Attacking the king of the ocean: The sharks that can't fight back

On my first open water dive in Hawaii I swam near a shark. Even though it demonstrated nothing but shy and skiddish behavior I couldn’t get that d#!# Jaws theme music out of my head. And for good reason, when most people hear the word shark, they think about the Great White shark, the king of the oceans, the top predator on the planet.

While attending the Ocean Film Festival this weekend I watched Requiem (while the film was too long and required patience to endure inexperienced filmmaking), it was worth it to see the awesome underwater footage as the filmmaker followed an underwater photographer from Hawaii as she familiarized herself with with the beauty, power and skills of one of the most infamous classification of sharks – the REQUIEM Family.

The film was filled with plenty of staggering facts such as three sharks are killed every second, 1 million are killed a year, and a myriad of fun comparison stats that compared shark attacks to the regular hazards on living on land such as in 1991 there were 1,300 deaths by bicycles and 4 deaths by sharks. The most staggering information was that many sharks are caught only to have their fins removed and then thrown back in the water and that while there is 350 or so species of sharks, 79 are imperiled.

Why should we care about these giants in the ocean that most of us will never come in contact with? Well…because they are what is considered a “keystone species“, in other words, they have a major influence on their entire environment. At the sustainable seafood pannel the following example was provided to illustrate the role and influence of sharks in the ecosystem: when the sharks disappear, there is an abundance of weak and diseased fish, which then influences the rate of the algae, which in turn influences the amount of oxygen in the water, which then influences the ability for all species in the area to survive. So in other words, if you want to keep eating your salmon and halibut, you might want to consider making sure that we don’t kill off all of the sharks.

How can you engage?

1. Learn more at wildaid, Monterey Bay Aquarium, Adopt A Shark, or the Shark Foundation.

2. Help get the information out to countries who are affected by the actions of their government but might not have access to the information (hello Twitter. We got a small thrill when one of our tweets about sea horse annihilation was translated and retweeted in Japanese, given that at the sustainable seafood panel one of the speakers stated that they did not have an education system in place to inform the Japanese population about the effects of the Japanese government policies).

3. Contact your local seafood restaurants and educate them about the dangers of shark fin soup. I felt a little nieve and shocked to find out that they serve shark fin soup right here in San Francisco (and if you want to get really crazy, start a campaign that educates the consumers at the restaurant about the dangers of shark fin soup).

Number of sharks that died while you read this post: approx 120

If you want to see more shark videos: check the blog post: http://blogs.current.com/green/2010/02/08/attacking-the-king-of-the-ocean-the-sh...