♪ (ambient music) ♪

David Doubilet: Unseen, unknown, mysterious.

Beautiful and existence,

city in the sea.

The richest part of our planet.

It was paradise.

(applause)

Good evening!

What we want to show tonight

is basically a year.

A year in photography.

And we will take you on a journey,

mostly under seas,

from the boiling hot tropics,

the volcano-laced tropics,

to the cold water, to the ice,

to the arctic.

And I think I may share

a little bit about us.

We work as a team. We're together 24/ 7,

which is--

We are married, you know.

Yes, we are married.

But it's a good partnership.

Jennifer has always said

that I have this teenage crush

about Papua New Guinea.

But 18 years ago, it's now 18 years ago,

I was in a place called Kimbe Bay,

I was there for the total of six days.

And in those six days I made

some very serious, wonderful pictures.

And I had to go back, I had to go back.

But the years passed and suddenly...

The phone rang and it was...

It was the office

and they said to me,

"You. You have been selected

to participate, to contribute

in the 125th anniversary issue,

David: the photography issue

of the National Geographic magazine ."

They said, "You can go anywhere you want,

shoot anything you want."

And I said to myself, "Kimbe Bay," ding!

And so we had an assignment.

But here's a problem that all of you share right now

and that problem is 'Where the hell is Kimbe Bay?'

(audience laughter)

David: Well, Kimbe Bay is in the Coral Triangle.

And the Coral Triangle is where, on this planet,

the most bio-diverse, the most numbers

of fish, coral and of course, invertebrates live.

This was a perfect assignment.

What could possibly go wrong?

Hmm.

The whole story's had a cloud over it.

Boiling dark cloud.

The monsoon is still going on.

The wettest March and April since 1970.

The batteries are smoldering, stinking and burning.

Your camera's on fire.

It nearly burnt the place down.

Strobes flood.

A GoPro floods.

Gone.

We lose another light.

The electronics are scrambled.

Torrential rains.

And kaboom!

Another $3,000.

Charger blows up.

Like this place has it in for us.

Mosquitoes are buzzing around our heads.

You don't have to worry about the bends,

you have malaria.

And as of two days ago, a cyclone.

Guinea is eating us up and spit us out.

And this story was supposed to be a gift,

an easy, beautiful story.

Funny, all these years, all these stories,

every place we've gone to we're sort of

reluctant to leave.

But it's over now.

So say goodnight Buffalo Bob.

Goodnight Buffalo Bob.

Well, the one sunny day.

David: This is what this place looked like.

It's an absolute paradise.

Deep water with these wonderful sea mounds

rising from thousands of feet, almost to the surface,

and surrounded by volcanoes.

And here's this mysterious lake

called Dok Toek, the forbidden lake.

No foreigners, nobody but tribesmen

can go to this lake because it's full of spirits

and crocodiles.

The offshore reefs, like this incredible place

called Kimbe Bomi and they were far offshore,

two and a half hour boat rides every day.

Hundred and twenty-five feet down at the top of the reef.

They were like absolute gardens,

these deep, underwater volcanoes.

♪ (melodic music) ♪

David: Bradford is the most spectacular dive here.

There's a sea mount called Bradford Shoals.

It rises up from the deep,

it is rounded, steep-shouldered

and has an immense school of chevron barracuda,

which swim around in great circles,

almost making funnel-shaped clouds.

Around they go, spooling upwards.

When fish move in a circular pattern,

they create the rarest thing in the sea

which is a geometric pattern,

a place that has no corners, no edges.

Geometry in a place of weightless chaos.

♪ (melodic music continues) ♪

And then the barracudas would form these immense,

circular tornado-shaped towers,

David: going from basically the bottom of the reef

all the way to the surface,

sometimes 70, 80 feet high.

Look at this.

And here's Jennifer on the side

of one of these towers.

The first time we landed on this sea mount,

called Joelles, it was raining fish.

Jennifer Hayes: They were isolated, they were unfound,

they were untouched.

And they were de facto marine protected areas.

