A decade ago, wildlife photographer Chris Fallows could count 250 to 300 individual great white sharks in the waters off Cape Town in a single year. Then, over the span of roughly ten years, they were gone. Not thinned out. Not reduced. Gone. And scientists still can't agree on why.
The Man Who Photographed a Thousand-Kilogram Shark Mid-Air
Chris Fallows built his career on one of the most jaw-dropping images in the history of wildlife photography. In 2001, he took a boat out near Seal Island in False Bay and spent an hour dragging a seal-shaped decoy through the water with nothing to show for it. Then a great white shark launched itself out of the ocean, jaws open, teeth catching the light, and Fallows' shutter clicked. Seven seconds. Done.
This was the era of film cameras. No instant preview on the back of the screen, no confirmation it had worked. He spent the entire weekend not knowing whether he'd imagined the whole thing. On Monday, according to CBS News, he walked into the photo lab and everybody was clapping. The image, called 'Air Jaws,' ran in newspapers and magazines worldwide and turned Fallows into one of the most recognized wildlife photographers on the planet.
'It was a photograph that changed my life,' Fallows told 60 Minutes Overtime, 'and it epitomizes the power and, I guess, predatory prowess of this incredible animal.' He went on to spend years diving into those same waters without a shark cage, photographing great whites from below as they passed overhead. His wife Monique, who understands animal behavior with enough depth to help keep him alive out there, works alongside him on every shoot.
Then the Sharks Stopped Showing Up
False Bay sits at the southwestern tip of South Africa, and for years it was one of the best places on earth to watch great white sharks do what great white sharks do. Tens of thousands of Cape fur seals live on Seal Island, and the sharks hunted them. Tourists came from everywhere. Fallows saw hundreds of individual animals every season.
About ten years ago, the sightings started dropping. Then they stopped. As CBS News reports, scientists and conservationists are still actively disagreeing about what caused the collapse, which is a remarkable and deeply unsettling sentence to type about the apex predator of the ocean. The sharks that defined that coastline for decades are simply no longer there.
'It really showed to me just how fragile our planet is,' Fallows told 60 Minutes Overtime. 'It affected me very deeply.' The tourists stopped coming too. The whale-watching boats, the dive operators, the whole ecosystem of people who had built their livelihoods around those animals, all of it collapsed alongside the shark population. Nobody handed them an explanation.
Sharks Nobody Fears and Elephants Nobody's Supposed to See Anymore
Here is something Fallows has said out loud, after years of diving unprotected alongside animals that could absolutely kill him if they wanted to: he has never felt that the great whites were acting aggressively toward him. 'It's the tolerance of those animals to allow me in their space,' he told 60 Minutes Overtime. That's not a guy performing bravery for a camera. That's someone who has spent enough time with these animals to understand them as something other than monsters.
He's had the same experience with elephants on land. One of his most celebrated photographs, called 'Defiance,' captures a massive-tusked female elephant, a so-called 'tusker,' leading her herd across a dried lakebed in Amboseli National Park in Kenya. Fallows told 60 Minutes Overtime that elephants with tusks that long are extraordinarily rare now because they're systematically targeted by poachers for their ivory. This one survived. 'This incredible matriarch defied the poacher's snare or the hunter's gun,' he said, 'and has somehow managed to keep her herd both safe and sustained with food and water.' The fact that photographing a naturally occurring elephant with full-length tusks is now a rare achievement tells you a lot about where we are.
One Thing That Actually Got Better
The humpback whale story is genuinely worth hearing, mostly because it is one of the vanishingly rare environmental stories that ends with more animals, not fewer. The International Whaling Commission's moratorium on commercial whaling went into effect in 1985, and it worked. The global humpback population has grown significantly since then, and Fallows has watched this happen in real time off the South African coast.
'We now see groups of 150 or 200 together,' he told 60 Minutes Overtime. He described photographing them as a full-body sensory experience: you smell the whale breath, you hear them, you feel them. 'It touches you very deeply,' he said. This is what regulated conservation can actually accomplish when it's taken seriously and enforced. A species pulled back from the edge. It's not complicated. It just requires not killing them faster than they can reproduce.
Fallows and his wife have put their money where their convictions are. In 2017, they used profits from his photography to purchase 61 acres on South Africa's south coast for habitat restoration, according to CBS News. That's the whole loop, closed: photograph the natural world, sell the images to people who want to see it, use the proceeds to make sure there's still something left to photograph.
The Dingo Take
The great white sharks of False Bay didn't disappear because of a hurricane or an asteroid. They disappeared while humans were watching, measuring, and arguing about it, and we still don't have a consensus explanation. Let that sit for a second. We lost hundreds of apex predators from a well-studied coastline over the course of a decade and the scientific community's official position is essentially: we're not sure. That's not a knock on the scientists. That's a knock on how catastrophically fast we're breaking things relative to our ability to understand what we're breaking.
Chris Fallows spent his career doing something that sounds almost painfully simple: pointing a camera at wild animals and showing people what they look like. The 'Air Jaws' photograph ran in publications around the world in 2001 because people had never seen a great white shark like that before. It was alien and terrifying and magnificent all at once. Twenty-five years later, Fallows can't take that photograph anymore because the sharks aren't there. The location still exists. The island still exists. The ocean is still there. The sharks are not.
The humpback whale rebound is real and it's genuinely good news and you should let yourself feel that for a moment. But it happened because one specific, targeted human behavior, commercial whaling, was curtailed through international agreement and enforcement. We knew the cause. We stopped the cause. The whales came back. With the great whites of False Bay, we don't even have that much. We have a mystery, a silence where there used to be 300 sharks, and one photographer still trying to show the world what it's losing before the last of it disappears.
