My Story:
Growing up, I was a pretty quiet kid who loved to play outside and care for all my pets. My parents were wonderful and also appreciated all species and loved being in nature, so we had every pet allowable. We even had bunnies and goats who would run through the house or flop up on the couch with us. I grew up that way from the time I could remember. Whether it was nature, nurture, or a combination of both, I was very attuned to the communicative behaviors and subtleties of other species—both domestic and wildlife—that I would observe and interact with around my home.
Our home was full of pets and also a lot of SCUBA gear, relics, and natural "tokens from the sea" that my parents had collected over their lifetime. One of my first memories was of my fathers dive fins. They were stored in the hallway, they were all black (the old original US Navy kind) but he had marked his by spray painted a florecent orange dolphin and whale in a circular arching formation. That "logo" burned into my memory and was the first depiction of a dolphin and whale I had knowingly seen, this is the earliest clear memory of my life, so to no surprise when it came time to design the logo for OneOcean I recreated it from memory and added the shark at the center (to represent my generation and kuleana.)
I remember a coral head my mother had found during her time living in Taiwan, it was literally brain coral in the shape of a skull, eye sockets and all. There were so many shells and I would sometimes ask my parents about them and my father would tell me what they were and stories of specific adventures. My mother is very kind and patient with animals and my father too. He was always very adventerous, confident, and brave. He loved to explore and was an inspiration for me really getting into night diving. He used to go night dive by himself for lobster. He too got into SCUBA young and my mother, while she dives too, prefers to swim. She grew up swimming with her father as well, exploring all over the place. My grandfather was a sailor and became a submarine captain and told me old stories from Tahiti, and how his work as a submarine commander meant he got to explore the ocean all the way up under the polar ice caps where he saw "black and white whales" (Orca.) He and my grandmother met in Honolulu when my great grandmother had insisted that her daughter (my grandmother) attend a luncheon in downtown Waikiki. He eventually proposed to her at the old pink Royal Hawaiian Hotel and they got married at Pearl harbor. My great grandmother swam off the south shore of O'ahu every day until the day she died and my family has an even longer history of their shared love of the ocean and wildlife, and we all seem to have "spirit animals," a species that we each seem to connect with and be drawn to more than others.
I still remember my first time seeing underwater in the ocean. It was a green, murky day without much visibility. I had a mask on, but no snorkel—I didn’t use snorkels until I was older. Having only opened my eyes underwater before to a natural blur, having more clarity but nothing to see besides many green particles of seaweed and sand swirling near shore, was actually iniatially disorienting, but then all a small school of fish with cute eyes and a little green stripe on their sides swam by and I forgot about the need to breath and I was no longer disoriented. Instantly, everything felt so natural. I was so excited, joyful, and just wanted to follow them. As I followed them into slightly deeper water the near shore turbidity calmed and I could suddenly see the deeper reef and many other more brightly colored fish. I wanted to see those fish up closer so I took a deep breath and dove down. The rest is history and my facination with watching and interacting with marine life just naturally just flowed from there.
The first shark I saw was very close to shore, it was a calm clear crisp morning and the water was very clear. I was floating in maybe less than 10ft of water and this beautiful elegant shape glided along the bottom beneath me. It felt like time stood still as it was directly beneath me. I was mesmorized and intrigued. I remember hearing the calm sound of the waves on the shore nearby and thinking to myself that I wasn't sure what to do as it passed me, simply continuing on its way, I thought to myself should I follow it or go in? I indulged my curious nature and slowly and quietly followed it from a distance for a little while just watching and appreciating the gracefulness of its movement, its hydrodynamic shape, and its unique precence. I am so grateful to my younger curious and courageous self for exploring and wanting to learn more. Had I not been taught by my mother to be respectfully sensitive to other species and nature, and had I been previously brain washed into believing sharks are monsters maybe my reaction would have been different.
