Large North Atlantic sharks are in danger. Because of the over fishing the whole marine ecosystem is paying the price. Smaller sharks are normally eaten by larger sharks. Now these smaller sharks are have become so abundant that they are destroying shellfish stocks. The shark decline follows the increasing demand for shark fin soup, which is causing some scallop fisheries to collapse entirely. The article comes out this week in Science journal and it is the first ever to show how wiping out the top-level predators impacts the rest of the food chain.
"Industrial fishing has left so few big sharks that they no longer perform their role as the top predators," said study co-author Julia Baum of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. The artilce continues with worries about rays (Cownose) which has increased 20-fold in the last 30 years, because there are so many of them, a scallop fishery has been closed down after a century. They are now worried that these smaller sharks and rays will run out of the shellfish and turn to other species.
"Herds of rays may destroy seagrass beds as they go through looking for smaller buried mollusks," Baum, of Dalhousie University, said.
People do not think about what the long term effects of the actions will be. We need to consider what damage we are doing to the marine environement, which in many ways supports our earth habitat. Stricter laws need to be enforced. Its good to know that people so close to home are helping in these difficult times and getting the news out there about what this over shark fishing is actually doing.
Source:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/03/070329-sharks-shellfish_2.html
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