Did Hollywood Kill the Sharks?

Since author Steven Spielberg released Peter Benchley's famous movie “Jaws” (1975), the public has eaten up all stories, movies, documentaries and headlines that depict sharks as blood-thirsty avengers who are single-mindedly hell-bent on consuming those poor innocent bikini-clad beach goers.

The Discovery Channel has glommed onto the ratings-grabbing nature of sharks and have discovered that educating people about sharks wasn't ratings-grabbing enough. In their zeal to educate the public as to the gnarly toothy bloody results that can happen if you film them correctly, they have all but forgotten the value of the rest of the education: the non-toothy, non-gnarly, non-blood-rendering sharks and the real purpose that they actually serve on our planet – beside simply just eating people.

Meanwhile, the Asians are sipping shark fins (in the form of shark fin soup) 'til they come out of their, well uh, gills. The appetite for shark fins is so voracious that it has created a monstrously profitable and competitive industry. Giant fishing boats are now trawling the seas every day netting up all the sharks they can find. Once found, they hoist them up, slice off their fins, and throw the live animals back into the ocean to drown. Drown! Fish drowning! Because of our gotta-haves for this crazy soup, we make prey out of the predators.

Not a biggie? How 'bout these for numbers: over 2.5 million sharks are finned each and every month. That's as many as 30 MILLION sharks finned and drowned each year. How long can they possibly last at that rate? I mean how many sharks can there possibly be in all of the world?

A couple of weeks ago, some poor guy was tragically killed by a shark along the Florida coast. The media, knowing of the voracious sharketite for big toothy creatures that like to munch a lunch on mankind, plastered this headline all over every newspaper and TV station from here to Timbuktu. And yes, we ate it up. But the fact of the matter is that that was merely the fatal shark attack off the Florida coast since 1896. But when we innocent readers and media aficionados are drowned in every last bloody gory detail of every little shark-related event, whether fiction or non, we begin to believe that any creature that has the letters s-h-a-r-k in its name is a single-purpose, one-track killing machine out for human revenge.

General fear and 'shark apathy' is the outlook of the day. The problem is that in the past 3-4 decades, we have seen an 80% decline in shark populations worldwide. People don't seem to care that within 10-20years the ocean will be equivalent to a vast underwater desert.

Think of an eco-system or food chain as being vertical: when a species is removed from an eco-system, all other species below it in that food chain will crumble. But when an apex predator (top of the food chain) is removed from the eco-system, all species below it will crumble.

As I sit on my sailboat and float on the brackish churning waters of the vastly beautiful Pacific Ocean where my family has enjoyed many years of swimming, fishing and frolicking, I am reminded that my grand children will not know this kind of enjoyment except from from old photos, TV shows and movies. Their Pacific will be a vast wasteland where all forms of life were left to fend for themselves, where the wrong creatures have eaten the wrong creatures, where mud and muck, because it was the least interesting meal, was left to proliferate ad infinitum and now dominates the once relatively clean waters. Beach-front real estate will become the least desired residences because the brownish muck that rolls in every 30 seconds or so is not only unsightly, but the leagues of rampant algae and goo that are left to die and rot on the beach with each rolling breaker leaves a stench that will be smellable from several miles inland.

Is this fixable or have we lost the fight before people really understand that there is even a fight to fight? The way I see it, it can be solved, but the general public will need a reality check, a wake-up call, a goose in the denims. It took a long time to get us here, and it'll take quite an effort to put us back on the right track.

While Hollywood and the media were getting us to salivate over anything and everything Shark, this same grabbing of our attention in one direction has caused us not just to ignore what was happening on the other side of the same coin, but to actually feign ignorance. “Sharks? With so many sick children in the world, why would anyone want to spend time thinking about [those mean terrible] sharks?”

Can Hollywood to Step Up again?

So besides the standard applaudable efforts to complain to your Senator in the hopes of changing public policy, and the attempts to ask people to open their wallets to raise more funds to buy the tags that provide the data that educates our children, maybe Hollywood and the media can step up and provide some of that endless creative magic and sway public consciousness away from our salivary glands and onto a more comprehensive solution-causing wave of proaction. I'd love to see not a random act of kindness by a random star who was connived into doing a shark stint at the Hilton on Wednesday afternoon, but a real famous effort to step off the surfboard and come up with some clever ways to ride a new wave of looking at the ocean and really appreciating – not fearing – the real beauty and the bounty in the form of food, jobs and commerce that a balanced ocean can and will bring to all of us... and our grand children.