Being a shy and quiet kid in general meant that I listened in and self-reflected on my observations of people—their behavior, conversations, and body language toward one another. I did the same thing with my pets and the wildlife around me. I found that I could “communicate” with my pets and some wildlife—just not in the way that you and I would communicate (the way you “communicate with your cat, dog, bird, horse, etc If you have pets and are sensitive to them you probably know what I mean 😉.) It was through body positioning, eye contact or lack thereof, sometimes sounds, sometimes physical contact, and or simply my presence and energy or lack thereof. I watched how they watched me, how they learned they could respond to something I did—and vice versa. Fish can be very reactive to movements, and they can also become attuned to your prescence and become comfortable enough to go about their day with enough of a calm and patient prescence.
I think growing up with horses—large, powerful animals who can bite, kick, trample, step on you, etc.—and who are generally quiet but show subtle body movements (which become very overt to the trained eye…like shark body language…) to express themselves and establish or maintain a social hierarchy, helped me tremendously. Having to redirect their swinging heads or leverage off of their shoulders to maintain space and avoid my toes getting stepped on or kicked or trampled certainly helped me in developing my shark redirection technique.
Combined with growing up going to Tahiti, where we would hand-feed charging stingrays and gracefully move so that their powerful approaches actually helped us to flow together—while also staying aware of other rays and circling sharks to make sure not to get bit—helped me to develop my water skills as well. Stingrays can be surprisingly pushy, and also sweet if they want to be and they can react and adapt to one individual to the next. They share the electroreceptive sensory system sharks have, the ampuallae of Lorenzini. Like horses, I've noticed how much shark and rays also seem to be highly sensitive to my hearbeat, breathing, and tensed or relaxed muscles.
There has never been a doubt in my mind about the individual consciousness of each animal I have met, or their ability to feel and react. The longer I spend with an individual of any species the more I become aware of their “personality” disposition or temperment in comparison to others. There has also never been a doubt in my mind that nature has a balance. I can see the interconnectivity, and science backs that up.
So when it came to sharks, getting to see them up close while diving and even hand-feeding them when I was younger, and watching their social hierarchy and behaviors up close when they were excited, and eventually interacting with ones the size of horses (or larger), the interactions felt natural. I kept the same calm yet heightened awareness that I would with an excited horse, person, or other species, and that helped. Funny enough, I think some of the things I say to do (or not to do) to avoid enticing a shark would also probably be good advice to follow around an agitated human, lol. Humans, are after all, far more emotional, unreasonable, and dangerous.
So there has never been a doubt in my mind that sharks are important for nature’s balance.
Learning about shark finning (for shark fin soup) when I was a little older, I was actually in disbelief. I thought it was some kind of made-up bad joke. Like—how could something so ridiculous exist? How illogical! And why would anyone keep such a practice up? It seems pretty stupid, dangerous, expensive, and wasteful—not to mention full of toxins passed into the consumer.
Sharks are in a way sort of like the “unicorns” of the ocean—you really don’t see too many outside of identified aggregation sites. Like a tiger in a jungle or a bear in a forest, you have to know where to go to have a higher chance of spotting them. They are apex predators so they are naturally slow to reproduce; their populations just cannot keep up with that kind of fishing pressure. Over 100,000,000 sharks are killed most, in the barbaric, cruel finning process, where their fins are sliced off while they are still alive, pulled out onto a fishing vessel deck where they suffocate and slowly bleed to death.
