Lewis Pugh completes swim in great whites ‘hotspot’ for shark protection as Jaws turns 50

By Eyleen Gomez and Emily Beament, PA Environment Correspondent

It took 12 days but Lewis Pugh has swum 59 miles around the island of Martha’s Vineyard, the location where iconic movie Jaws was filmed 50 years ago, in a bid to raise awareness of the importance of sharks to ocean ecology.

Upon completing it on Sunday, Mr Pugh took to his social media account and said: “It's been one of the toughest swims of my life. Cold water, relentless wind, big waves and the constant thought of what might be beneath me.”

“But I swam here for a reason.”

“Jaws has shaped our perception of sharks as vindictive killers. That fear spread across the globe and lasted for half a century.”

“Now it’s time to change the narrative for a new generation.”

“Sharks are not monsters. They’re magnificent. They’re essential. And they’re seriously endangered.”

“As apex predators, they keep the ocean in balance. Take them out, and the entire ecosystem starts to collapse.”

“Right now, sharks need us.”

Mr Pugh, who in the past campaigned for an end to Gibraltar’s balloon release on National Day, added that an estimated 274,000 sharks are killed every single day calling it an ecocide that must stop.

The Plymouth-based activist began his swim around Martha's Vineyard on Thursday, May 15, his backdrop being the US east coast island where the blockbuster was filmed.

Mr Pugh’s fight to highlight the overfishing, climate and pollution threats to the oceans and seek greater protection for the world’s seas has previously seen him take to the water in places ranging from the South Atlantic to the English Channel and up to the Arctic and Greenland’s Ilulissat glacier.

Speaking from Martha’s Vineyard before his latest swim, he told the PA news agency: “It’s a really beautiful island. It’s a small island unless you swim around it.”

He said he expected the swim would be challenging because of the cold seas, currents, the distance he would be covering, and because the area was a global hotspot for great white sharks, adding: “this swim is going to test my body and my mind.”

Everybody he spoke to in Martha’s Vineyard had their own shark story, he said, and while he swam with a support team and an electronic shark deterrent, it was not risk-free.

“I’m a swimmer, I readily admit that I’m frightened of sharks.”

“But I’m really frightened of a world without sharks, they’re essential for a healthy ocean.”

Mr Pugh pointed to what would happen if an apex predator was removed from the biosphere, citing as a theoretical example the loss of lions from southern Africa’s veld or grasslands.

This would lead to a huge increase in species such as wildebeest that would overgraze the land and cause “ecological collapse”, he said.

Sharks eat fish which graze on ocean vegetation and the loss of the predators would lead to overgrazing of seagrass meadows and kelp forests, which are key habitats for numerous ocean species and a major carbon store.

Migratory sharks also cycle nutrients through marine ecosystem, and help store carbon at the bottom of the ocean through their faeces and when they die and their bodies sink to the seabed.

Fossil records for sharks date back 400 million years, before the time of the dinosaurs, but while there are more than 500 species of shark in the oceans, conservationists warn that many are at risk.

Mr Pugh said: “The main direct threat to sharks is simply overfishing, 100 million sharks are killed every year, so on average that’s 274,000 every day. It’s ecocide.”

“But I think the greatest threat is indifference, it’s the belief that sharks really don’t matter, that this catastrophic crash in their numbers will not ultimately impact you.”

“It will, because they’re guardians of the oceans, and oceans are essential for all life on Earth,” he warned.

Protection of great white sharks has enabled the recovery of the species in the US, but sharks are at significant risk globally, he said.

“The challenge with sharks is they have been the most vilified out of all predators, the most feared out of all predators, and so I want to carry this message to other countries, to other swims in other countries where populations are crashing,” he said.

Mr Pugh is calling for an end to killing sharks, which are caught for their fins, oil, meat and sport, as well as “bycatch” in fisheries targeting other species.

And he is supporting the creation and enforcement of marine protected areas – ocean sanctuaries where nature is protected from harmful activities such as fishing – to meet the 30X30 commitment to fully protect 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030.

The swim kicked off a three-year campaign to engage a billion people worldwide with science, education and advocacy.

It came before a key UN ocean conference in France in June, where governments are under pressure to ratify a global treaty to protect the high seas, end damaging fishing practices such as bottom trawling, and deliver on the 30X30 commitment to protect the world’s marine environment.

Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, chief executive of the Global Environment Facility, which funds international work on biodiversity and climate, said: “As a lifelong surfer and conservationist, I’ve seen firsthand how the ocean supports our communities.”

“Apex species like sharks not only signal the health of our oceans, they help maintain it. When sharks are at risk, so are we,” he warned.