Today marks the beginning of Shark Week, and to celebrate we’re sharing some fascinating facts about sharks, plus some reasons as to why they’re so important!
FASCINATING FACTS ABOUT SHARKS
- Whale sharks have teeth on their eyes.
- Some female sharks, like zebra sharks, can make babies without needing a mate.
- Nine out of ten sharks became extinct 19 million years ago, but shark scientists aren’t quite sure why this happened.
- Epaulette sharks can wiggle out of the water to ‘walk’ between tidal pools.
- Great white sharks are hunted and eaten by orca in the water around the Cape of Good Hope.
- Bonnethead sharks can somehow sense the earth’s magnetic field which helps them find their way in the ocean.
- Frilled sharks stay pregnant for 3 and a half years!
- More people are killed by cows each year than by sharks.
WHY SHARKS ARE SO IMPORTANT
All sharks are incredibly important for making sure their ecosystems stay in balance. They are ‘keystone’ species: remove them and the whole ecosystem would come tumbling down.
But sharks everywhere are in trouble.
The biggest problem for sharks is humans fishing in the oceans. Humans have caught and eaten sharks for thousands of years but using ‘sustainable fishing’ – where the number of new sharks being born was the same or more than the numbers being taken out of the sea. But the problem today is that way, WAY too many sharks are being killed for food and for their fins.
Humans kill an almost unbelievable 100 MILLION sharks and rays every single year and because they reproduce slowly, they can’t replace all those taken out of the oceans.
What can you do to help? Eating ‘sustainable’ seafood is a MASSIVE help to sharks, as species that might be accidentally caught in nets have an opportunity to be replaced in the oceans by the next generation and try to avoid fish caught by ‘long-line nets’ as these tend to accidentally capture hundreds of sharks.
Sharks can’t speak for themselves, so it’s great when humans make a racket to get everyone’s attention and get them to think about their watery neighbours.
EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SHARKS IS WRONG!
Find more fin-tastic facts in Everything You Know About Sharks Is Wrong! by Dr Nick Crumpton & Gavin Scott – an informative, inventive and entertaining take on an animal book that will help shark fans quickly become shark experts!
Read an extract:
