Column SFF Bestiary Up Close With Predators: Ocean Ramsey’s Shark Whisperer A documentary that seeks to rehab the image of “killer” sharks… By Judith Tarr | Published on October 27, 2025 Credit: Netflix Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Netflix Ocean Ramsey’s life is sharks. It’s who she is, what she does, and why she does it. With her partner and photographer Juan Oliphant, she’s dedicated her life to changing the way the world perceives sharks. They declare, in so many words, that they set out to be the Anti-Jaws. Their Netflix documentary, just released this year, tells their story, centering around Ocean’s life and passion for sharks. It aims to be balanced in that it provides alternative viewpoints and touches on the controversy around Ocean’s thousands of hours spent swimming with sharks. No cage. No barricade of any kind. And much of the time, no air tank, either. She free dives. She has, over the years, trained herself to hold her breath for up to six and a half minutes. This allows her to present herself as a fellow fish, without the distraction of breathing equipment. This isn’t a vanity project (though some of the controversy alleges that it is). She has a clear goal, to advocate for shark conservation around the world. One of the main story lines of the documentary is her campaign to protect sharks in her home state of Hawaii, lobbying for legislation to make it illegal to harm or kill a shark. There’s a strong environmental reason for this. Sharks are essential to the health of the ocean. As marine biologist Kim Holland points out, if you take out sharks, you get a ripple effect down through the rest of the ocean. We need the ocean, and the ocean needs its apex predators. Between 70 and 100 million sharks are killed every year. Ocean’s goal is to reduce that number to zero. She has a long way to go, but she starts by setting out to prove to the world that sharks are not monsters. Shark attacks, as I’ve noted elsewhere, are actually quite rare. The documentary notes that if sharks really were out to get humans, swimmers and surfers and kayakers wouldn’t just be bitten, they would disappear. And they would do so in large numbers. What’s happening is that sharks are mistaking humans for their usual prey. If you thrash and splash, you read to a hunting shark as a fish. The shark picks up the vibration, homes in, and boom. Over and over again, people who have been attacked say, “It came out of nowhere. I never saw it coming. All of a sudden, my leg/arm/body was inside a shark.” That’s a big part of why people are so afraid of sharks. It’s random. It’s unexpected. It’s the biggest jump scare there is. And then, because that’s how fear works, it gets blown out of all proportion. The legend grows. The terror mounts. Whole beaches full of tourists are afraid to go in the water. Ocean Ramsey sets out to be the antidote to that. She meets the sharks in their own domain, on their own terms. “But aren’t you afraid you’ll get eaten?” her social-media followers (and interviewers and opinion columnists) ask her. Her answer is No. Is it dangerous? Yes. Any human who comes into close contact with another apex predator has to face up to the fact that we may be the apex of the apex, but it’s not because we’re physically stronger or faster. By ourselves we’re small, weak, and slow. What we have is our intelligence, and we can use that to connect with the predator. Could a shark turn on her at some point? Yes. As with every other naturalist/media star who engages with major predators, she runs that risk every time she goes in the water. But if it happens, she says, “Don’t blame the shark.” In the meantime, she has been studying sharks since the early 2000s, particularly tiger sharks off the North Shore of O’ahu, Hawaii. Great whites may be the main monster of myth and legend, thanks to Jaws, but in Hawaii, the real fear is of these somewhat smaller, lightning-fast, powerful hunters. It’s actually a tiger shark who first gets accused of taking the first victim in Jaws, until the real perpetrator shows up and starts terrorizing the human population. Ocean, beautifully filmed and accompanied by Juan, began her study in 2007. She identified multiple individuals, recording their behavior, coming to understand their language. It’s not a language of sounds, as far as she observes in the documentary. The communications she observes are visual. Her inspiration for her observations is a study she read when she was younger, about the way bees communicate. She sees in sharks a similar kind of interaction, a dance in three dimensions. They are not swimming at random. They’re communicating through movement, through position in the water: what she calls patterns of social hierarchy. Where they are in relation to each other is significant. If they’re parallel, if one is higher, if one shows its underside. Lowered pectoral fins are a threat display—“Go ahead, come at me.” These signals can be subtle, and sharks with their big brains have the capacity recognize small nuances. Ocean has learned from them to control her body in extremely precise ways. If she’s tense, if she’s off, they pick it up. She has to cultivate muscle-deep calm. She has to be keenly aware of where everyone is at all times, and she has to keep careful track of their moods. Sharks are super fast and super strong. That’s where “it came out of nowhere” comes from. Free diving allows her to be more agile than if she were carrying breathing equipment. She can interact with sharks as if she were one of them. She swims like a dolphin or a mermaid, rather than with the separate flipper strokes we more often see in divers. She uses her body as a shark will, as much as human anatomy will allow. She is right there with them, in physical contact. There’s a rule: lock the elbow. If the shark moves in, keep it literally at arm’s length—unless it’s very clear that the shark is inviting her to come in closer. She comes to know individual sharks, and they seem to recognize her as well. There’s more to this than scientific identification, though that’s important. It’s a way to make the shark accessible to humans who are watching these videos. If you name a thing, you connect with it. You start to understand it. It’s not a monster anymore. Nikki, Riley (aka Koa or Warrior), young Kalihi who seems to study Ocean as Ocean studies her, and most poignant of all, Roxy with her broken jaw and her tragic story—we get to know them in some small way as Ocean and Juan know them. We see past the big pointy teeth and the killer-shark mythos to the individual. We start to understand that this, however alien, is a person. As fascinating as tiger sharks are, Ocean realizes that she needs to aim literally for a bigger fish if she wants to bring large numbers of people on board her campaign to protect sharks. That means the great white, which is rare in Hawaii—the unicorn of the ocean. She travels to Guadalupe, Mexico, where great whites are known to congregate. She starts with a cage there, because she may be at ease with tiger sharks after years of swimming with them, but these sharks don’t know her and she doesn’t know them. She gets what she came for. The dominant great white in that part of the world comes up to the cage. She seems curious. Her eye is open. It almost feels like an invitation. Ocean leaves the cage. She swims with the shark. Juan records the meeting, the slender woman with her hand on the shark’s fin, skimming along with her. (In shark world, the dominant individual swims above. It’s not coercion; the shark could turn at any moment and place herself on top. Or simply shake the human off, and leave her far behind.) That’s the point at which the narrative changed. The footage went viral. Ocean had her defining image, her anti-Jaws moment. Images have power. Visuals sell not just products but ideas. Humans believe in what they see. If they see a shark and a human swimming together without conflict, they start to lose their fear. They begin to understand. The film is careful not to let this get out of hand. Basically it adds up to Professional Driver, Closed Course, Do Not Try This At Home. Or as the National Parks Service warns about another large and emphatically not tame animal, Don’t Pet the Fluffy Cows. No, a shark is not a monster. Yes, it can be dangerous. Be very, very respectful, and only try what Ocean does if you’ve spent as long as she has studying sharks in their native environment. The documentary has some amazing moments. Aside from Roxy’s story, I’ll long remember what happened after the trip to Guadalupe, sometime around 2019, when a deceased sperm whale fetches up on a Hawaiian reef. Ocean and Juan went out there to study tiger sharks feeding on the huge carcass. While they were watching, the tiger sharks disappeared. The ocean went quiet. They heard little dolphin noises, but nothing else. Then out of the depths it came: a great white shark. A good twenty feet long, Ocean says, and massive. She tears at the whale in an ecstasy of hunger, paying no attention to the humans (and that, it’s implied, is emblematic of how sharks really are—they’re not going to eat you unless they mistake you for something else). I wonder if she’s pregnant, because she’s not shaped like the other sharks in the film. Her midsection is extremely round. It’s not mentioned or explained, but it would be amazing if she’s filling up on fuel to gestate her babies. It’s an incredible sequence. The beauty and terror of the animal, the way the ocean goes still as she comes, the power she has—it’s all there. But so is her vulnerability. Human fear, human hostility, human greed, are a clear and present threat to all species of sharks. We need to protect them; we have to stop killing them by the millions every year. The ocean needs them, and we need the ocean. We can’t live without each other.[end-mark] The post Up Close With Predators: Ocean Ramsey’s <i>Shark Whisperer</i> appeared first on Reactor.