- It's time to let sharks off the hook.
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Sharks are amazing creatures
and they have been since before there were dinosaurs.
They come in all shapes and sizes,
from the gentle whale shark
to the teeny tiny dwarven lanternshark.
They're phenomenal, and they also have
a mostly unearned bad reputation.
Look, I get it. Sharks are scary.
They're predators, they live in the water.
We can't even see them until they're really close.
And occasionally, they mistake us for something else
like a tasty seal.
But trust me.
Sharks have got way more to be scared of about us
than we do about them.
Sharks are really important parts of a balanced ecosystem.
Let's take seagrass beds, for example.
Without sharks, the foragers of these seagrass beds
would eat up all the seagrass.
Which would be great for exactly one generation of foragers.
After that, you'd be in some serious trouble.
So the predators help keep everything in balance.
But, they've been in danger for quite some time.
Out of all the species of sharks and rays
assessed by the International Union of Nature,
about half of them are on
the Near Threatened level of extinction or worse.
And, every year, 100,000,000 sharks are caught by fisheries.
Fortunately, we have a lot of conservation efforts
across multiple platforms.
On the political side, the United Nations
has passed resolutions to regulate shark trade,
which is an enormous step.
They've also put into protection several species of sharks,
and there are now shark sanctuaries around the world.
Meanwhile, shark biologists have taken
to social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter,
to communicate directly to us, which is fantastic.
We get the benefit of their knowledge, their enthusiasm,
and their love of these animals
to help encourage our own curiosity.
If that's not enough, sharks themselves have joined Twitter.
Yeah.
Sharks like Katharine,
who was captured and tagged and released
off the coast of Cape Cod,
and Mary Lee, who cruises up and down the east coast,
Tweeting about things like fast food, the swimming kind,
have joined the Twitter roddy.
And you can use an app, called Ocearch.
It's a non-profit, shark tracking app.
And it keeps track of multiple sharks, wherever they go.
All the sharks that have been tagged are there,
available for you to look at at any given time.
So you can watch their migrations throughout the year.
A shark might start its journey off the coast of New England
and end in the Bahamas.
That's a shark that knows how to vacation.
The real purpose of Ocearch
is to give people another tool to connect with these sharks
in a way that doesn't encourage fear.
It encourages wonder.
To see the journey
of one shark as it moves throughout
the Atlantic or the Pacific,
searching out food is phenomenal and exciting!
But if this isn't enough for you,
you can always get more hands-on with shark conservation.
A lot of organizations allow the general public
to join on shark tagging expeditions.
They're mostly geared toward schoolkids,
but there's some that allow people who graduated...
some time ago to join along.
And it's really exciting.
You could actually take part in shark conservation,
letting scientists learn more about these creatures
and protecting them for the future!
Now personally, I've never been on one of these trips. Yet.
But I know a guy.
And when he has an opening on his next trip,
I wanna go along.
But I wanna hear what you guys think.
What is the next step in shark conservation?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
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(relaxed music)