All this led me to finding my voice to speak up for sharks. They really pulled me out of my natural tendency to be introverted. I certainly talk a LOT more now, lol. I forced myself to be more social in general growing up, thinking that’s what I was supposed to do. I pushed myself out of my natural introvert tendencies enough that I know I can easily hold a conversation with anyone of any background in any situation and give valuable and impactful presentations very comfortably to huge diverse audiences of people. However at times, I still find socializing personally exhausting to my core nature, especially if the conversation is about drama of somekind (I think I might be allergic to such conversations, ha ha.) So I have found that I am better off if I make time periodically to recharge by instead listening to nature, watching sharks in relative silence, and listening only to other non-human animals make noise. If I go swim, snorkel, or dive and listen to the fish on the reef, the dolphins, or the whales, or even just the waves, at the beach or while I surf, then I feel rejuvenated. Spending time in silence on a hike, or with my horse, pups, cats, or birds and listening to the wind as it moves through tree’s and terrain really helps me to recenter and recharge . Anytime I can be in the water with sharks I naturally recharge, they force me into the present moment commanding my full attention, my breathing takes up a different rhythm, and I am more alert yet calm and feel more connected, especially out in infinite blue. Really, I’d be happy to never speak a day again in my life, but I speak up for sharks and wildlife because they cannot speak up for themselves against human cruelty and unfortunately, I am human 😉 I think..ha ha, at least I look like one, even if I feel more akin to a wild animal on the inside, ha ha… So fortunately for sharks and marine life, I do have a voice—and probably an overly-analytical brain—and possibly a gift for teaching and thus an ability to articulate the things I’ve seen, experienced, and learned.
So when it comes to sharks, it’s like you can’t get me to shut up—ha ha—and I could easily “bulldoze” someone in a conversation with my fiery passion about the subject of sharks and marine conservation. I have to actually be mindful to stop and listen, which, really, I’ve always known is the best default, because I learned from a young age that you learn a lot more from listening and observing, and a good arguement or conversation truly considers and tries to factor in the perspective and information and needs of the “other side.”
So here I am, having personally witnessed sharks—a species I’ve now had a lifetime of incredible encounters with—being killed for such wasteful reasons as casual fishing, targeted sport fishing, finning, and even just for spite—probably derived from fear stemming from ignorance or the blinding misportrayal of them in films like Jaws.
Along my lifes journey, I’ve seen so much animal cruelty—not just on sharks, but many other species: fish caught and thrown to the ground and discarded, rather than being thrown back… the way some people treat their dogs… or the horrific things evil people do to cats. It’s left a deep distaste and distrust of humankind, and so I’d prefer to stay away from most, knowing the capacity for cruelty, I am a bit guarded… but then there are the good people 😊❤️ The ones who, like my parents and I, respect all life, respect nature, and are kind to other species.
It is for them—for nature, and for the next generation of all species—that I’m not backing away from humans. I might have quite a bit of a warrior soul from my ancestral genetics most likely. I wake up everyday ready to fight! The fight I choose is to fight for the survival of sharks and other species, which is and can and will help other humans survive, too.
I think by speaking up and doing what I do, I can inspire others to feel more comfortable taking up a cause, speaking up for those without a voice—speaking up for sharks. And working together, we can get them the protection that has already been afforded to dolphins, sea turtles, and whales in many areas of the world.
For the majority of my life, the saying most people have said is “the only good shark is a dead shark.” At some point, I realized that no one I knew—and there were fewer than five people I had heard of—had said or written nice things about sharks, or was going to speak up for them. No one was going to teach others about the truth (which contrasts films like Jaws immensely—that they are not just swimming around trying to eat everything). This was more than 20 years ago.
Then I met my husband, @JuanSharks while taking friends out on a boat he was working on, to swim with sharks—literally trying to get them to overcome their fear and believe me when I would say: they are not monsters. They are usually really cautious and calculated, and you can actually swim around with them and they usually won’t bother you if you give all of them constant acknowledgement and stay quiet, etc.
I didn't know it at the time but he had broken his back and so he had to workout daily to keep his core muscles strong so he was a lot of muscles which of course caught my eyes—but what actually drew me to him was he caught my ears—when I would surface every few minutes to breathe during my breath-up. I would actually hear him saying nice things about sharks! WOW! Someone else who is speaking up for sharks, sharing facts—not hyping sensationalism or trying to boost fear and adrenaline. He was respectful of them as apex predators, not monsters--That caught my heart.
