The truth about sharks By Suzannah Evans, Oceana Every summer, familiar headlines creep into the news: stories of sharks terrorizing beaches around the world, sending swimmers racing for shore with the ominous display of a dorsal fin. The shark’s reputation as a killer was sealed in the public imagination with the 1975 release of Jaws , a movie with imagery so powerful that the original book’s author devoted the rest of his life to dismantling the character he had helped create. The shark in Jaws was a brutal, instinctive killer with a dozen rows of jagged teeth and a taste for human flesh. The bloodthirsty great white has become an archetype so pervasive that even a news story reporting on a harmless two-foot sand shark can’t resist recalling the Jaws mythos. The reality of shark attacks, however, is that they are few and far in between. Sharks may not be the relentless killers they’re made out to be, but there is still a victim in shark-human interaction. Sharks are a vital part of a healthy ocean.
Shark finning Shark finning refers to the removal and retention of shark fins while the remainder of the living shark is discarded in the ocean. Sharks returned to the ocean without their fins are often still alive; unable to move effectively, they sink to the bottom of the ocean and die of suffocation or are eaten by other predators. Shark finning at sea enables fishing vessels to increase profitability and increase the number of sharks harvested, as they only have to store and transport the fins, by far the most profitable part of the shark.[1] Some countries have banned this practice and require the whole shark to be brought back to port before removing the fins. Shark finning increased since 1997 largely due to the increasing demand for shark fins for shark fin soup and traditional cures, particularly in China and its territories, and as a result of improved fishing technology and market economics. The global shark catch in 2012 was 100 million.[5] Process[edit] Impacts[edit] Opposition[edit]
How 'Jaws' changed our views When "Jaws" burst onto movie screens on June 20, 1975, the film shocked audiences with a terrifying monster. Now, 35 years later, the slogan "Don't go in the water" from the movie has turned out to be a lousy PR campaign for sharks, whose numbers worldwide have been decimated due partly to the frightening and false ideas the film helped spread about them. Although sharks certainly have a fearsome reputation nowadays, incredibly, "at the turn of the 20th century, there was this perception that sharks had never attacked a human being," said George Burgess, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research in Gainesville. "There was even a reward offered if someone could prove they were bitten by a shark — money that was never collected." That began to change when a deadly rampage by a rogue great white shark on swimmers along the New Jersey shoreline and in a nearby creek during the summer of 1916 — attacks that helped inspire "Jaws," Burgess noted.
Shark savers BoycottWall Every year tens of millions of sharks die a slow death because of finning. Finning is the inhumane practice of hacking off the shark's fins and throwing its still living body back into the sea. The sharks either starve to death, are eaten alive by other fish, or drown (if they are not in constant movement their gills cannot extract oxygen from the water). Shark fins are being "harvested" in ever greater numbers to feed the growing demand for shark fin soup, an Asian "delicacy". Not only is the finning of sharks barbaric, but their indiscriminate slaughter at an unsustainable rate is pushing many species to the brink of extinction. Since the 1970s the populations of several species have been decimated by over 95%. StopSharkFinning.net is campaigning to achieve a worldwide ban on shark finning. If you are concerned about the plight of sharks - an animal that has been around since before the dinosaurs - there are plenty of things you can do to help.