The Week After Shark Week - Oceana/Jon Frank

Last week, Discovery Channel focused its programming on some of Oceana’s favorite animals – elasmobranches! Cheers to you if you knew elasmobranches are a subclass (taxonomically speaking) that includes dogfish, skates, ray and sharks (pity it’s not called Elasmobranch Week).

Anyway, last week marked the 23rd annual Shark Week, which as I learned this week makes it cable television’s longest-running programming event of all time. This year the programming drew especially large audiences as over 30 million people tuned in and Discovery’s online videos were viewed 2.4 million times.

While I’m glad to see that sharks are getting so much love on air, I wish all that love would translate into more attention for one of the biggest problems facing sharks today: they are disappearing. They’ve existed for 400 million years, but now 50 of about 400 shark species are vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered because of overfishing.

In 2008, 22 million pounds of shark fins – not sharks, but just fins – were shipped into Hong Kong for shark fin soup. If fishermen don’t discard the finless bodies, they can find other commercial uses for the animal’s liver, meat, eyes and teeth. Whether they are caught as a target species or as bycatch in another fishery, the exploitation of these animals has put some of the most well known species – great whites, basking, whale, and hammerhead – in series danger.
Fortunately, there are several ways we can show some love to sharks and protect these keystone predators:

1) Join the nearly 20,000 people who have already signed a petition calling on the U.S. Senate to pass the Shark Conservation Act, which would end shark finning in U.S. waters.
2) Keep shark out of your diet – the meat will tend to be high in mercury and if you consume shark fin soup, you are supporting the industry most responsible for the overfishing of sharks.
3) Adopt a shark at Oceana’s adoption center
4) Spread the word that we shouldn’t be afraid OF sharks, we should be scared FOR sharks. Oceana spokesperson January Jones certainly agrees.
5) Bid on a shark-themed skateboard by August 19. We partnered with Discovery Channel this year to help educate the public about the plight of sharks and through the channel’s sponsorship of the X Games, they had several skateboard decks designed with shark themes. Those decks are being auctioned on CharityBuzz with the proceeds going to Oceana. They are really cool, but I can’t tell you which is my favorite (I might just have to bid on it myself!).