They just had no sense of humans

and one of the scariest things

and in-your-face conservation I have ever seen

was a group of fishermen in a single boat,

what they call a banana boat

and they had found Joelles reef

and they had anchored on it

and they had been on it all night fishing.

And the minute they saw our boat coming,

they cut their line and they sped off.

And it turns out when we went down,

all we found were hooks and fishing line,

and half or more of the fish were gone.

All of the pinjalo snappers.

Every pinjalo snapper was gone.

This is one night on one small piece

of real estate in the ocean that was wiped out.

And the next day when we were

in the Kimbe Bay market there were the pinjalos.

And it shows you how fragile,

first off it shows us how marine protected areas

work and function and then it shows us

how vulnerable these places are.

David: There's small things on this reef.

I have to tell you, anemones and clownfish,

it's one of the most beautiful friendships in the sea.

The anemones protect the clownfish's eggs,

protect the clownfish at night

with its stinging tentacles.

The clownfish protects the anemones

from being nibbled to death by butterfly fish.

But Joelles has this wonderful collection

of anemones and toward the evening

they ball up like this

and the clownfish begin to burrow in their stomachs.

I also managed to photograph spawning.

Here are the big female clownfish.

And the female is the dominant partner

in this relationship.

If the female dies, the largest male

turns into a female and begins to produce eggs.

They're producing eggs right now.

And that purple curtain in the background

is the side of the anemone.

We dove with sharks.

(ocean waves)

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♪ (ambient chime music continues) ♪

We were amazed and shocked

and pleased to see sharks in Kimbe Bay.

They would meet you when you rolled off the boat

and you were like, "This is the way

it is supposed to be."

So it was just another indicator,

another symbol that these reefs had survived

where other reefs throughout the Coral Triangle

had not done as well.

David: We dove on a place called Father's Reef

and we met a hawksbill turtle.

And she met us on every dive.

We could swim with her as she made her rounds

past schools of barracudas and schools of bat-fish.

I love this picture because it looks

like the turtle is flying.

And then she'd do this amazing thing:

instead of going to the surface

and going back down to another piece of bottom,

she would come and she would rest on our tanks.

And she would do this, she would take her flippers

and put her flippers around the tank

and rest there.

Jennifer: It was wonderful, she really was magic.

She met us on every dive

and she would follow you and when she was tired

she would rest on you.

And it was a magic moment.

But it was also a terrifying moment

in terms of that makes this particular animal

very vulnerable.

The local fishermen there, they fish the reefs

that they can find and they harvest anything

they can find on the reefs,

from reef fish to turtles.

And we would be diving, a local banana boat

comes up and with a group of people,

the young man swims down the turtle.

"How much, how much, how much?

You buy, you buy, you buy.

Would you like to buy?"

Your gut inclination is for a handful of dollars

is to buy that turtle,

take it to the next coral sea mount

and let it go.

But you can't do that

because you're setting up a trade, an economy.

They'll go catch another turtle

and they'll come back to you again.

Or they'll go catch the same turtle

and bring it back to you.

We were in a tiny empire.

A perfect, tiny coral empire.

And we needed, we needed to have an image

of coral.

A panorama.

A shot that said, "This is this coral world."

Built of tiny polyps, beautiful in existence,

city in the sea.

This picture isn't the one we wanted.

David: And we kept looking and we kept searching.

David: A place called an Ann-Sofie.

It's a group of islands at the tip

of the Williamez Peninsula.

And there's one little island,

it's not even an island,

it's an island with a bunch of trees on it

and sort of a lone palm tree.

And it has in one corner of it,

a field in very, very shallow water.

David: In less than a foot there is a field

of beautiful purple-laced coral intermingled

with a cropper coral and stagnant coral.

David: It's absolutely beautiful.

And we worked there and photographed

David: a picture half and half out of the water.

One of the things I particularly liked to do.

And as we were working a father and son came up

in a dugout, they were fishing there.

We give them lunch later on.

(indistinct chatter)

Jennifer: We'll see Anton and his papa again.

♪ (gentle guitar music) ♪

Whoa! Big fish!

(indistinct chatter)

It was one of those lovely days

where everything worked out.

We made another dive, we went home.