Introducing Chris Fallows is akin to experiencing the start of a superhero movie. He’s gone where few have dared to go: free-diving with great white sharks and facing agitated male elephants. Yet the most life-threatening encounters he has had have involved humans plundering marine protected areas.
Fallows, the wildlife photographer, naturalist, shark expert, ocean advocate, elephant whisperer, skipper, explorer and activist, speaks to the FM from an island in the Maldives as he’s waiting for a flight to a small atoll. He’s hoping to dive with a special shark he hasn’t seen in the wild for 19 years — the now critically endangered oceanic white tip shark. Jacques Cousteau called them the most dangerous sharks in the sea. Fallows describes them as “bold”.
Having spent decades around great whites as a photographer, ecotourism operator and guide for international film crews, Fallows was the first to capture pictures of great whites breaching as they ambushed seals. He has learnt to read big sharks’ body language. He says he experiences a healthy frisson of fear, but knows when sharks are being curious, and recognises when they’re agitated. Most of all, he loves them and wants to protect them.
South Africa was the first country to legally protect great whites, he says. It’s now on its way to being the first to have driven its great white population into functional extinction.
They were directly catching and killing protected species, endemic species — and unbelievable numbers of them
— Chris Fallows
That isn’t due to a couple of shark-eating rogue orcas, known as Port and Starboard because of their floppy dorsal fins that droop, one to the left and the other to the right, according to Fallows. The disappearance of white sharks from False Bay coincided with the flourishing of demersal longlining. This involves commercial fishing vessels running lines with baited hooks at regular intervals on the ocean floor to target bottom-dwelling fish. In South Africa the fish they target include hake, kingklip and sharks.
Yes, sharks. The shark meat is exported to Australia and sold as flake, Fallows says. Down Under, battered flake and chips is a popular meal and the flake is known to be shark meat. But some of the sharks used for this are on the threatened list, and a number of them are imported, according to a 2023 University of Adelaide study.
Commercial longliners in South Africa weren’t specifically targeting great whites, but they were targeting some of their favourite snacks — small soupfin and smoothhound sharks, even though they’re a threatened species. As the longlining ramped up, the white shark numbers declined, says Fallows, who ran Apex Shark Adventures in False Bay for many years.
“What we didn’t understand at the time was that the commercial longline fisheries weren’t only taking out the white sharks’ food, they were killing a lot of white sharks through entanglements,” says Fallows. “When the white sharks came across lines filled with their favourite foods struggling, of course they picked the cherries off the cake, but when they did that, they got tangled in the main line and drowned.”
As an ocean lover, Fallows had also been exploring the marine protected area at De Hoop for decades because of its extensive biodiversity. In 2001 and 2002 “we were seeing 500 to 600 hammerheads and we’d have 100 bronze whaler breaches in a day. You’d see soupfin sharks, smoothhound sharks, ragged tooth sharks,” he says. “It was consistent for a long time, but then, in about 2015, the longliners appeared.”
These boats would fish in the protected area or right on its boundary, and very quickly the number of hammerheads observed by conservationists around De Hoop dropped to almost zero, says Fallows.
“They were killing truckloads of the animals,” he says. “They were directly catching and killing protected species, endemic species — and unbelievable numbers of them.”
Fallows and fellow conservationists took photographic and scientific evidence to the authorities, but nothing happened. Eventually Fallows and his colleagues, at risk to their own lives, laid complaints with police against the White Rose fishing vessel. It became a landmark case last year, when its operator, the Gqeberha-based company Unathi-Wena Fishing, became the first to be found guilty of illegally fishing inside a marine protected area. It led to convictions and a R2m fine.
But there’s no happy ending. Even though the department of forestry, fisheries & the environment crowed about the White Rose win, it has recently approved four new longlining licences for the De Hoop area, according to Fallows. No extra buffer zones are in place, no new enforcement, and no new ways of evaluating the fisheries’ catches. Endangered species of sharks remain unprotected. The battle is far from over.
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