There’s a long sharky love story there, I’ll save that for another day. Long story short: Juan and I worked really hard (sunrise to after sunset 7 days a week as I’ve done since I was 15) and we bought our own boat. I took all my experience from working on dive boats, in research, and with animals from around the world, plus my professional safety training—and his experience working on boats, in conservation, and with wildlife—and we combined our efforts and formatted a program where we could teach people about sharks, shark behavior, and how to adapt to enjoy time as safely as possible around them. Then they could snorkel with us while we—with our extensive experience—would safety the situation and help the humans adapt to more curious sharks, etc.
On the way in from our OneOceanDiving.com program, we would then educate people about the plight of sharks-our ultimate goal. We knew this format would work because we had always found that friends and work colleagues we talked about our shark adventures with were always so much more open and receptive to our conservation message once they had already had a beautiful personal in-person experience with sharks to overcome their fear. Our approach was really worked, we changed minds and hearts and slowly won people over to "the shark side." So all day, every day, we were devoted to working to speak up for sharks.
A note on safety: It really was earlier in my life that I developed the methods to redirect—first with horses, then stingrays and smaller animals and with so much time in the water before ever opening One Ocean Diving, I had already learned the things to do, and not to do, to avoid catching the attention of a shark and how to respond to an assertive approach. I never would've started OneOcean or guided people in the water purposefully with sharks had I not had a lifetime of exeriences on my own interacting with them and fine tuning my own advanced water skills. To have "oh shit" moments when being rushed by a juvinile tiger shark without having to worry about another person in the water was crucial to my development. The sharks really pushed me to be my strongest most controlled self, to finetune the way I move in the water and to be even more sensitive and aware than I already was. I wrote another book "My Shark Teachers" as a dedication to them. While I've taught tons of people (including most of the professionals you probably see interacting with sharks on social media) the sharks were the ones who taught me. I didn't have a translator, I learned "the hard way," and it is a testament to the sharks patience and perhalps my water skills and natural animal behavior senses that I was able to retain all my appendages through my younger learning curve. With OneOceanDiving being in the water from before sunrise till after sunset I was really able to polish my abilities. There's a saying if you want to master something, teach it, and I was teaching people daily, and then training a professional crew from the ground up which forced me to really analyze, break down, and then verbalize all the small behavioral nuances I had learned from observing and interacting with sharks. It was sometime later that I had another look-around moment, and I realized: no one else either knew this, no one else was spending 7 days a week all day everyday in the water with sharks, no one else had been diving sans cage with great white sharks, bulls, tigers, oceanic whitetips and 30+ species around the world in interactions that required redirections. I knew I needed to share more information with others and that no one else was currently in a position with as much expereince to be able to share such information that I knew could help others stay safer. I knew that helping people learn methods to be able to more safely coexist with sharks could translate to more people being in support of protection for sharks.
Given Juan’s and my background as surfers, I knew how to adapt my shark behavior observations to teach surfers, swimmers, near-shore waders, divers, and spearos how they could best adapt to reduce their chances of an advese interaction with a shark. I had worked with the largest, fastest, most iconic predatory species and even helped with several projects on nonlethal mitigation deterrent devices and I knew I needed to get this information out to help more people.
So for more than four years, on top of working seven days a week, I would sacrifice the little sleep I was getting already to pour all the information that the sharks had taught me into a manuscript. The revisions of the manuscript were painful and took another year and a half, but eventually, when it was split into two books, I was finally able to get out the information I feel most people could benefit from—in a way that would be very easy to read and comprehend. My first book I titled "What You Should Know About Sharks" was an amazon best-seller in its category within the first two weeks of being released.
Our efforts are non-stop and our approach to conservation takes on every aspect. Over the course of more than seven years, we dropped everything and would drive across the island to speak up and testify in person at the Hawaiʻi State Capitol on behalf of the protection of sharks in Hawaiʻi from wasteful killing. We utilized our social media platforms, our network from One Ocean, and our network of friends in the community to push year after year, meeting after meeting, call to action after call to action—to eventually, finally, successfully get sharks fully protected from wasteful killing in Hawaiʻi.
