Shark Life by Peter Benchley

Author:Peter Benchley [Benchley, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-54574-9
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2005-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

11

You Say You Want to Dive with Sharks?

Well, you'd better be with an experienced scuba diver.

And you'd better be guided by a veteran dive master who knows the local waters and its inhabitants very well indeed. Because the sharks of one area may behave completely differently from sharks of the same exact species that inhabit another area.

And you'd better be prepared to expect the unexpected and act accordingly.

And you'd better be extremely lucky, unless you are in areas where feeding stations have been established and the sharks are used to having humans in the water with them. In those places sharks have come to associate humans with (not as) food. Everywhere else, sharks have no interest at all in hanging out with humans. In fact, sharks go out of their way to avoid us—especially scuba divers.

Scuba divers appear to a shark to be large, strange (they look like no other animal it knows), alien (they emit blasts of bubbles), noisy (those bubbles are loud), possibly threatening, and definitely unappetizing.

More and more these days, at dive sites, hotels, and resorts around the world, divers want to see, be in the presence of, and photograph sharks. They're prepared to travel vast distances and pay big money to dive with sharks of all kinds, from great whites to whale sharks, blue sharks, hammer-heads, duskies, and silkies.

Every year millions of sharks are killed for their fins. Crusaders who want to save sharks have worked hard to come up with a statistic proving that a live shark is worth much more to a community than a dead one. The following statistic may not be reliable, but it makes the point: every shark killed for its fins brings a fisherman and his community somewhere between five and fifty dollars. But every shark that is left alive to become an attraction for diving tourists generates fifty thousand dollars a year in income for the community.

While that statistic isn't provable, there is an underlying truth to it: tourism is the fastest-growing industry in the world. Tourism can help save ailing, inefficient economies. Since diving is an important part of tourism, and divers want to see sharks, that makes sharks a lot more valuable alive than dead.

Conclusion: preserve your local sharks and you'll attract tourist dollars. Those dollars ripple out into the rest of the island (or seaside or port or coastline) economy. They support restaurants, hotels, car-rental franchises, shops, video-rental stores, and so on.

For the most part, intentional diving with sharks is reasonably safe, because it is chaperoned and supervised by experts. Even the many shark-feeding enterprises that are springing up all over the world (especially in the Bahamas) are, as a rule, conducted so that the paying customers are kept safe.

Shark feeding, however, is increasingly controversial. Scientists worry that behavioral patterns are changed in sharks that become used to being fed by humans. Natural behavior becomes unnatural when it is interfered with. Sharks lose part of their “sharkness.”

Surfers, abalone divers, chambers of commerce, and seaside merchants are worried about a different possible problem—and a more practical one.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.