In Issue #65 of Inside Scuba, we tackle one of diving's more uncomfortable questions head-on — is it ethical to spearfish and harvest your own seafood? We also switch gears for a diver's unexpected fall down the macro rabbit hole in Magdalena Bay and Lembeh, get Alex Mustard's first underwater impressions of the new Sony A7R VI, and round it out with a rare, jaw-dropping encounter between a great white shark and a whale shark.

We've also given the Inside Scuba website a refresh worth mentioning: search is faster, much more comprehensive and easier to use, making it simple to dig through our library of nearly 300 articles (and growing) whenever you're chasing a particular topic or destination. On the top navigation bar, we've also added a link to the Underwater Photography Magazine (UwP) Archive, a free resource we built so any underwater photographer can search or browse all 150 issues of UwP in one place.

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As a diver, the question of whether we should eat fish and seafood or not comes up so frequently. The fish in the ocean are what we want to see, they are the primary reason for us to go diving. We are amongst the few people in the world who actually get to see what is happening, and we have the saying “fish are friends,” so should we really be eating seafood? Ultimately, I always come back to the same thing, I am ok with it if it is sustainable, but how do you know if what you buy from the supermarket is sustainable?

Here in Iceland, we are lucky to have some of the healthiest fisheries in the world, even today 1 in every 7 cod dishes served across the world comes from Iceland. But even living in a country with apparently sustainable and managed quotas, I still question myself on the sustainability of mass fishing and the bycatch and impact these fisheries have.

Now as a diver, we have the opportunity to harvest from the ocean ourselves, and no matter what you think of that, it is very commonly done around the world. So I wanted to write an article to openly discuss the ethics and controversies, and share a few of my own experiences.

Every time I go into the water planning to bring something home, I try to hold myself to a simple standard. I take what I will eat, in the quantity I actually need, and nothing more. If I am diving for my own dinner, that means one meal, not a freezer full, not a bag to sell or trade, not a trophy to photograph and discard. This sounds obvious when stated plainly, but it is astonishing how often it gets ignored, even by people who consider themselves conservation-minded divers. The moment you start taking more than you can eat, whether out of habit, ego, or the simple thrill of a good day underwater, you have crossed from provisioning into something closer to extraction.

This is where I draw a hard line for myself. Scuba diving for food is, in my view, entirely defensible when the diver is selecting a single meal for themselves or their household. It becomes indefensible the instant it shifts toward commercial volume or toward hunting purely for the sake of hunting. An animal that is killed and not eaten is, to me, the clearest possible failure of the whole exercise.

So much of the conversation about ocean harvesting gets tangled up in arguments about methods, scuba versus freediving, spears versus hands, nets versus lines, when the far more important variable is intent. A method can be sustainable in one person's hands and destructive in another's. The gear does not make the ethics. The diver does.

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In each issue of our newsletter, we will curate some top dive news from around the world. Links to each of the original articles are available.

Sat in the panga, bathing in sunny, happy smiles after having just experienced a very close interaction with a hungry Bryde's whale. Two, in fact! The last hour had been stolen from a further three-hour Dorado/mackerel baitball experience that had already seen dolphins and the ever-present sea lions taking turns on the feast. The Bryde's whales continued to lunge at the baitball until nothing was left but some very happy people! Very happy indeed.

We had spent the best part of a week searching for this very type of experience, and it's only the lucky few who get to do such things. Of course, with searching comes some quiet time, and tales of other seas and adventures were thick and fast.

One of the many interesting conversations in our group surprised me. I don't mean our friend Bonnie's turtle interaction at depth, as it tried to “engage her”! Ooer. No, this was one of the other guests exclaiming that big cetaceans and amazing things like sharks, marlin, sailfish etc, were… OK!! But his real preference was tiny little nudibranchs, or some seahorse I'd genuinely never heard of and thought looked more like a sweet (candy) than an animal.

I was intrigued immediately, as I just couldn't fathom it for myself. My eyes and vision were on the way down with no sign of improvement, and I had no idea of the “little kingdom” beneath all these leviathans, let alone its beauty. I was all about great whites (when you could see them at Guadalupe), giant mantas and all things massive.

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Alex shares his first impressions of the Sony A7R VI after shooting it back-to-back against his A1 during a pair of underwater photography workshops in the Red Sea.

Alex ran into a couple of niggles worth flagging. The first was flash sync speed — with his manual Nauticam and Underwater Light & Magic triggers, he'd get a slight unflashed band right at the top of the frame at 1/250th, a frustration he's hoping a dedicated Underwater Technics board will resolve.

The second was color on the EVF. On land he preferred the A7R VI's viewfinder to his A1's straight away, but underwater the first few dives left him unconvinced by the colors — something he'd probably not have noticed if he hadn't switched cameras mid-trip. Amusingly, he had almost the opposite experience to what most underwater photographers report: he'd come out of the water a bit disappointed, then download the files and be very happy.

White balance is a clear improvement. Alex doesn't usually like Sony's Auto white balance shooting underwater with flash, but he happily used it extensively for macro, calling the results genuinely the best he's seen on a Sony. The new battery also bulks up battery life significantly, with one long 80-minute, 250-image dive leaving 80% remaining.

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Our Video of the Week is a genuine rarity: a great white shark and a whale shark crossing paths in the same stretch of open water. Two of the ocean's most iconic giants — one an apex predator, the other the gentlest of filter feeders — sharing a frame is the kind of moment most divers will never witness in a lifetime of diving. The footage takes you through the whale shark's world via stunning aerial and underwater shots. Check it out.

That's a wrap on Issue #65 — whether it's got you rethinking your next possible sustainable seafood hunting trip, eyeing a macro lens, or just marveling at two ocean giants sharing the same stretch of blue, we hope you found something worth diving into. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a fellow diver.

Andy & Byron