Sharks: Monsters or Misunderstood?

The sharp dorsal fin. The rows upon rows of razor sharp teeth. The large pitch-black eyes. The sharks you see on television in Jaws or Discovery’s “Shark Week” are not the friendliest looking creatures. They aren’t exactly an animal you want to find near you while swimming in the ocean. Despite their portrayals in movies and popular culture, sharks are complicated, misunderstood creatures that are more vulnerable than they appear.

Though they look like mammals, such as dolphins and whales, sharks are actually a type of fish. These large fish are not new to the world. They have been around for over 450 hundred million years, even older than dinosaurs. Unlike most other fish, sharks’ skeletons are made from cartilage and not bone. Cartilage is what your nose and ears are made of. This material allows them more flexibility, which helps them glide through the water. Most fish only have one gill slit, but sharks have five to seven, which all allow the shark to separate oxygen from the water.

Despite the continued portrayal of sharks as these large beasts with cold black eyes, there are many differences between sharks. There are over 400 different types of sharks! These range from the gentle giants called whale sharks which can grow to over 55 feet long, to tiny lantern sharks that are only 8 inches long. While some sharks swim deep in the ocean, others stay near the surface and in the shallow water. Some eat other fish, while others will go after small mammals like seals, and some sharks don’t even have any teeth! In popular culture and television, the only sharks that get a lot of attention are great white sharks and their rows and rows of sharp teeth.

One very common misunderstanding about sharks is their desire to hunt humans. When sharks attack humans, it is because they mistake a human for their normal prey, seals or dolphins. They don’t seek out humans on purpose. Despite what you might see in movies or on television, the truth about shark attacks is that they are very unlikely to happen to you. They are so rare, that statistically you are more likely to be struck by lightning than be bitten by a shark. Another common misconception is that sharks can smell a single drop of blood a mile away. While sharks do have strong senses of smell, their sense of smell is actually similar to that of other fishes. They notice smells between one part per 25 million or one part per 10 billion according to BBC’s Science Focus. This means for one drop of blood, there are 25 million drops of water around it to dilute it. This is equal to one drop of blood in a small swimming pool, not the entire ocean.

Sharks are very important to the ocean as an apex predator. They are at the top of the food chain, which means that they have few predators above them and eat animals below them. The food chain is the order in which food is moved from organism to organism. For example, the Sun allows plants like seaweed to grow, which are eaten by fish. Fish are then eaten by seals, and seals are eaten by Great White sharks. This is one example of a food chain that sharks are a part of. If you take away the Great White sharks, the seal population increases, which will then cause the fish population to decrease because there are so many seals to eat all the fish. Without fish eating seaweed, the seaweed grows out of control. As an apex predator, sharks help manage all the populations of organisms below them. If they are taken out of the chain, the effects are felt throughout the chain.

Some sharks even control the balance of an ecosystem through fear alone. Tiger sharks in Australia help protect seagrass meadows from turtles. Turtles eat the seagrass and without the sharks, will destroy these meadows. When tiger sharks are present though, the turtles are scared away, curbing their appetite for seagrass and protecting its growth.

Though sharks have a reputation for being very scary to humans, the sad truth is that they should be scared of humans. The number of sharks in the ocean is steadily dropping. There are a few reasons for this. For one, they mature quite slowly, over several years, and produce relatively few young and this makes them particularly vulnerable to overfishing. Though they have managed to live through four mass extinction events in the past, now humans are pushing them to the edge of extinction due to overfishing.

Secondly, overfishing of sharks is happening because more and more people want their fins. About 100 million sharks are killed every year according to National Geographic. Shark fin is considered a delicacy in many east Asian countries. It is a way for people to show off their wealth, like how wealthy people in many countries buy fancy cars or big mansions. Shark fins are also believed to have medicinal benefits, though there is no evidence or proof that they actually do. Both of these ideas are putting a strain on the number of sharks in the ocean. One practice in particular, called shark finning, is especially cruel, as the fishers will just cut off the fin and throw the rest of the shark back into the ocean. The fin is the most valuable part and this allows them to save space on their boats for more fins.

In response, some countries have taken steps to protect sharks by putting limitations on shark fishing. In China, where shark fin soup is very popular, the Chinese government has put a stop to serving shark fin soup at any official dinners, so as to change its cultural importance. These changes are small, but will hopefully push laws and culture in a direction to keep sharks safe. Despite their scary reputation, they are more vulnerable than they appear and they need our continued protection.