Swimming In A World Without Sharks

I know what you're thinking. A penguin making the case for sharks… that's weird. Aren't you guys enemies? Aren't penguins the cute embodiment of fluffy aquatic goodness whilst sharks are sleek cartilaginous killing machines?

Just because sharks have evolved over 400 million years into Oceanic apex predators doesn't mean they're necessarily evil. Rest assured when the penguins are forced to come out to bat for the sharks, the world is in all kinds of trouble.If I can make the case for my sworn natural enemies then perhaps you can all rethink the shark.

So, let's make like a shark in a juvenile seal population and get stuck in.

First you need to understand what sharks are

There are lots of different species of sharks across the globe, estimates vary but it's considered to be around 450 different individual species. Chances are, your mind went straight to Carcharodon carcharias - or as it's more commonly known, The Great White Shark.

Thanks to a Peter Benchley novel and a film by some aspiring director nobody's ever going to hear from again, the Great White became the stuff of collective bipedal nightmares. No longer was the ocean a big blue benign wobbly thing at the edge of our respective nations - it was home to unrelenting psychopathic death-fish.

And most sharks are killers, though they don't often attack us. It's hard to imagine Etmopterus perryi - the Dwarf Lanternshark doing any real damage. It fits in the palm of your hand and eats Krill. I'm sure the Krill equivalent of scouts has campfire horror stories about the glowshark that comes for you in the night.

Though in fairness, it's always night down where they live.

At the other end of the spectrum is Rhincodon typus, the Whale Shark, the biggest ever found was around 18m. That definitely wouldn't fit in the palm of your hand, it would barely fit in your lounge. This shark is a filter feeder, so once again a nightmare for Krill.

Turns out being Krill is rubbish.

Sharks exist in all the oceans of the world, diverse in appearance and diverse in behaviours. Some are very sedentary, popping to the underwater equivalent of the local shop to pick up food. Others roam around thousands of miles on the hunt for quality food.

Most sharks are predators of one form or another.

Some of them, like the nefarious Great White, are full apex-predators. They're free to roam the ocean without worrying about being eaten, pretty much the same way we roam around the land pointing out cows, pigs and chickens. 

We don't fear them… though I'm sceptical of the cows.

And I've every right to be they kill around five times more people than sharks every year. Other creatures that also kill more humans include hippos (actually terrifying) as well as dogs, pigs and a particularly nasty species of aquatic snail.

For a group of fish like sharks to be this diverse and this successful, they've needed to consistently evolve. Like all creatures that have been around for a very long time, they are firmly embedded in a complex web of interdependent predator and prey relationships.

Reef sharks may be the scourge of tiny fish but they must also keep an eye out for bigger sharks who don't mind a spot of weekend cannibalism.

It it the interdependence in myriad ways which ensures many things humans take for granted remain so. When you start poking bits of nature and presuming you know best, you start invoking the law of unintended consequence.

You're a stupid bunch of hairless apes and you're a danger to yourself and everything else on the planet

Now you need to understand what sharks do

Sharks eat. Sharks eat a lot. It's probably best to think of them as the white blood cells of the sea. They keep fish healthy and numerous. Sharks pick off individual fish, often the injured, genetically unhealthy and 'not quite so quick on the uptake' fish. The ones swimming at the shallow end of the gene pool

Nature abhors a dithery fish.

But what if we took them out? Wouldn't that be a good thing? We could swim freely and without restraint free from impending death from the depths. From a penguin point of view, it seems ideal; the famalam and I could pop out for some squid without fear of ambush. There'd be plenty more fish in the sea.

We'd be overrun with fish, even some of the dithery ones would survive.

Without sharks culling them, the small fish populations will go into overdrive, nothing is eating them but they're still eating like never before. Those greedy little bastards will chomp up all the plankton and tiny shrimp until there's none left. Not even Krill.

Then they'll starve. Then the rest of us will starve. Good job guys.

And when I say the rest of us, I mean you too. To quote my favourite author, this is about the interconnectedness of all things. Take away the sharks and you'll set up a chain of events that will come back and bite you on all the subcutaneous fat you enjoy resting upon.

That's your ass by the way. It'll bite you on your ass.

Nature is finely balanced.

Consider what happened around various Caribbean islands where localised extinctions of sharks have been tacitly encouraged. Good in theory as it reduces the danger to divers and swimmers, bad in practice as you're upsetting the equilibrium of a well-functioning system.

