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Sharks in Serious Danger
jd writes "According to the BBC, shark populations in the Atlantic declined on average 75% (the hammerhead faring worst at 86% loss) in the past 15 years. This ain't trivial. Many sharks produce one pup a year, if that, and less than half of those survive to adulthood. Sharks are essential to the health of the oceans, so this is not a trivial concern. They're mostly in decline because some idiots like to cut off the dorsal fin, to make soup. (You kill a lot of sharks, and get gristle stew as a reward.) Others die because of paranoia, and yet more because of psychotic trophy hunters. If sharks do die out, they will be the longest-lived species that humanity has exterminated. (Who needs Daleks? We're doing just fine on our own... :()"
Whoa, you just dissed an entire country!
Well no, Keanu, not exactly. The people who have been dissed are those that engage in the practice or that purchase products based on those actions. I'm sure that there are people in those countries who aren't happy about the practice of cutting off the dorsal fin.
Yet of course we've done all kinds of similar things like the buffalo for tongues and hides, the dodo bird for feathers, fur of various animals driven nearly to extinction, etc. I don't think even now we're particularly unified in our view of spotted owls and other species that "get in the way of progress." So with our history and our modern ambivalence, I don't think we're in a great position to lecture, and we're really recent converts ourselves.
I'm sure that the same people who frown on the asian practice of killing sharks just for their fin are equally ashamed of the examples you listed in the western world. And, besides, if we've "recently seen the light", don't you think it's perfectly normal for us to try to explain our insight to others? Maybe they can learn from our mistakes.
Please, extinction of species is a serious issue in its own right. Don't try to muddle the discussion by throwing in some tenuous link to nationalism or racism.
GMD
watch this
I think it's important to look at the source. I don't know how Dalhousie University works in particular, but most state universities here are funded by the government. Releasing a study saying they need research and conservation facilities could polarize people enough to get the government to give them more funding.
There's an angle to everything.
Yes, exactly. In strict terms, the grandparent poster is correct -- any species that goes extinct is, by definition, not fit. But humans are the only species that gets to make conscious decisions about fitness, which means we'd better make good ones ...
... and if we make bad decisions, we may end up making ourselves unfit.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Y'know, it's just not as simple as you think it is. Sharks, by virtue of being at the top of the oceanic food change, are especially vulnerable to large scale changes in the ecosystem upon which they depend. The fact that their population is falling so rapidly should be a major wake-up call about the health of our oceans (especially given the hugely long time that sharks have existed on Earth.) It is fact, not opinion, that humans are rapidly decreasing the biodiversity of the planet at this moment. While this is a normal part of the Earth's natural cycles if you look at it on a geologic timescale, what we are in effect creating is tantamount to a mass extinction. Mass extinctions generally occur because some species or event has destabilized the Earth's overall ecosystem. Due to the huge level of interconnectedness of biological systems things tend to snowball and major dominant species are wiped out and replaced by newcomers. This has happened before (trilobites, dinosaurs) and it will happen again. Soon if we don't make a concerted effort to stop it as an intelligent, self-aware species.
If you think about it, humans occupy a similar sort of ecological niche to that of sharks. Like them, we are incredibly efficient predators who have spread across most of the earth and occupy a seemingly untouchable position in the food chain. I think if we're not careful and responsible we may soon find ourselves in the same position as the sharks.
Once we initiate large scale ecological change by wiping out a dominant predator like sharks, there is no turning back. I think we cannot even imagine the vastness of the consequences such an event would have on the biodiversity of the oceans.
I'm astounded at how many posters like you in this article actually believe that this is inconsequential or right somehow. We as humans need to wake up and make a concerted, united effort to stop wasteful and shortsighted practices that hasten such environmental change. The Chinese (for example) should not be allowed to harvest unlimited numbers of sharks for dorsal fin soup. The Americans (for example) should not be allowed to dump unlimited amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. The potential difference between us and the dinosaurs is that we KNOW that we are making ourselves extinct (yes, I think it's possibly that serious.) We need to gain some species-wide sense of restraint if we don't want to lose OUR niche at the top of the food-chain.