Interesting Facts:
Sharks have been around for over 400 million years, making them older than dinosaurs. The sharks we are used to seeing in our day and age evolved into their current forms over 64 million years ago. There are currently more than 350 identified species of sharks.
You can tell the age of a shark in a way similar to telling the age of a tree. With trees, you count the rings to tell its age. With sharks, you count the rings that have formed on their vertebra. A shark’s body is actually made of cartilage, not bone! This allows greater flexibility and gives the shark the ability to twist and turn both in and out of the water.
Unlike most other animals in the world, the upper and lower jaws of a shark move. This dual movement makes it easier for the shark’s teeth to separate their prey into chunks.
Each type of shark has its own type of teeth, and all sharks can grow as many as 20,000 teeth in a lifetime. When a tooth is lost, another rotates forward from the backup rows of teeth in a shark’s mouth.
The largest sharks, such as the whale shark, are herbivores. They eat plankton by swimming with their mouths open and “scooping” the tiny shrimp-like creatures right into their throat. Appendages called “gill rakers” separate the plankton from the water and sends it on through the shark’s stomach.
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| Whale shark |
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| rows of shark teeth |
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| Mouth of a great white, you can see rows of teeth. |
Senses:
Sharks are very skilled predators and they have their “super senses” to thank for this. Two-thirds of a shark’s brain is devoted just to the sense of smell. Most sharks can smell blood in the water from a mile away. That translates to smelling 1 drop of blood in 1 million drops of water.
They also have the ability to sense electrical fields coming off of nearby animals, helping them to pinpoint their locations.
Sharks also have sensitive hearing, giving them the ability to hear a fish in the water from more than a mile away.
Shark Attack Likelihood:
What do a dog, a snake, and a car collision with a deer have in common? All three are more likely to cause your death than a shark.
You are also 3 times more likely to drown at the beach and your chance of being hit by lightening is 30 times higher.
1 in 300 million – that’s the likelihood of being killed by a shark. The chance of dying from a plane crash is only 1 in 10 million. That’s right! Airplanes are most dangerous than sharks!
Still not convinced? Consider this … In 1 single year, there were over 200,000 people hurt by ladders, toilets, and chainsaws. Those hurt by sharks … only 13. 13 versus 200,000 – I like my odds with the shark much better!
Still need convincing? Try this statistic … From 1977 to 1995, a commission tracked the number of people killed by having a soda machine fall on them after trying to get a reluctant soda or quarter. In those years, 37 people died – twice the number killed by sharks during the same time period. So technically, your Mountain Dew is more dangerous than a shark.
On average, a person’s chances of being attacked are 1 in 11.5 million. Those are pretty big odds. Even more interesting is the finding in recent years that Great White Sharks, the most feared of all species, are typically not interested in humans. These apex predators patrol all around Seal Island in False Bay, Africa, just miles away from surfers and swimmers but human attacks there are extremely rare.
While sharks do need to be respected, they are not the mindless monsters movies and television have made them out to be.
Sharks Need Your Help:
Sharks are quickly becoming one of the most endangered species in our waters. Some populations have declined by as much as 99%. What’s causing this sharp and deadly decline? Soup. That’s right! 26-73 MILLION sharks are killed yearly for their fins just so humans can eat shark fin soup. Even worse, those numbers are an underestimate because so much of the shark finning goes unreported.
For those who don’t know, shark finning is the practice of cutting off a sharks fins and then throwing the shark back into the sea. Without their fins, they cannot swim and if they can’t move, they drown. Can you imagine having part of your body removed and then being left to die a slow drowning death?
Sharks tend to grow slowly, mature late, and produce few young over long lifetimes. This leaves them exceptionally vulnerable to human exploitation and their slow recovery times make their depletion all the more dangerous. You may find it hard to believe, but the depletion of sharks puts the entire Ocean Ecosystem at risk. Consider for example, tiger sharks. This species of shark has been linked to the quality of seagrass beds. The tiger sharks feed on the dugongs and sea turtles that foarge in these beds and control the amount of foraging done. Without tiger sharks to keep their prey’s numbers in check, important habitats will be lost.
Find a conservation group in your area today and help save the sharks! Your ecosystem depends on it!
Still have any doubts about finning? There's proof in the pictures.
Shark Finning - The Big Picture of a Big Problem
How a brutal practice is wiping out one of the most important species in the ocean.
(Article courtesy of The Discovery Channel & Planet Green.com)
Shark finning is a brutal practice. A shark is caught, pulled onboard a boat, its fins are cut off, and the still-living shark is tossed back overboard to drown or bleed to death. The wasteful, inhumane practice is done to satisfy a demand for shark fins, which can fetch as much as $300 per pound. The meat, on the other hand, is far less valuable, so fishermen toss it overboard to save space for more fins.
Not only is it an intensely wasteful and harmful practice, it's also essentially pointless since shark fins have no nutritional or medicinal value. And they're practically flavorless. Yet, finning continues, to the point that these animals so vital to the ecological balance of our oceans are about to be wiped out completely.
What's So Great About Shark Fins?
Really, nothing. They have no nutritional value and are practically tasteless. When it comes to shark fin soup, all the flavor comes from the broth. The fins are added just for texture and novelty. The shark fin is merely a status symbol and a mark of tradition.
How Serious A Threat is Shark Finnig?
Finning is responsible for the death of between 88 million to 100 million sharks every year. Exact numbers are unknown because the practice is illegal in many places and hauls aren't accurately counted.
Because sharks are at the top of the food chain and have few predators, they reproduce and mature slowly. That means their numbers are slow to replenish when a population is overfished. At the rate humans are going, we're set to wipe out sharks entirely in as little as 10-20 years.
What Happens If Sharks Die Out?
Sharks are an apex predator. Apex predators are invaluable for keeping the populations of everything else in the food chain in balance. The oceans depend on them to keep the numbers of other fish and mammal species in check and weed out the sick, injured and dying so that populations of fish stay strong and healthy. Without sharks -- from bottom feeders all the way up to Great Whites -- the balance of the ocean's food chain is in danger.
This is not just a guessing game, either. We've already seen the impact a loss of sharks can have on an ecosystem. According to Sharks Savers, a scientific study conducted in the mid-Atlantic part of the United States showed that when 11 species of sharks were nearly eliminated, 12 of the 14 species those sharks once fed on became so plentiful that they damaged the ecosystem, including wiping out the species farther down the food chain on which they preyed. The negative effects trickle out as the ecosystem gets thrown out of balance.
Are There Laws Against Shark Finning?
There are some laws in some areas worldwide, but ultimately, they're incredibly difficult to enforce.
The 2000 U.S. Shark Finning Prohibition Act restricts shark finning in all federal waters and both coasts. It also calls for an international effort to ban shark finning globally. The first international ban on finning was instated in 2004 with sponsorship from the United States, the European community, Canada, Japan, Mexico, Panama, South Africa, Trinidad (Tobago) and Venezuela, and support from Brazil, Namibia and Uruguay. This international ban, however, has proven to be more posturing than action since only the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Namibia, South Africa and the European Union (EU) have actual laws in place.
Much of the problem surrounding laws with shark finning is enforcement. If a country sees fit to create a law, they have to then somehow come up with the resources to monitor the oceans over which they have jurisdiction, and to punish those who break the law. Some countries just simply don't have the resources.
Beyond the shores, laws can help by curbing access to the fins that are sold. For instance, Hawaii has outlawed the sellingof shark fin soup. Difficulty in getting the soup decreases demand, which decreases the selling price and makes finning less attractive of an option to fishermen.
