Sharks need our help, but many widespread conservation messages are not based on scientific evidence
Sharks have long inspired our fascination and our fear. However, a growing body of scientific evidence has shown that instead of being afraid of sharks—which have killed fewer humans within a year than such risks as accidents taking scenic selfies and encounters with vending machines—we should be afraid for sharks.
Many people believe that the largest or only threat to sharks is “shark finning”: the practice of catching sharks, harvesting their fins and discarding the carcasses at sea. But this isn’t the case and hasn’t been for decades. I’ve seen some online petitions calling for bans on shark finning within Florida waters get tens of thousands of signatures.
In reality, the top threat to sharks and their relatives, by far, is unsustainable overfishing, which includes, but is not limited to, shark finning. One hundred percent of the shark species considered threatened with extinction by the IUCN Red List, include overfishing among their threats; it’s no accident that the paper announcing Red List status updates is entitled “Overfishing drives over one-third of all sharks and rays toward a global extinction crisis.
If you’ve never heard about sustainable shark fisheries before but have heard that the best way to save sharks is by banning the U.S. fin trade, it’s probably because, for reasons that aren’t very clear, such bans get much, much more media attention than science-based sustainable fisheries management. Many people are also influenced by provocative and misleading “documentaries” like 2021’s Seaspiracy.
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