My Dive Articles RSS He has an impressive stature – you can actually feel his inner energy just talking to Amr Ali, the man who runs HEPCA, the Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association. HEPCA is well known within the Red Sea community for many unique initiatives, among which the largest mooring system in the world, the Shark and the Longimanus Projects, managing fisheries and monitoring marine life. In an exclusive interview for mydive.ro, Amr Ali gave us several new insights with regard to sharks, the challenges 
faced by HEPCA in preserving the Red Sea environment, as well as the educational plans of what is probably one of the most active NGOs in the world. A diver himself, Amr Ali talks with passion about the need to keep the underwater wonders of the sea alive for the future generations.
Recent sharks’ accidents in Sharm el-Sheikh have been in the world’s attention for the past weeks and of course, we will start by asking which are your comments on what happened there and how things developed afterwards. So, what is your opinion on the subject?
This is first of all a drama. What you have to do when something like this happens is to be close to those affected, to offer the deepest condolences to the family or wish for the people in the hospital to get well soon. We cannot deal with these people as if they were an object that was attacked; a human being was attacked, it suffered and maybe lost his/her life and of course, there are dear ones at home who are also affected.
The next thing needed to be understood is that like everything in life, such an event has both positive and negative sides.
In this case the positive, to call it like this, is that it’s attracting the attention of all governmental agencies in Egypt, that we do have a problem with the over-fishing in this country, we have a problem with the fish stock in so many regions, we have a problem because sharks started to approach areas that they were not supposed to come close to, and they do this because of lack of prey, of fish stock, because of fishing sharks with long lines, because of baiting for sharks with dolphins’ meat and raw bloody fish. The outcome of all these is that of course you are changing their behavior.
For many people the attacks were shocking, with the Red Sea not being usually cited on the top risk list of holiday locations, such as Florida, Hawaii, South Africa or Australia. People were thinking that sharks are present in less number here…
Whoever thinks that there are three sharks in Ras Mohammed and four sharks in Hurghada it is completely mistaken. The sea is full of sharks; they are there every day, even if you don’t see them! That’s because they don’t want to see you, it is as simple as this.
The explanation for divers who look for sharks and don’t see them is that they are diving around the coral reef areas, which are, all in all, about 100 square kilometers from the whole Red Sea [A/N the overall surface of the Red Sea is more than 400 thousand km²]. So if you don’t see them around the dive sites it doesn’t mean that all sharks took a migration visa to Canada [he laughs]… they are still here!
In fact I was very proud when I found six Yemen boats fishing for sharks in Egypt, because if they travel all that way here it means that our shark operations are better and better – nobody knows better than the fishermen about the fish stock in an area, and it seems that the four-five years of protection of sharks is getting very good results.
Why do you think the attacks happened? This is not common in the Red Sea…
I can say quite openly that when an accident like this happens, all the “monkeys” stay away from the jetty. There the diving “gurus” used to deal with sharks as teddy bears, they humiliated them – I don’t know of anybody who goes to Kenya in the forest, touches the lion on the nose and runs back to its group to see what the lion will do. This show with the sharks became comfortable, as a dive guide you just need to show the customers the sharks and you get good tips. This was many times a monkey show: let’s go down to see the Longimanus… go to the shark, with the chicken in one pocket of the BCD, or the calamari in the other one, take it out, and show it to the Longimanus… I didn’t see in my life a Longimanus feeding without taking down his dorsal fins, which means that for that shark getting a lunch like this, without hunting, had become a normal behavior. And that’s how an energetic creature, the king of the oceans, is losing its hunting habits and it’s treated like a lion in a circus.
Well, things have changed. What happened in this season? We got here sharks from the ocean, rushing behind its prey, like the tuna – they came in the Red Sea in hundreds. They finish this season and get back to the ocean. And as a diver you think that you’ll have the same shark as you always have, you go to the shark by the reef to play with the guests and behave very macho, like Tarzan. And after this you see things going a different way because sharks are not teddy bears, they are untamed animals and they start to act very aggressive. So you think that something is wrong with the sharks, no, something wrong happened to you! If you go anywhere in the world this would not happen! In South Africa or at the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, this would not happen!
What do you think is the next step needed to be taken in Sharm after the accidents?
I believe that all diving authorities in that area have to proceed, from now on, very strictly with all the feeding of fish done by tourists or divers, and act with most of care regarding all water activities.
On the other hand, what they did to the Ras Mohammed National Park the last weeks is a disgrace; by killing the sharks they are bringing all the conservation concepts 20 years back. The national parks of Egypt were always a lighthouse for anyone who wants to work in conservation. We have in Egypt one of the strongest conservation regulations – whether these are enforced or not, it’s a different story. That’s why I repeat that what they did in Sharm it’s a slap on the face of all people working in conservation. I really wonder how the head of the Ras Mohammed National Park will go now to the fishermen and tell them they will go to prison for one year if they will be caught with a fished shark in their boat. It was a random selection of sharks from the water, even if it’s an approved action. You have a shark that attacked humans, but what do you do now? Are you going to take out of the water all the sharks from the Ras Mohammed?
HEPCA started a few years ago the Shark Project, meant to preserve and protect the shark population in the Red Sea. In the project’s info deck it is said that 100 million sharks are killed every year around the globe, meaning three sharks die every second, making them vulnerable and endangered. How is this project evolving?
There was a lot of work happening in the past six years. Elke [A/N Dr. Elke Bojanowski, the scientist leading the project] is doing an impressive job, but this job has to be developed even further. I mean we keep counting and counting and this is good for a database, but this keeps us still in the data collection phase. So we want to go to the next stage, to track the sharks via satellite. We already bought the tracking devices and we are waiting for the right time to start embedding them.
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