Sunday, 9 February 2014

The Disappearing Sharks









My interest in sharks was like everyone’s – morbid. A shark attack with photos was front page news and each sparked debate in the dive clubs over the best way to avoid becoming the next victim. I sometimes carried a ‘bang stick’ so I could fight these villains if it came to the worst.

When I started work on the Great Barrier Reef , I got a surprise. The sharks seemed bigger, more numerous, and very brave compared to their Caribbean brothers. Australian shark attacks were front page stories and dominated the news for days.




And yet there I was working for hours every day, year after year within metres of these predators and all I had to do to avoid trouble with the tropical species was respect their territories and not swim around with speared fish on my belt.



So how real is the case against sharks?
 Every year about 100 shark attacks are reported worldwide. In 2011,  just 17 fatalities were recorded as having being caused by sharks, out of 118 attacks.  Although shark attacks are infrequent, there is a heightened awareness due to occasional serial attacks; “it’s out there and it’s after me”. Horror fiction like Jaws appears on TV just often enough to keep this fear alive and even “nature” shows only show sharks in frenzied feeding.



Shark attack experts are adamant that the danger has been greatly exaggerated. According to the International Shark Attack File (ISAF), between the years 1580 and 2011 there were 2,463 confirmed unprovoked shark attacks around the world, of which 471 were fatal. Surprisingly, that’s only 1.09 fatalities per year for the last 431 years.
Australia is ranked second in terms of global shark attacks with 877 attacks since colonial settlement in the 18th century; it’s ranked the highest in terms of shark fatalities, with only 217 during this long period.
The results of Gore’s Michigan State University study reviewing worldwide media coverage of sharks found that more than 52 percent of global coverage focused on attacks on people and sharks were portrayed as aggressive and dangerous in nearly 60 percent of the reports. Positive PR was tougher to find with only 10 percent of stories dealing with shark conservation and just 7 percent looking at biology and ecology.
According to Time/ CNN : Zoologists today estimate elephants around the world kill 500 people a year while the great white sharks (Jaws)  kill only 4 people.

Incredibly, there are about 24,000 lightning deaths (one every 20 minutes) and 240,000 injuries worldwide annually (Royal Aeronautical Society, 2003). When was the last time we read stories of the lurking danger above or watched a movie where people were struck down like dominoes by searing thunder bolts?

Why is shark conservation so important and why is it being neglected?

The first part of this question is easy. Sharks are in big trouble. "Overfishing of sharks is now recognized as a major global conservation concern, with increasing numbers of shark species added to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's list of threatened species," say Mizue Hisano, Professor Sean Connolly and Dr William Robbins from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University.
 Why we are neglecting shark conservation is harder to answer. First, there have been powerful economic reasons to turn a blind eye to shark fishing and shark finning. These may not have been good reasons but greed is a characteristic of human behaviour and we make lots of poor decisions because of it.





A second explanation comes from deep in the primitive part of our brains. Our prehistoric ancestors had the very same fears that we do according to Psychology Today. We were ‘designed’ to be afraid; fear was our operating manual for things we didn’t understand or that could do us harm. Fears protected our ancestors. “Our distant ancestors who were afraid of heights didn’t fall off cliffs, those that feared wild animals didn’t get eaten, those that ran the fastest left the rest behind---and they survived.” 

 Elephants are not on our list of feared animals and we donate millions of dollars each year to protect them even though they kill thirty times more people than sharks. Why can’t we see that the health of our ocean hangs in the balance and that we are making decisions with our ancestor’s fears and not with our future in mind?

Special thanks to my friends Ellen Cuylaerts and Shawn Heinrichs whose photos 'tell' the story.