YES follow me and say NO to shark finning!
For once i am covering a very serious topic in my "blog" Probably my last ever entry because i would want this to be on top whenever people bump into this site. I am not gonna lie, i have tasted and eaten shark fin soup before. Mostly in wedding banquets and of course Chinese restaurants, but i always had this belief, which is "If i don't order them, i can eat 'em, and if it's dead already, why waste their life by not eating it?" That was then, and slowly i grew older and started watching and learning more about sharks. What do we really know about them?
Since young, i was always afraid of the ocean, and most of us got that influence from the movie "JAWS" The movie is still circulating peoples mind of how evil this creature is, it did play a big part of my childhood life of not liking the ocean. The taught of them biting a big chunk of your arms or legs aren't a pretty sight. But what changed my mind? I grew older and i learn more knowledge about sharks. Even before i started diving, i always wanted to see them, and it never crosses my mind i will be bitten, and finally i saw them when i was snorkeling in Perhentian island Malaysia. For the very first time, i fell in love with a fish, a smooth swimming black tip shark swimming peacefully around the big ocean. From the second i went back up the boat, my perspective of sharks changed entirely. I was like a kid in a toy store, happily telling my baby how big it was, how gracious it swam, how beautiful it was (She was bleeding therefore she did not snorkel) Finally i could say i swam with sharks and it did not bite me. After that experience i started googling / researching more about sharks, from different species, names, shapes, places you can spot them. Up to date, I've dived 60 times, and i never once fear i was gonna get bitten by a shark, instead i went looking for them, i remember sharks swimming besides me in Sipadan, one particular curiously swimming a few circles in Perhentian during my advance course. I slowly fell in love more and more, and everytime i was told there were sharks in the dive sites and when i don't see it, i feel bumped. My latest sensation was the thresher sharks in the Philippines,Malapascua island, oh god how amazing that experience was. The BEST by far (until the day i see a whale shark)
So what do we really know about sharks? I will try my best to share what i have learned about them.
For the very first, they are afraid of us, more so than we are afraid of them. They are also probably one of the oldest living thing on earth, estimating over 400million years ago, that means 150million years before dinosaurs existed. Sharks have been Gods for over 400million years, shaping this world for the entire history of life on land. I will go into that later below. Let me share some facts stats i have researched over the past few months:-
Shark kills - 5-10 people each year
Elephants / Tiger - 100 each year
Execution - 2,400 each year
Drugs - 22,000 each year
Road Accidents - 1.2million each year
Starvation - 8million each year
The fact is sharks do not eat people, if they did i would have been eaten, or many of my diving friends. Most cases when people dies from shark attack is because of blood lost and not being eaten by them. They explore human by biting, they have very bad eye sight, therefore they use their senses and smell most of the time, and being curious, they bite. Once they bite, they move along, knowing we are not part of their food, they leave us alone and not continue biting til they swallow us up. If they would want to, they could have done it straight away. It's very rare occasion sharks swim closely to humans, and so far i have only experience ONCE a shark swimming really close by, which was in Sipadan. There were many of them, so one or two will eventually swim pass you.. If i'm not mistaken 60-100 bite cases happen each year. Everyone wanna save elephants, pandas, bears, koalas, and the world are afraid of Sharks. If there were a group of lions or tigers around, you won't go out there for a run. BUT million of people still entering the water where shark hunts, mates, and very few people gets bitten or most places even none. Like i said before, if they wanna kill us, they would.
Once you see sharks in front of your eyes, you might change your mind, this are beautiful creatures. Now let me try to explain a bit on how i meant they reshape the life on land. 2/3 (two-thirds) of the worlds surface are water, and 80% of life on earth are from the ocean. To summarize, sharks controls the population in ocean, sharks keeps their preys from over populating. Example, sharks eats fish (dead or alive), and if they do not the fish that they feed on would become over populated and throw the whole ecosystem out of balance. Herbivores then might eat too much algae, and coral eaters might eat too much reefs, everything in the ocean must be in well balanced, and sharks do that for us. Believe it or not, sharks also do give us air to breathe, tiny plants in the oceans called phytoplankton absorb huge amounts of greenhouse gas and it produces 70% of the planets oxygen. Lots of fish eats phytoplankton, but as sharks are the top predators under the ocean, they keep the phytoplankton eating fishes under control, without them, once again the ecosystem is unbalanced. Someday when the fishes get over populated and starts eating all the phytoplankton, we will be pretty screwed. So life on earth evolves from the sea, sharks have managed to survive 5major extinctions, and truly our architect of the planet.
Now to the most important part my topic, Shark Finning. Shark fin soup is a symbol of wealth and a sign of respect, it has been around for ages and only recently the last 20years only it bloomed with popularity in most places especially in China. The fin is actually tasteless adding only texture to a soup flavour of chicken or pork's broth. People tends to think eating shark fin provides you good health or even better life just because sharks are strong, long lives, hard to die and never falls sick. If you are one of those people who comes across with "Then why do you eat Chicken, Pork, Deer, Sheep" all i gotta say is go fucking shoot your self, because you don't deserve to have brains. I don't even think i should explain to that mentality, its pure common sense in why its NOT something human need to avoid. For a very fast summarize video i have come across you can click and view the video below.
Estimated 30-70millions of sharks are killed each year. Nature created them for a reason, and now humans are killing them. They kill millions each year, doesn't matter if they are harmless, big, small, long, thin, good or bad, and like i said, we are destroying all food chains from the marine ecosystem and majority where oxygen comes from, so we should be more careful. Future generations will look at us, thinking we are fucking assholes the same as how we think of other kind of stunts they pulled off back then such as slavery? We drive species to extinctions, the worst fucking part is, we human know what we're doing, its fucking WRONG and yet we still do it, what sort of person does that make you feel? We have only been here for a few million years (im guessing) and the last 100 of years, we have done a significant impact on life of the ocean, but everyone of us has the power to change, we can make it better. People in the world aren't fighting to save sharks, but also fighting for life.
Just remember one quote i've learned, "When the buying stops, the killing stops too"
If you wanna learn more about sharks, you can also watch a movie/documentary called "Sharkwater" Hopefully after this post, i may be able to change a number of peoples mind set of ordering sharks fin. Even if its just One person, it's good enough =)
My pictures taken in Sipadan:
