Playing with Sharks

Valerie Taylor began swimming with sharks as a teenager. Now, 70 years later, she reflects on her amazing journey as the world’s greatest living shark expert and protector of the species.

- Robert Yehling

This is the time in her life when Valerie Taylor should be kicking back, reflecting on 70 years of dives with sharks, fish, moray eels, and other creatures of the sea. She should be playing back the countless experiences that led to more than five dozen photography and film shoots for National Geographic, Time-Life, IMAX, movies like Jaws and Jaws II, and culminating with the Disney+ epic documentary Playing With Sharks, her life story that premiered in mid-summer (and continues to stream on Disney+).

But that’s not the case. Sadly, due to a public perception that sharks are the source of a delicacy (shark fin soup), an interfering force for commercial fishermen, and deadly dangerous predators, the world’s shark population is approaching a critically low level. As much as she’d like to step back, Valerie cannot. It’s not in her nature, as her decades of establishing protected areas in her native Australia well prove. Plus, sharks have been her friends since she was a teenager. So, at age 85, she continues to voice her concerns.

“I really feel that sharks worldwide should be totally protected,” says the subject and star of Playing with Sharks. “According to what I’ve read, we have only 10 percent of the shark population that once existed. They’ve been taken mainly for their fins for shark fin soup. We don’t need shark fin soup; we need sharks. Nature put them in the ocean to do a job. They’re apex predators, top of the food chain. They keep the marine animals alive and fit by eating the diseased, sick, unwary, and stupid.”