The Dorsal Fin

The Shark Alliance recently released a new video in attempt to boost awareness and increase regulation of shark finning in Europe.

According to the The Shark Alliance’s petition page,

• The EU ban on ‘finning’ (slicing off a shark’s fins and discarding the body at sea) is among the world’s weakest due mainly to the strong influence of the EU’s top shark fishing nation: Spain.
• The EU finning regulation allows permitted fishermen to remove shark fins at sea and land shark parts separately, complicating enforcement. Spain grants more permits than any other EU country.
• Spain is working to further weaken the EU finning ban as the European Commission and other countries have called to strengthen it. Calls from concerned European citizens are needed to persuade Spain to change course.

If you support the cause of The Shark Alliance, you can sign the petition online.

The question of why the ocean (and the planet, for that matter) needs sharks is one that I see pop up quite often on message boards, blog comments, and video comments. I came across the video below from abc Green Forum, while browsing through Oceanic Defense’s website. It’s a nicely produced video that walks through the potential consequences of wiping out species, including sharks, through over-fishing.

To counterbalance the stupid whale shark video posted earlier, I thought I’d re-visit one of WildAid‘s excellent shark conservation public service announcements. The video features 7-time Olympic medalist (2-time gold medalist) Amanda Beard and addresses the impact of finning and over-fishing on the world’s shark populations. While the video has been around for over a year, I figured it was worth re-visiting to hopefully give it some more exposure (it only has about 3,500 views on YouTube versus the 137,000 views of the guy riding the whale shark, as I write this). I think the people who put this one together did an awesome job.

The Save Our Seas Foundation recently posted another shark conservation video on their blog. While the human fatality statistic is a bit outdated using the 2007 global statistic of just one fatal shark attack on humans, the main point still remains true even for the years that have seen a handful of fatal attacks. Shark populations are being decimated at an alarming rate. If this trend continues, irreversible damage will be done to marine ecosystems of the world. Save Our Seas have been doing an excellent job with their awareness campaigns. Keep up the awesome work!