In news that is sure to please shark conservationists, Florida on Wednesday announced it will ban the take of tiger sharks and three species of hammerhead sharks in state waters beginning Jan. 1, 2012.
The measure, enacted by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission during meetings in Key Largo, also prohibits the possession, sale and exchange of tiger sharks, as well as great, scalloped and smooth hammerhead sharks caught in adjacent federal waters.
Catch-and-release fishing for these sharks still will be allowed in state waters.
Florida waters provide essential shark habitat and there had been increasing concern that too many large, slow-to-reproduce sharks were being harvested. (Tiger sharks take about 15 years to reach sexual maturity.)
Several other species of sharks already enjoy catch-and-release-only protection in Florida.
-- Tiger shark image is courtesy of Wikipedia
Let me place my understanding of sharks and place it on your eyelashes.
Sharks are agents of an unspeakably dark ecological niche and, as such, we must begin our analysis from what is– not what is “best” to rehabilitate their public image in a fleeting attempt to “save the planet," as if, in the end, the precarious plight of the pelagic shark must be the sole harbinger of how our modern activities, left unregulated, shall cause irreparable harm.
A winter without any snow in the western United States should conspicuously sound an alarm in front of us, not in the rear.
As Science must help guide our nations and global commerce, and make a bed inside our ear.
Perceiving this objective need for Scientific integrity, I think every shark enthusiast, every self-described shark expert, every student of sociobiology, must hold the Natural Law of survival of the fittest face to face. It is neither good nor bad that Tiger sharks are such indiscriminate killers- it is their express purpose to remove the sick and injured from the marine ecosystem.
Pity for the stranded human in the open ocean, to feel that bump in the night beneath them. As the pelagic shark completes what time will allow.
We need not pass judgement on the shark for opportunistically realizing a feeding event at our expense, for it has always been since our earliest seafaring ways- but to ascribe such human predation in exculpatory terms is perhaps even greater folly in every sense. Under the misguided auspices of "mistaken identity" theory, a learned mind is willing to subvert empirical knowledge for the mere convenience of a more palatable, if not desirable, reality- not unlike those that question the self-evident causes of climate change in part or totality.
It is time for those that invoke shark decimation as the canary in the coal mine to dispassionately accept that sharks will indiscriminately eat almost anything- including us, from time to time. For to deny the obvious sometimes casts doubt on credibility. Fain would I implore the world to work together in good faith as a symbiotic whole, perceiving the ability to rectify everything from the world debt to (e.g., via reorganization) to maintaining a healthy fish stock for future generations, by implementing regulation.
Where, where...
Where are those lost malarial visions that Wallace had, stolen by Darwin like a thief in the night, knowing that there is a form, union and plan- and that survival of the fittest is the thread that weaves it together- a thread beyond description- so that, we might set things right?
Talking about Jaws, media-hype and bee sting mortality rates? Sounds more like the human condition.
The shark itself is amoral and persistent, a terror to all that comes in its path- an expression undone in the coil of the gene: wrath.
Rarely seen from above, as it strikes from below.
When it grabs and shakes you with the weight of the seas
…you’ll know.
Posted by: drudown | Jan 08, 2012 at 03:46 AM