This week, Sunday June 26th will kick off the start to Shark Week. For those of you who don't know, Shark Week is marine biology heaven. Shark Week is comprised of past shark week shows and new ones. The new ones which always start in the evening are the shows everyone has been waiting for. Now if you don't watch shark week because you are scared of sharks, you should know that sharks only kill 3-4 humans each year and only because of mistaken identity. Humans kill over 100 million sharks per year for the shark finning industry. We are so afraid of sharks but shouldn't sharks be terrified of us? Also in this past weeks news Morgan Freeman announced a new bill that he is supporting. It is the ban of all shark fins and shark related products to be shipped in the US.
It is 2016 and we are still actively killing thousands of sharks daily and we even sell shark oil and shark fin cartilage pills in Walmart, Target and Walgreens. I walked into a Walmart in West Palm Beach, Florida and I was waiting for a prescription when on the side of the medicine aisle was a huge bottle labeled "Shark Cartilage Dietary Supplement." My stomach fell to the ground and I couldn't even think. All I could think about was how is this legal in the US? I looked at the ingredients to make sure it was real shark cartilage. The bottle read "100% Pure Shark Cartilage Powder, Silica, Magnesium Stearate, And Gelatin." This is being marketed as helping with arthritis, cancer and other diseases. But in small letters on this bottle it read, "There have been no scientifically proven benefits of ingesting shark cartilage" The picture below is the exact bottle I saw at Target.
So let's understand this real quick: they capture a shark on a long line. A long line is hundreds of miles, of huge fishing hooks that are baited for sharks. The sharks usually are caught and end up waiting for days for the fishermen to come back. Many of them end up drowning along with mistaken animals, such as dolphins, stingrays, turtles, fish etc. Then they come and collect the shark, they slice all of the shark's fins off. He is now a body with no way to move or breathe. They throw him back into the ocean, still alive and the shark drowns. They take the cut off fins and dry them on a roof in the sun. Get a few hundred dollars for how ever many pounds of fins they have and use it for shark fin soup or "medical reasons." Shark fin in the shark fin soup is only used for texture and not for flavor, interestingly enough. Science has not been able to show that shark cartilage actually does anything either. So why is this still happening? Well many people don't even know that this is happening! We need to educate people on this subject. We need to make some noise about this and bring it into the publics eye.
This is how I come back to Shark Week. Shark Week will show at least once, a documentary on shark finning and the devastating effects it has on our ecosystem and the sharks themselves. Our sharks are dying out and this is a terrible thing for our oceans. Our oceans will die without a predator like the shark. The ecosystem will be thrown into complete chaos and fail. Shark week is showing documentaries about shark finning on tv to educate the public. Now it's our turn to educate the next person we talk to as well. I encourage you to watch shark week this year and learn about sharks and why we need them. Invite some friends over, make shark cupcakes or shark jello cups but this is an important topic. We need to save our seas. The planet can survive without us but we can not survive without the planet.
