Save our sharks

If sharks were the cruel, menacing man eaters that the media makes them out to be then I would have probably been eaten years ago. However, I believe that sharks know we are not prey and I intend to prove that with the most feared animal on the planet, the great white shark.

Swimming with sharks I felt vulnerable, clumsy and small. They have an aura of invincibility, but with these top predators in the ocean nothing is as it seems.

Great white shark

Sharks are in serious trouble. Every single second of every single day around 3 sharks are killed by us. We are destroying their homes, polluting their seas and catching them by the million. And there is one practice that could empty our oceans of sharks for good... Fishing. Unfortunately this has become a much more common way that humans now interact with sharks, and it's not just their meat they’re caught for, but their fins. The fins are used for shark fin soup, an Asian delicacy and status symbol; although the fins do not even add to the taste they are just used to enhance the texture.

 In the time is has taken you to read this over 2,000 sharks will have been killed, all for the sake of a soup. If this carries on in the next 4 years as many as 20 species of sharks could go extinct. Every year 70-100 million sharks are taken from the oceans purely for their fins.

The natural world is all about balance. Sharks are top of the marine food chain and like all apex predators they're especially important. We don't know what the impact would be If we lost them but the effects could be catastrophic. Without a healthy ocean, the world as we know it would cease to function and the horror of a world without sharks is a very real one.

Over 500 million years sharks have evolved to become complex, sophisticated and utterly magnificent. To lose them in the age of man would be truly unthinkable. We need to tame our fear and learn to love sharks. 

Tiger Shark