The Importance of Sharks in Ocean Ecology

Brett here. Many people don't know how important sharks are to the ocean. Sharks help stabilize the ocean's populations between all the animals. Sharks take out the young, sick, or old members of a species. Studies have found that in areas where overfishing has caused shark populations to decline, predators that would normally have been kept in check by sharks became more plentiful and were causing greater damage to the ecosystem. For example, the cownose ray populations in the Mid-Atlantic had increased dramatically and were eating a large amount of the bay scallops, which in turn was causing the scallop fishery (which was going strong for over a century) to almost disappear entirely, with the highest catch only being 13%. Healthy shark population support healthier and more abundant commercial fishing species (such as tuna) by keeping the populations of fish that would normally eat these species relatively low. One study in coral reef degeneration found that a larger number of apex predators such as sharks led to higher reef-building corals and algae, as well as low levels of coral disease. These reefs could also recover quicker from disease and heat episodes caused by global warming (link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0001548). If sharks continue to be overfished in the oceans, then the whole world, not just the oceans, is going to slowly degenerate. The species that sharks would normally eat would reproduce beyond control, which would then lead to lower population counts for the species that those fish eat. This causes the whole ecosystem to be unbalanced and unhealthy because of the higher or lower populations of certain types of fish. This is going to cause problems for humans because, in addition to humans not being able to eat species that are now commercially available for consumption, fishermen are going to have to find new jobs, fishing companies are going to go out of business, the ocean tourism industry is going to plummet, and the amount of oxygen in the air is going to diminish because the ocean produces at least 50% of the Earth's oxygen. Think about that the next time you hear someone say sharks are nonessential to the ocean or the world.

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