Blue Planet

For the longest time I've greatly enjoyed the ocean. In all the time I've spent away from it I've realized just how beautiful it really is. I'm so happy to be living on the coast again, but a conversation with a friend the other day brought an issue into my mind that I hadn't thought of in a long time. Me and my friend were talking about surfing, he has never been and the first thing he asked about was sharks. After telling him that sharks are not the cold-blooded killers everyone takes them for we ended the conversation and went on to other topics. However that stuck in my mind and I began to think about sharks more and more. I've always seen them as beautiful creatures of the oceans, wonderful examples of God's perfect creation. Unfortunately most people don't see them that way. They see them as evil beings that hunt and kill people intentionally. This is not true of course, but it is not entirely these people's fault. The media has portrayed sharks in such a negative light that they have become this horrifying monster in the eyes of the general public. Sharks hardly hurt anyone per year. Something like five people per year are killed by sharks, five people out of the 6.6 billion people on this earth every year. More people are killed by BEES per year than are killed by sharks. You are thirty times more likely to get struck by lightning than to get attacked by a shark. Sharks are highly sophisticated animals, they have seven senses, count 'em, seven. Sight, Sound, Smell, Taste, Sight, and two unique senses. Their lateral line which runs along the length of their bodies is responsible for detecting pressure changes in the water around them. The Ampullae of Lorenzini is a similar sensory structure that is responsible for detecting the minute electrical pulses given off by living creatures. This means that sharks can feel your heartbeat from long distances, they can tell if you are excited, scared, or calm. With this information we can see that if sharks were really what the media has told us they are there would be far more shark attacks, in fact if sharks were what the media tells us, armed with this information, people wouldn't be able to go into the ocean at all. When you're in the water sharks know you are there, they can feel you. What you are is another question. Most shark attacks are the result of a shark investigating what a person is. It feels our presence, sees us and thinks "what the hell is that?!" Sharks don't have hands, they can't just come up and touch something like we can in order to figure out what it is. The only tool they have to investigate their world is their mouth. The vast majority of shark attacks are simply because the shark was "feeling" the person it bit in order to find out what that person was. Sharks are highly intelligent and they learn through experience, some sharks have even been trained. These investigatory bites are simply a shark's way of learning about its world. One question my friend asked me the other day when we were talking was "If you saw a shark would you get out of the water?" Well now that I've had time to think about it, no, no I wouldn't. I have no cause to fear them, in fact they fear us. With good reason too. Millions of sharks are slaughtered every year and the overwhelming majority of these sharks are caught for their fins. The sharks are caught, their fins are cut off, and their still living bodies are dumped into the ocean with no way to swim. Sharks can live for hours or even days after they have been finned, unable to move, feeling the excruciating pain of having saltwater wash over the already painful stumps of where the fins used to be before they finally die. It is one of the most disgusting things that man has ever done. The only things worse than this were the concentration camps of the Holocaust and the Siberian labor camps of Soviet Russia. Whales have been saved, seals have been saved, crocodiles, alligators, birds, leopards, tigers, pandas, all kinds of animals have been protected. Even animals that are exceedingly more dangerous than sharks have been offered protection throughout the world, but the animals that control the top of the food web in the oceans are not offered such courtesy. Sharks are the keystone of the oceans, they go the ocean goes. Prey species skyrocket in population devastating the phytoplankton. Phytoplankton are microscopic plants that live in the upper layers of the oceans, and they provide 70% of the earth's oxygen. You know that stuff we need to BREATHE! If sharks go, the ocean goes, and if the ocean goes we all go. The ocean controls our climate, it provides food for the planet, it produces 70% of our oxygen. Screw the freaking rainforest, the only reason people want to save it is so they can save they cute monkeys. Maybe that is half the problem, sharks aren't cute. No they aren't, but they are one of the most perfectly adapted animals ever to have been created. So screw the rainforest, save the freaking oceans! Because if we don't we die too.


I encourage you to watch the documentary SharkWater. It is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen and a real eye opener for those of you who aren't already thinking like I do.
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