To us, it felt like getting our ohana (family) protected. The manō (sharks) that Juan and I had grown up with, were finally safer. I remember a long period of time before the bill was passed into law where I was afraid to post about the individual sharks I cared about, because I knew there were some mean fisherman in the neighborhood who had helped cull sharks in the 90's. So I asked the crew members we eventually trained not to share coordinates and abiundance so as to protect the schooling sharks as best as we could. It was a joyful relief to regain what was once a traditional respect for manō, to treat them as ohana, as aumakua, and not to kill them unless out of actual necessity.
While Juan and I started the first no-cage shark snorkel dive in Hawaii and all of the USA (only a few guys from Florida existed before us but they ran their shark SCUBA charters in the Bahamas) the industry has since grown and I am grateful that there are more people who now care about the sharks. The sustainable OneOceanDiving educational platform we created has employed many minorities and women in STEM (something I felt passionate about hiring and training for because I was discriminated on as a young woman in the field) as well as local fisherman (which I felt was important for reaching stake-holders in that community would had previously killed sharks) local lifeguards who had also attained their captains licenses, and other locals who wanted to work in a conservation based, eco-friendly, sustainable, feel-good position. It truly is the best office view and the program changes people's lives for the better, fosters their awareness and subsequent support for shark and marine conservation. We even teamed up with Dr. Michele Barnes from the University of Hawaii (now at the university of Sidney) and Dr. Sarah Sutclif and the team and I collected over 500 data points for a study showing the pro-conservation benefits of our OneOceanDiving Program, but nothing proved it more than being able to bring the mass number of supporters we had grown from the life-changing dives and education to get political pressure to get the bill passed into law to fully protect manō (sharks) from wasteful killing.
My Mission:
My mission is to share information to educate and inspire others to help sharks gain protection worldwide. I know I cannot do it alone, and I appreciate so much everyone in the community who joins in. I Truly want to inspire others to take up this cause—to empower them with enough information so that they too, feel they can speak up for those without a voice—for sharks. This is not about me, and I dont want it to be (remember I am naturally a quiet little be-out-in-nature introvert) and so I want to encourage others to understand that there is no one single perfect path or single approach to be followed to achieving further marine protection. I want people to feel empowered, inspired, and comfortable to join in and take action, to speak up for those without a voice. Collaboration is key, but ultimately the more voices and people taking actions in all ways the more likely we are to achieve the goal of global shark protection. So please join me, your background doesn't matter, please you dont have to be a marine biologist to help save sharks, as a matter of fact most marine biologists just study systems and only the few good ones take that research if even useful, and try to apply it to make positive change.) Everyone can make a impact and we need unique and diverse approaches. I want people to feel a similar connection to wildlife and nature. To understand the importance of speaking up and just how powerful their words can be to help protect others. I hope more people will come to understand that speaking up for those without a voice, especially misunderstood species like sharks, and taking action for them is currently desperately needed—at the rate they’re being killed, which is an unsustainable 100 million or more every single year. We have fewer than 10% of the remaining populations in comparison to even just 3-4 decades ago when the demand for #SharkFinSoup really spiked following China's modern industrial boom( 1970-2000.) The practice of shark finning and demand for shark fin soup originates from China, which has the 2nd largest population of people on the planet. However, almost every coastal country is guilty of killing sharks to sell their fins to China except a few countries that have now banned the cruel and wasteful practice. See the Animal Welfare Institute website ( https://awionline.org/content/international-shark-finning-bans-and-policies ) for the current list of countries and levels of protection.
So thank you to the global community and anyone who has helped me in achieving any level of further protection for sharks—and that includes helping others to understand their importance. Because for generations, they’ve been portrayed—misportrayed—as mindless monsters. And there’s still much to be done:
- To ban finning globally
- To ban culling
- To ban fishing tournaments
- To ban the killing of sharks for their liver oil for pharmaceuticals and cosmetics
- And to ban the killing of sharks just for the souvenir trade—for their teeth and jaws
I hope you will join me to speak up and take action to save sharks.
Thank you, and mahalo nui loa.
—Ocean Ramsey
