Gage Bellitto
Lippsett, Lonny. "An Ocean That's No Longer Wild."
: Oceanus Magazine. N.p., 18 Oct. 2013. Web. 21 Oct. 2013.
No More Sharks in the
Great Blue Sea
Where
are all the sharks going? Most of them are ending up in bowls of soup because
of the high demand for shark fin soup in Asia. Sharks are a dying species, and
they need our help staying alive. It is estimated that 100 million sharks are
killed every year – most of them just for their fins, and their bodies are
thrown overboard like trash. Sharks have sustained life for a long time now,
even though it takes years for them to reproduce. Radical shift in the
industrial fishing, however, changed all of that, and the sharks simply can’t
keep up.
What do
we really know about sharks? Surprisingly, not that much, which poses a great
problem in that we don’t know how they function in our ocean ecosystems and we
have no idea how the decreasing population will affect the rest of the
ecosystem. Observing sharks is not like watching a goldfish swim in its little
bowl. It is much more difficult; the
ocean is a big and mysterious place and trying to keep eyes on a shark is not a
walk in the park. Some questions that are still unanswered are where sharks spawn, where they pup, what they eat, how old
they get, and where juveniles, females, and males go to at different times of
the year?
In order
to answer some of these questions and to obtain knowledge that will be critical
to conserve some of the apex predators that we have left, the WHOI Fish
Ecology Lab’s TOTEM (Tagging of Oceanic Teleost and
Elasmobranch Megafauna) Project was founded.
The piece of equipment that is vital to not only this project but to other sea
life organization as well is the PSAT (pop-up satellite archival transmitting) tags. These $4,000 tags are inserted into the muscle tissue
just below the dorsal fin. After months and months of the tag collecting data,
the tag would release and float to the surface of the water. After floating to
the top via antenna the tag would send information such as, temperature,
depth, and light levels of the waters the fish swam in. This data gives
a good three-dimensional image of the shark’s movements. All the information
gathered from these tags is used to plan strategy on ways to sustain the lives
of these beautiful sharks.
Sharks
are the lions of the oceans since they are the top predators. If the population
of the sharks continues to decrease “it can increase the abundance of animals
at the level below and reduce biodiversity down the line.” Diversity is part of
every ecosystem, and if we want our oceans to stay the way they are, we need to
protect the diversity. What would happen if the sharks were no more? Our most
charismatic animals would be gone. Oceans would no longer be as wild, and a
whole new environment would develop.
There is an increased emphasis
in the world to learn more about nature and how we can help it to thrive
forever. The scientific study of the
sharks can be a model for the study of other species in the future. By using the new technologies of science to
explore and answer questions about nature, we may be able to save many species
from extinction, and, instead, learn ways to help them to thrive.
I
feel that this article did a great job of portraying the main point that they wanted
to get across, and at the same time made it interesting and understandable to
the reader. I appreciated how they broke down the article into subsections, and
each subsection asked a new question. It was very interesting to learn about
how the population of sharks affects the rest of the ocean, and how we are
trying to obtain more information about them. However, I do think that the writer
could have expanded more on some of the information; I felt that, at times, a
minimum of information was given, when more could have been said. The author could have written about how the
invention of tags came about and how people went about finding sharks in the
ocean. What interesting information that
would have been! Even though the author could have expanded his information
more, nevertheless, he did a fantastic job at making the article fun to read
and in stating all of his points in a straight forward way.
With the
increase in technology like the invention of tags we are able to begin to
answer some of the mysterious questions that wait for us beneath the ocean sea.
How many white sharks are there? What exactly do those white sharks do down
there? How often do they return? We don’t know everything about these creatures,
but we are starting to become more familiar with these animals, more than ever
before. Hopefully, with new information like this, we can start to think of strategies
to save these magnificent animals. Yet, the question that no one knows the
answer to is how much time do we really have?
I liked that you gave a lot of background information about sharks and the studies that are being made about them. You also summarized the article very well in general and explained the main points. You made it clear to the reader what the problems and questions regarding the topic were and that sharks are nearly extinct. You also asked questions throughout your review, which gave the reader an opportunity to think and reflect on outside information or past knowledge about the topic. I did not know that scientists used a tag device to track information about the sharks movement and surroundings, which impressed me. From your review, I also learned that many sharks are killed every year and how hard it is to stop it. The main thing that I did not know before reading your review was that there are so many unanswered questions about sharks.
ReplyDeleteOverall you summarized the article very well and gave the reader a lot of information, but you could have made a more clear point as to why it is so important to save sharks.
I like how you began with a question and then answer it; this organizes what you are talking about and makes reading what you wrote easier. You also picked an article with a good topic. I didn't know that sharks are being killed in such high numbers, and I think that people know more about sharks killing humans, than humans killing sharks. I thought you nicely explained what the tags are, and how they will be used to collect more information on sharks. You also did a good job explaining why this is significant to science, by talking about how shark deaths will affect the ecosystem and how this research can stimulate other studies on animals we do not know much about. I would have liked if there was more information about what we currently know about sharks or what data the tags have given us so far, but that may not have been in the article. I think you did a great job with summarizing and explaining the article, and choose an interesting topic to write about.
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