
and she coaxes him into the water.
They meet with this underwater nose-to-nose,
I call it a kiss of recognition. (kissing sound)
It's like smooch, are you my mom?
Are you my pup or are you an impostor?
And while we're swimming the pup is very curious.
What are you? Who are you?
What's going on? Who are you?
And he would try to swim towards me,
he would get a little close
and the mother would come up
and literally hold him down, "No."
And eventually she allowed him to get a little closer
and he gets so close and he scrabbles.
He begins to climb up on my--
Here you come be the seal, you're there.
-So he begins to do this. -I'm the seal.
And then he climbs up onto me,
I'm the raft, I'm the ice.
And now he's on my chest, he's tired
and he's on my chest.
And he's nosing my mask like he did his mom.
Like I'm the impostor, I am the impostor.
Jennifer: We swim along and we move
into this very open water.
Now we're resting, we're all stopped.
Then something nips my left ankle,
then something nips my right ankle.
And I look down and there's 30 or 40
male harp seals circling below me.
A male comes up over my back,
pushes me down,
his penis gets caught in my mask (audience laughs with disgust)
taking it off with him.
The mask drops, we're in 3,000 feet of water.
I see it, I grab it.
Got my camera here
and the male is going down below me
and the female sweeps past
and she goes down and the mother
is beating the crap out of this male.
(audience laughs and applauds)
The mother surfaces,
she surfaces and she's grunting and snorting
(heaving noise)
and she comes back and I'm thinking,
"I'm not sure what's going to happen now."
But she comes back and she uses her head
and her flipper and her entire body
and she kind of scoops up her pup.
Kind of using everything she's got.
And she kind of gets him in front of her.
And then she uses her flipper, her nose,
her body and she scoops me up.
(audience laughs)
-Now... -Super mom.
The pup and I were being propelled.
Herded through the water,
out of this open area where we had
all the males beneath us.
I ducked underneath and I watched the mother
and the pup disappear.
I'm pumped up on adrenaline,
I'm ecstatic, I'm excited,
I go to the edge of the ice
and I throw my camera up.
And I'm taking off my weight belt
and just as I'm taking off my weight belt,
right at the edge of the ice a male harp seal
comes under the edge of the ice
and he bites me square in the groin.
And he lets go.
And then he bites me square in the thigh.
Wonk! And he lets go.
And I have a very, very memorable scar
from all of that.
But it's not the scar and it's not the male
that I would ever or want to or will dwell on.
It is the female and her reaction.
Jennifer: And I will say the world of the harp seal
has been a changing world.
David and I were on our way back to shore,
a storm came up and the ice was so bad, so weak,
(Jennifer: deep breath in)
that when the storm came through,
it wrecked the sea ice and 10,000 pups perished.
Every one of them died.
They had 100 percent mortality of the gulf seals
in that particular year.
This past year in 2014 was a big ice year.
That's a relief, we had a relief year,
because we had had three to four
almost full-on 100 percent mortality years.
So it is a shifting world for our climate there.
And what I want to close on is David and I go back
every year now.
We have become addicted to the ice.
-We feel-- -Extraordinary place.
We go back every year
and what we're trying to do
is create a shifting paradigm
away from hunting into a model of ecotourism.
Now we can take some people up
and we take a week
out of the harp seal hunting boat.
We buy a week, we buy another week,
we buy another week.
And hopefully we'll show them a different economy.
An ecotourism-based economy
where we can take the pressure off the hunting.
And with that I would like to thank you all for coming.
You've been an incredible audience.
(applause)
♪ (gentle string music) ♪
(English US - SDH)