SHARKS PLAY A VITAL ROLE IN KEEPING OUR OCEAN’S ECOSYSTEM IN BALANCE.Shark. The word alone evokes a primal response in humans. Peter Benchley once commented that when he wrote his novel “Jaws,” he unknowingly tapped into some primal fear that exists within people — a fear of being eaten by another animal. Beachgoers on Cape Cod may have been channeling Benchley in recent weeks, as great white sharks have once again been sighted near Chatham, dredging up that thrilling mix of fear and fascination that sharks seem to evoke. While no one wants to see a shark swimming next to their boogie board, the reality is that the likelihood of being bitten by a shark is infinitesimal. And, as Benchley observed in the years following, sharks have far more to fear from us than we do from them.
On Cape Cod, great white shark stocks have been growing, or at least becoming more concentrated, because of the multiplying numbers of seals around Monomoy Island. We are fortunate to have such abundance of these sharks in our own waters. Around the globe, we are killing in excess of 100 million sharks each year. As apex predators — that is, predators that lack natural predators of their own — sharks play a vital role in the health of ocean ecosystems. Yet, in the last six decades, we have lost an estimated 90 percent of shark populations to our own predatory behaviors like overfishing and “finning” sharks for shark fin soup. Remove the predators, and the whole ecosystem begins to crash. As the sharks disappear, the predator-prey balance dramatically shifts, and the health of our oceans declines. Since the majority of the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean, not to mention much of the world’s protein, it is not an exaggeration to say that when our oceans’ health declines, our very survival is at risk.
On Cape Cod, great white shark stocks have been growing, or at least becoming more concentrated, because of the multiplying numbers of seals around Monomoy Island. We are fortunate to have such abundance of these sharks in our own waters. Around the globe, we are killing in excess of 100 million sharks each year. As apex predators — that is, predators that lack natural predators of their own — sharks play a vital role in the health of ocean ecosystems. Yet, in the last six decades, we have lost an estimated 90 percent of shark populations to our own predatory behaviors like overfishing and “finning” sharks for shark fin soup. Remove the predators, and the whole ecosystem begins to crash. As the sharks disappear, the predator-prey balance dramatically shifts, and the health of our oceans declines. Since the majority of the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean, not to mention much of the world’s protein, it is not an exaggeration to say that when our oceans’ health declines, our very survival is at risk.