What sharks need from us
These charismatic animals tell us much about the health of the ocean
Most of us have moments — sometimes despairing, sometimes awestruck — when we ask ourselves the fundamental question of existence: Why are we here?
The answer that resonates may vary according to faith, philosophical stance, subway delays or the day’s headlines, but even in the best of times any answer may seem contingent, unclear or shadowed by doubt.
Fortunately for New Yorkers, there’s a clear, literal and unambiguous answer:
Simply, we’re here because New York City is surrounded by an astounding abundance and persistence of wildlife in our local waters. From the fishing villages of the Lenape on the island they called Manahatta to the expanding economic powerhouse of the 19th century right up to our current moment, New York’s teeming waterways have provided the food, economic engine and political capital.
It’s a thus a sad irony that the basis of our success has been so completely forgotten. New Yorkers have grown to define the Big Apple through so many other points of pride — whether it’s Broadway or ballet, fashion or finance, Yankees or Mets — that we have lost sight of our core identity as a maritime city of islands.
While this historically abundant wildlife heritage may be forgotten, it is not gone. Shark Week encourages to focus this week on one component of it: the astonishing fact that there are roughly 25 species of sharks found in the New York Bight — a coastal area running from Cape May, New Jersey all the way to Montauk in Long Island.
And I don’t mean we should focus on them by sharing screaming headlines about swimmers getting bitten on Long Island.
These charismatic animals tell us much about the health of the ocean covering threequarters of our planet. As apex predators — animals at the top of the food chain — sharks help keep marine habitats in a healthy balance. Like many large-bodied predators, sharks have a generally lengthy gestation period and give birth to relatively small numbers of young.
That means that shark populations, currently under threat, are slow to recover.
Globally, some 70 million sharks are killed each year for their fins alone, which are served in the Asian delicacy shark fin soup. The practice of shark finning — in which a shark is killed, its fins removed, and its carcass thrown back in the water — is banned in the United States, but it continues in many parts of the world.
Sharks have much more to fear from humans than we do from them.
That is why the Wildlife Conservation Society and the New York Aquarium are supporting the Sustainable Shark Fisheries and Trade Act. This legislation would promote sustainable management of shark fisheries globally by ensuring that all shark, ray and skate products entering U.S. markets come from fisheries that are held to standards similar to those already required by U.S. law for domestic fisheries.
Our goal with the Aquarium’s just-opened 57,500square-foot Coney Island shark exhibit is to use the story of these animals and their critical role in marine ecosystems as a lead-in to bring New Yorkers back to an awareness and appreciation of the wildlife that surrounds us even today.
We fail to safeguard it at our common peril.