My junior year of high school, we got our first (black-and-white) television, and one of the most watched shows at our house was
Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom.”
Frequently, a segment would include something about how the chief danger for this or that species of predator was none other than: man.
That fellow above is today’s example:
Sharks suffer population crash
Species that once filled the oceans is on the verge of extinction.
By MICHAEL HOPKIN
Oceanic whitetip sharks, once the most common shark in the world, are almost completely extinct, according to a new census in the Gulf of Mexico. Over the past 50 years, their numbers have crashed by more than 99% in the Gulf. Researchers think the same drop has happened around the world.
"What's shocking is that nobody noticed until now," says Julia Baum of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, who took part in the analysis1. Her colleague Ransom Myers says the situation is akin to herds of buffalo disappearing from the US Great Plains without anyone noticing.
The study adds to a body of work that points to a massive decline in numbers of large predator species in the oceans. Baum and Myers previously found that silky sharks in the Gulf of Mexico have declined by around 90% since the 1950s. And hammerhead shark numbers in the Atlantic have plummeted by 89% in the past 15 years2. "Sharks are in a global extinction crisis," says Myers. "Wherever you look around the world the story is the same." But the case of the oceanic whitetip is particularly dramatic, he says.
Baum and Myers blame tuna fishing and the lucrative trade in shark fins for the animals' demise. Shark's fin soup is a prized delicacy in many regions - in Hong Kong's markets, for example, a kilogram of shark fin can fetch hundreds of dollars.
The sharks are often hooked on the long lines used to catch tuna, Myers explains. Although US law prevents fishermen from cutting off the sharks' fins, the practice is rife in many areas of the world. "It's very difficult for poor fishermen to resist catching them," Myers says.
Some people still
don’t get it:
An advocate for U.S. fishermen disputed the study as a whole, saying its authors failed to recognize that changes in fishing technology over the past 20 years had drastically reduced the amount of sharks accidentally caught by fishermen going for tuna or other fish.
"This study is not science. It's pretty random speculation," said Nelson Beiderman, executive director of the Blue Water Fishermen's Association.
But Myers said previous studies have shown that changes in fishing technology had little effect on accidental shark catches. He said fishermen in the 1950s reported that whitetips were everywhere in the open Gulf. Now they are rarely seen, he said.
"In descriptions from earlier studies, scientists were astounded at how abundant whitetips were," he said.