KILL ALL SHARKS!!!

Subscribers to pay TV may have seen an ad that is currently playing on one of the channels which depicts a man choking and then dying in a restaurant. The tag line at the end of the ad is something like: "more people die eating shark than are eaten by sharks". The aim of the ad is to bring people's attention to the hideous practice of shark-finning, whereby fins are removed from a still living shark to provide an expensive delicacy for up market Asian restaurants. Whilst rich diners slurp at their shark fin soup, which can reach up to $US 100 a bowl, the hapless shark is left to die a slow and painful death in the ocean. The fins fetch high sums, but the rest of the meat is not highly valued and the standard practice is to discard the still living, but now finless, shark back in the water. The recent arrest of 197 Indonesian fishermen in the north of Australia highlights the lucrative nature of the trade; the decks of their 13 shark boats laden in many tonnes of shark fin. These fetch approximately $200 per kilo in Asian markets.

Unfortunately, many people would applaud the trade and say that sharks deserve this inhumane treatment. They cite the number of attacks on humans by sharks saying that these animals make our waters unsafe to swim in and that any enterprise that diminishes this threat must be a good thing. To put this in perspective: it is estimated that on average 30 - 100 people are attacked by sharks throughout the world in any given year, with approximately 30% of these attacks being fatal. In contrast, over 30 million sharks are killed by humans every year.

An excellent website reporting on shark attacks in Australia belongs to the Taronga and Western Plains Zoos. The following information has been quoted from this site with their kind permission: Over the last 200 years there have been 193 recorded fatal attacks from sharks. This equates to less than one fatality per year. In the last 20 years, there have been 26 recorded fatalities to give an average of 1.3 per year. 6 of these have been in WA which means roughly 1 death every 3 years or so. Whilst this might seem to indicate that the risk has risen in recent years, it also needs to be considered that there has been a huge increase in the number of people engaging in water based recreation and living in beach side communities as opposed to 100 years or so ago. Just to compare the risk that sharks represent compared to other water related activity, take the year 1995. In that year, 1 person died from shark attack. By contrast, 2 died surfing, 13 died rock fishing, 14 died skin diving and 68 people died of drowning whilst swimming. Each of these activities in itself poses a far greater risk than shark attack. Moving further afield, there are some other painful ways to die: in one study nearly 3 Australians are killed each year by lightning, whilst an average of 2 -3 deaths per year can be attributed to bee stings. The situation for sharks is becoming dire: without them, the world's oceans would be an entirely different place as the shark's main purpose is that of culling. This helps maintain the overall balance and health of the underwater world, much as top end predators such as lions, tigers and crocodiles maintain a more visible culling role in our terrestrial environment. Sharks keep populations under control and weed out sick and weak individuals. If sharks were to become extinct, (an entirely plausible scenario if the current rate of killing continues unabated), fishermen can expect to see falls in their catches of some of their favourite fish. Models that show the consequences of removing sharks show an increase in some species such as seagulls, turtles and bottom-dwelling fish. An unexpected effect was that populations of pelagic fish such as tuna and trevally crashed as they were heavily predated by seagulls, currently prey to tiger sharks.

The hope for our oceans and their health depends on people changing their attitudes to sharks: fear is an important instinct for self preservation, but rather than turning it to a vengeful lust for shark blood, we should be calling for the protection of these animals before it is too late.

Beccy...

Contributed by BeccyK added 2006-04-06