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.
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| 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.
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Tiger Shark |
