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Sharks make hot news, and CNN is there: a 14 foot Great Hammerhead was killed today off of Florida.So why am I not excited ? I’m sure by now you know I don’t think random killing is cool, but sharks in particular? 6 reasons why:

* Slow growth * it takes a long time and a lot of fish sticks for an animal made entirely out of cartilage to grow to 14 feet in length

* Late maturation * Sharks aren’t capable of breeding until much later in life than other fish, so many of the sharks that fishermen kill haven’t even hit puberty yet, so to speak

* Low Fecundity * Sharks don’t have that many babies, and they don’t have them very often. The biggest advantage that a shark mother can have is growing to large size (say, 14 feet and 1000 pounds) so she could have as many babies as possible

* Low Survivorship * It’s hard out there for a shark, especially a baby, who has to worry about being eaten by everything from larger fish, birds, its bigger siblings, or even its own mother if she’s starving. This is another reason for female sharks to have as many babies as possible, because only a small percentage will survive.

What does this all add up to? These “well-meaning” fisherman were attracted to the shark for the same reasons conservationists are - she was huge. This means she was old enough to have babies, and big enough to have have an awful lof them - that’s not an opportunity many sharks get. They may have “accidentally” killed her, but it makes me mad that they acknowledged she was a “majestic creature,” and just couldn’t let her be.In the arduous hour and half it took them to catch and kill this shark, they undid decades of grueling survivorship on her part, but they also killed the babies she could have potentially had. When I hear that fishing captain practically salivate over the “even bigger” shark that was out there, I wonder if people will ever learn how much energy goes into a shark that large, and what they’re robbing from that ecosystem.

People may not like to think about sharks as anything but blood-thirsty monsters, but they’re incredibly important to the health of the oceans, and to the health of swimmers, fishermen, and fish-eaters everywhere. Let me make two more things abundantly clear:

1) Hammerheads feed in the sand on the bottom of the ocean, eating crustaceans and mussels hidden underground.

2) There’s no evidence that a Great Hammerhead has ever attacked a person.

Source: http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2008/03/06/dnt.fl.hammerhead.caught.wpec

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