Tiger Shark Eats Man in the Bahamas - 09/08/2010

[FastCargo]

Alright, this thread is wandering into Arena territory.

 

Keep it to aquatic matters, or we can move it to The Arena.

 

FC

[Lexx_Luthor]

Yea Okay. I laughed so hard through the second half of the article, but it is opinion, not a shark story, but includes a shark reference, hence my interest. Sorry about that.

[GwynO]

The fin soup situation is indefensible, it gives fishing a bad name. Apathy about it is pure and simple double standards, most of the people who don't seem to give one about the gratuitous wastefulness of finning sharks would no way defend a land based equivalent like hacking the feet off an Elephant to make umbrella stands, or soup or whatever. And just like with Tigers, Sharks are at the top of the food chain which means they don't breed like rats, they take longer to reach breeding age and when they do they don't produce numbers that can cope with ever increasing levels of hunting. In pure darwinian terms, nature red in tooth and claw and all that, people could say so what? Why not just take the same approach as HIV to the natural world, kill or be killed so just be the best killer and if they go extinct so what? Well even HIV would be screwed if it managed to kill off all of the habitat it feeds on, likewise with the world's oceans, they are not farms, they're wild ecosytems and no one has a clue what decimating the top part of that will do for economically, culturally very important species lower down such as tuna, herring, sardines. Will there always be something left in the ocean to eat? Probably, but not necessarily. I enjoy seafood as much as anyone, enough to want to keep eating it in years to come and that means being responsible. It all smacks of when greedy trophy hunters took the same kind of wasteful approach (as in the past e.g. Tigers, White Rhinos etc) to the animals they hunt and gave the whole concept a bad name. I say hunt, and fish, out of need, not out of greed.