Heavily fished areas have cleared out much of the typical marine life you would find in the ocean, and efforts to protect those areas have proven to make a major difference. In the latest episode of SeaLegacy | The Voyage, Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen travel to North America’s largest fully protected marine reserve, Revillagigedo National Park. “To get to Revi is an adventure on its own,” explains Mittermeier. “It’s such a vast, such a remote part of the ocean. It took us four days to get to the Archipelago of the Revillagigedos. Not an easy place to get to – it’s the only piece of land in the middle of the Pacific. It’s the largest marine park in North America. In 2017 it was declared a National Park, and that gives it what’s known as highly and fully marine protection status.” Watch the video as they share more on the area and how they used their Sony Alpha gear to capture what they needed in challenging conditions.
Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen travel to North America’s largest fully protected marine reserve, Revillagigedo National Park, to see how its protections have allowed the area to thrive and return to how it used to be before overfishing.
Nicklen says that the group’s goal is to go there, get in the water, and take people back a thousand years in time. As Mittermeier already explained, traveling to the area is no easy task, but once you get there…it’s still no walk in the park. Nicklen was thankful he had the Sony Alpha 1 as a reliable option to get the footage he needed. “There’s so much going on in a place like this,” explains Nicklen. “The currents are too strong. The diving is difficult. It’s too hard to carry two cameras. You need to grab a piece of rock with your fingers and hang on to shoot. And the nice thing about having an A1 camera is that I can roll 8K video, and I can click a button and I can be shooting 50 megapixel stills. It’s become the perfect tool for doing these big broad projects.”
What does it mean when they say highly and fully marine protected status? Co-founder of female-led marine conservation organization ORGCAS and PhD in Marine Biology Frida Lara Lizardi explains how it's a very ambitious task. “It’s not just creating a large kelp reserve,” she explains, “it’s making sure that the activities that are happening in this area are completely sustainable, supporting the recovery of these resources. Then you really create the change.”
In just the past five years of protection, the life has returned to the area. Mittermeier and Nicklen comment on all of the large marine life they see – big walls of fish, large sharks, manta rays, tuna. “It has come back in a magnificent way,” says Mittermeier. “The animals are big. Whales are big. Sharks are big. Everything is thriving. It’s almost like you go back to the land before time.”
They hope to use this as a reference that shows that these large scale reserves help areas even outside of it recover. “When you protect it,” says Nicklen, “it recovers quickly, and it is just this awesome.”
See other SeaLegacy videos and more on the Alpha Universe YouTube Channel.
