Thanks a lot, Hollywood.

With the proliferation of movies such as Jaws and the typical James Bond fight scene with sharks, it’s no wonder we see sharks as vicious beasts, lying in wait to take chunks out of our flesh. This assumption could be no further than the truth. In fact, most sharks aren’t suited to hunting prey as big as humans and are more afraid of us than we are of them. After all, we kill 100 million sharks a year for shark’s fin soup and other uses. Sharks, on the other hand, kill six to ten people a year, much, much less than the amount of people killed yearly by lightning. The only reasons that sharks would attack humans are because they occasionally mistake us for their prey or they feel threatened by us.

The number one victims of shark bites are shark fishermen. It should be obvious that they’re not hunting humans; they’re fighting for their lives as they get dragged out of the water and viciously have their fins cut off. The U.S. National Parks Association states that being attacked by a shark is extremely rare and goes on to state that if you want to practice safety, the number one tip is to not carry dead fish with you because the shark would want to eat it. Another tip was to not try to touch or ride the sharks as that might scare them into attacking. It is fairly obvious that they’re not vicious human-hunters. In fact, the National Parks Association says that most species of sharks attack humans only when they mistake them for seals and sea lions, which happens very rarely due to sharks’ incredible sense of smell and ability to detect electrical fields.

So, sharks are not monsters and do not actively prey on humans. In fact, it is the other way around.

Every year humans kill 100 million sharks. We kill them for shark’s fin soup, which can sell for 100 US dollars a bowl in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. We kill them for sport, and we kill them by accident while fishing for other aquatic life. By far the worst are the shark finners. They catch the sharks, pull them out of the water, cut their fins off, and then dump them back in the water where the sharks sink to the bottom and suffocate (most species of sharks need to be able to move to breathe, as they have no way to push water across their gill surfaces). Even if they didn’t suffocate, they would starve from not being able to move and eat.

We cannot keep fishing 100 million sharks per year out of the ocean. Sharks are not your typical fish. Sharks only reach adulthood at the age of 20 years, so they rarely produce offspring before then. Given their long reproduction time, they can’t recover anywhere near as fast as we are killing them. Furthermore, as top predators they control the top of the food chain, without them there would be effects on the lower levels of the food chain, the fish they eat would have less constraints on their population, and would then affect the level below them. This would continue on through all levels of the food chain. For example, without sharks, perhaps the numbers of fish on coral reefs would increase a drastic amount. Then, instead of eating bacteria or algae, the increased population of fish may resort to eating coral polyps. We are not sure of the effects yet, but by removing the top predator in an ecosystem, it would be like removing lions and cheetahs from an ecosystem. All the grazing animals that they ate would no longer be eaten, so there would be more of them, and they could overgraze the land and cause desertification. Scientists hypothesize this is what could happen to the oceans and plankton (the “grass” of the sea) were sharks to disappear.

Furthermore, regarding the actual shark fin soup, the flavor doesn’t even come from the shark’s fin. Shark fin is made out of cartilage, which has no taste. The flavor instead comes from chicken stock or other meat. The eating of shark’s fin comes with the common misconception that it prevents cancer because sharks don’t get cancer. That could not be further from the truth. Sharks do suffer from cancer just as humans do, and, as top predators, sharks actually have high concentrations of toxins (like mercury) resulting from human pollution in their bodies because they eat many other fish contaminated by these toxins. Not only does shark’s fin NOT prevent cancer, in fact, it is more likely to INCREASE the toxins in your system.

Sharks are not dangerous to humans and are a key part of ocean ecosystems. They cannot recover from the way we are massacring them and they must be protected.

posted by Sage @ 9/07/2008 10:06:00 AM Comments: 0