Discovery Channel's Shark Week Misleads

Surviving Sharks Key to Marine Ecosystems

Watching this year's 20th anniversary of Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, world-renowned marine biologist and shark researcher Samuel Gruber was shocked to see every myth about the shark's violent nature come to life on screen.

The Discovery Channel's coverage of the majestic shark has failed to educate the public on the shark's true nature and fallen prey to the public's need to paint the sleek species as blood-thirsty, brainless killers,

Sharks are a crucial element in the fragile marine ecosystem - at once an aquatic "Crown of Creation" and ancient "Lord of Time." The latter is perhaps a more appropriate moniker for these magnificent animals, but in the 1930s, great ichthyologists called them "Chinless Cowards" and even offered monetary rewards tr anyone who could prove that a shark killed a human.

Western culture portrays sharks as horrible predatory creatures, while the peoples of Oceania; Melanesians, Polynesians, Hawaiian Islanders and New Zealanders, like the Maori, venerate the power and majesty of sharks. Polynesians revere sharks as Aumakua or spirit master.

According to anthropologist Margret Beckwith, the shark is considered by Hawaiians to be a powerful Aumakua, having the ability to ensure that its family is always well fed and will never drown.

In stark contrast, the celebrated fish scientists JLB Smith - discoverer in 1938 of the most famous of all fish oddities, the Coelacanth, a true living fossil - proposed in the 1950s that maritime nations band together and wipe out all sharks.

Sharks have survived multiple extinction episodes and had the strength and adaptation to survive for half a billion years. A lemon shark can learn a simple conditioned response much quicker than a cat or rabbit - and they can remember such tasks for over a year.

Incredibly, they also had personalities and different "IQs;" some were left-handed and some were right-handed. We need sharks more than they need us. Fishers say sharks compete with us by eating the same species we do, but in reality, sharks actually keep the commercial fish stocks healthy and under control. If we indiscriminately kill them all, many species will be driven to the brink of extinction. If you cut that "thread" of top predators, the whole system can simply unravel.

For example, the reef-eating parrot fish are not being controlled by sharks and coral reefs are disappearing. A recent article in the prestigious journal Science demonstrated a direct connection between sharks and the disappearance of bay scallops.

As sharks have come under government protection, the negative image of Jaws has given way to protection for the feared great white, poster child for shark conservation; and an eco-tourism industry worth millions of dollars.