From near-fatal shark attack survivor to passionate sealife campaigner, unconventional conservationist Paul de Gelder is on a mission to change the way we see the world’s most misunderstood predator
s animal kingdom reputations go, sharks don’t exactly have the best of them. As any good publicist will tell you, “attack” isn’t really the word you want most closely associated with your brand. But Australian conservationist Paul de Gelder is a man on a mission, determined to change the way we think about these much misunderstood predators of the sea.
And that’s something of an understatement. Official estimates suggest 100m sharks are killed annually. De Gelder believes that figure is in reality far higher. “That’s only the registered numbers,” he says, “slaughtered each year for food, medicine and in bycatch.” Consider the amount of illegal and unregulated fishing that occurs globally, he states, and that figure could easily be double. “If you did to land-based wildlife what we do to sharks,” he says, “you’d go to jail for it, no question.
Then and now, de Gelder is pragmatic. He asked some of the police officers present on the day why it might have happened. “A dead body had been pulled out from under a wharf in the harbour the day before. The shark probably thought I was another corpse. Or I looked like an injured seal flapping about on the water’s surface.” That was always enough of an answer for him.
In 2014, the Discovery Channel approached him to co-present a show about great whites. “After that, I was hooked,” he says, “I started to presenton the network, and relocated to Los Angeles. The assignments have been challenging but rewarding. There were the two days and nights he spent drifting through the Atlantic Ocean with no food or water, surrounded by a group of sharks known as the wolves of the sea.
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