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Save the sharks
10th May 2008
“You can’t just take big hunks out of the ecosystem and expect it to work the way it should”
Photo Credit: Tanaka Juuyoh
This month, two high-profile fatal shark attacks near California and Mexico have sent swimmers running from the water, coast guards on the hunt and the media into a frenzy.
“But we don’t need protection from sharks – they need protection from us,” says Richard Brill, a research scientist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. Humans are more likely to be killed by lightning than sharks, he notes, while more than 11 million sharks are killed every year as incidental by-catch in fishing lines.
Which is why he and other scientists are working on a way to deter sharks with small chunks of palladium neodymium metal attached to fishing nets. The metal creates an electric current in seawater that sharks avoid, says Dr. Brill, who presented their research to a workshop in Boston last month. Lab experiments with sandbar sharks are promising, and this summer they will do field tests in the Atlantic.
It’s not just the sharks that would benefit: Like all top predators, sharks are necessary for keeping ecosystems in balance. For example, research from Dalhousie University last year found that declines in the populations of large sharks have led to population explosions in smaller fish and rays, which in turn are wiping out scallops. “You can’t just take big hunks out of the ecosystem and expect it to work the way it should,” Dr. Brill says.
Published in The Green Report in The Globe and Mail
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