The Thresher sharks of Malapascua

Hey, we're out here. We're just about to catch a boat to Malapascua Island, one of the best places in the entire world to find thresher sharks. Beautiful creatures with really long tails, so we're headed there. We're gonna go book some dives. We're excited. It's the next big part of our series and let's go find some thresher sharks. Just as the cleaner fish get there. 56. That's the good stuff. Hey, so we just left Malapascua Island. We're on our way to Monad Shoal. It's the best place in the world, the most consistent to find thresher sharks, so we're out here with our boat. We're racing towards the sunrise. We just had our dive briefing back at the dive centre. Pretty straightforward. We're gonna go down there, stay nice and low, stay calm, not try to chase any sharks, not try to touch any sharks, and hopefully they get as interested in us as we are with them and they come and check us out and get close and hopefully we get a cool little thresher shark experience. So we just finished our first dive in Malapascua. We just hit up Monad Shoal. It was sweet. We got to see like seven to ten thresher sharks. It was unreal. We were kind of on like a shallow bit and it dropped off so it was like a really deep, dark backdrop. The visibility wasn't amazing in the start of the dive. We weren't really seeing much and we were just waiting, waiting, and we're like, are these things, are they gonna come? Are we gonna see them? They started appearing out of the gloom. Really cool. Just their whole silhouette is like amazing with the tail and everything. Monad Shoal is so unique because it is the only place in the world where you can see the thresher shark or the pelagic thresher shark almost on a daily basis. It serves as a cleaning station for the sharks and other pelagic animals. Thresher shark are quite busy. They're pelagic animals. They travel around long travels. They could even reach to Taiwan. They could even reach to other parts of the world. We have some evidences of pelagic thresher shark reaching in the UK so they could reach as far as they can. It's very noticeable that they go deep because of their big eyes. They could go as deep as 100-200 meters looking for hunting grounds. So they just mainly foraging for food most of the time. It's just past 4 30 a.m. We're one of the first boats headed out here so hopefully we'll get some really good shots. Yesterday we dove with some threshers. It was really cool. We saw about seven of them. A couple of them came close. The visibility wasn't spectacular so some of our shots didn't work out but we're back at it. We're gonna hopefully see just as many threshers and hopefully they're curious about us. They get nice and close and yeah we're here bright and early so first mouse gets the shark and yeah we're out here. Thresher sharks baby! We just got up from Monad Shoal. Really sick dive. We saw like over eight thresher sharks. It was like bam one after another. Big big sharks too. Like maybe six feet at least. One of them got really close to us. Got a look right in the eye. It was really cool to see like when they're close super cool to see the tail. It's unreal and then also at one point we saw one just like really dart around so they're going slow cleaning speed so it was cool to see one just go into top gear, dart around some fish and just like honestly unreal dive. Monad Shoal and Malapascua man this is where it is. How could you start a day better than this? Like absolutely unbelievable. In Malapascua the superstar is the shark so we advocate for the protection of the thresher shark. It's very important for us. The population of the thresher shark is kind of controversial because the thresher sharks doesn't really have the markings that we could identify. All we could identify are those thresher sharks who have bent dorsal fins. That may suggest for birth defects. That may suggest to declining population because thresher shark in the Philippines are still being hunted for for food and it's fins. Most of the fishermen or the commercial fishing boats are arguing that these are bycatch. The government or the commercial fishing boat would say you can't tell the thresher shark not to bite the bait. We have managed to have the thresher shark put into CITES Appendix 2 and automatically under Philippine law once you are listed with CITES it's automatically protected under the Fisheries Code of the Philippines. Divers share common interests. The ocean we love and we must understand that the ocean we love is the source of life. The air that we breathe, the water that we drink. You know so it is very important to have complete understanding of why this particular superstar or the species of thresher shark is very important into the ecosystem. Such a sick dive like haven't been that stoked after a dive in a while. Malapascua has like a really interesting history with the thresher sharks and how they've gone from just being a common fish that they sold in the markets to now being like protected, preserved and conservation is a big thing here. We're lucky to be here, lucky to be there on the days we were here and just absolutely great shots, great sharks, really cool thresher sharks man, unreal.