What those humans realised is the nasty sharks were keeping down the population of other smaller predatory fish like the jacks and snappers. These fish feed on the population of parrotfish and other herbivorous algae lovers.

As the newly liberated jacks and snappers decimated the algae munching fish population, the algae threw a wild photosynthesis party and multiplied like never before. In the shallows where sunlight is plentiful, there is an ongoing battle between animal and plant for good solid real estate. The age-old battle of algae vs coral.

After the sharks were removed the coral became homeless.

Actually, the coral weren't homeless per-se, it would be more true to say the algae ambushed and suffocated the coral and murdered it all. That real estate is very valuable and nature doesn't mess around. Biodiversity is down and so is tourism.

See, there's very little diving interest in seeing all things algae, only real enthusiasts want to go diving on an algae reef. Tourism will drop, economies will flounder, it's an own goal of epic proportions.

Want to read another example of human short-sightedness?

On the east coast of the US, the absence of larger sharks is the likely cause of the increased number of cownosed rays. These rays breed slowly and in normal circumstances, many juveniles are lost to hungry sharks. So what? More rays? We love a good ray! Great for the ocean!

Unless you like shellfish of course, those populations have crashed. Did you enjoy having oysters at the weekend? Not any more you don't.

Sharks are the top-level predators and as such they often act as a stabilising influence on all other species. The balance they create by culling the unfit and keeping other predatory populations in check is vital to the wellbeing of all creatures in their ecosystem.

They don't have to be nice because they're necessary

Without sharks, ecosystems collapse and they don't bounce back. Humans don't have a fall-back plan. There's no captive breeding programme ready to release them into the wild. There's no cute story involving sign language and an emotional farewell from a tearful keeper called Janet.

Once they're gone, they're gone.

What can a hairless biped like me do?

Raise awareness. Challenge the status quo. We need urgent action on this matter particularly as China develops more of an economic middle class. Shark fin soup is a delicacy in some Asian cuisines and a profitable niche for impoverished fishermen.

Catching sharks and cutting their fins off is very lucrative. The rest of the shark is dumped back into the ocean. You don't have to be vegan to see that this is a ridiculous waste.

Shark Fin soup is often cooked together with chicken broth to add flavour. Which begs the simple question. Wtf?

Why on earth would human beings go out of their way to cut off a small but necessary part of fish anatomy only to ensure in the cooking process that people can't taste it. 

The answer, as with a lot of societal ills, is economics.

If you generate a market, the affluent will come, the impoverished will provide. There is no simple solution for such a sadistic economic trap.

The shark conservation charity Bite-Back leads efforts in the UK to reduce shark fin sales, leading to an 82% fall in the number of British restaurants serving shark fin soup and shark fin dumplings in recent years.

Bite-Back campaigned for ASDA to stop selling 100,000 portions of mako and thresher shark every day. They convinced Iceland and Wagamama to stop selling blue shark, Sainsbury's and Tesco to remove pre-packed marlin from their stores. Health food store Holland & Barratt removed shark cartilage capsules from all 580 stores.

A drop in the ocean if you'll pardon the pun.

Shark populations have declined 70% since 1970, not entirely as a result of Jaws the book (1974) or the film (1975) but as a result of rapid economic growth. Remove the market for shark fin soup and other shark products and you remove some of the need for 100 million sharks to be killed every year. 

That's two sharks every second for those of you who enjoy your articles to have catchy per-second calculations.

A focus on Shark Fin soup isn't entirely helpful either, most of us can go without some chicken flavoured cartilage in our diet - but shark products are everywhere. Shark oil is in a lot of cosmetics and fish-based fertiliser contains a lot of shark too.

Whilst market forces drive human behaviour, we must be careful of where we're driving - it could be off a cliff. Unregulated harvesting of sharks for whatever product is unsustainable in the long run and their continued decline may prove costly in ways we cannot envision yet.

In a liberal democracy everyone who votes has a say in the laws that get created. What laws have been passed in your part of the world prohibiting the sale of shark products? What legal regulations are in place to protect sharks?

One of the lesser known benefits of Brexit is the ability of the UK Government to come out of step with the current EU position, which seems at face value to be tacit indifference.

Sharks may be the stuff of nightmares, but their absence will be the stuff of pure unadulterated dystopia. Use that bipedalism and cortex-based moral reasoning to stand up for a fellow Apex predator. 

One that's significantly less deadly than you are. If the sharks go, the rest of us will likely follow.