Adopt-A-Shark...???

Sharks are, without any doubts or second thoughts, my favorite of all animals. No, not the man-eating sharks you see in false media depictions, like in "Jaws" or "Deep Blue Sea". I'm talking about the group of animals, belonging to the superorder Selachimorpha, who are, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful groups of animals on earth. Sharks are a very important part of any marine ecosystem, in ways that most people would think of as negative impact. Sharks are up at the top of the food chain in most of the oceans, which means that they have very few or, in most cases, no natural predators. As a result, they are the ones who eat the most, but they are naturally not as abundant as the animals who are a bit lower on the food chain. The only problem with humans is that for thousands of years, the common person has looked at sharks as "sea devils", and other names which suggest that sharks are evil. Sharks are NOT evil! They don't even like the taste of humans! My point is that sharks are not the ones to look out for, it's the people killing them out of fear of the unknown. We should be protecting sharks, if anything! This leads me to tell you about a program I recently stumbled upon while browsing MarineBio.org 

You may have heard of "Adopt-a-road" programs in your city, or seen those commercials that plead for you to donate a small amount of money every month to feed children in some remote place on earth, but I bet you haven't heard about the new program recently started in Miami, Florida, in order to help the conservation of the native shark species in that area. This article  is all about the program. Don't get all excited, there! No, you cannot actually adopt a shark to have as your pet. But what you can do is donate a sum of $2000.00 for a satellite tracking device to be attached to a shark off the Florida coast. So why should you donate your hard-earned money to this research program? Because first of all, sharks are one of the most important parts of the SW U.S. ecosystem. In fact, they are the most important in most ecosystems on earth. You may not know this, but the animals at the top of the food chain are just as important as plants, if not more so. Nevertheless, they are still the group of species in an ecosystem with the smallest population. This leads to the second reason to donate, which is that the research that will no doubt come out of this program could lead to new conservation measures, such as keeping zones of the coastal waters that have a high concentration of sharks off-limits to fishers. This would help to keep the native sharks abundant in the coastal waters, so they can continue to play their role in nature. Check out this article and decide for yourself how much you care about these amazing animals!


Read more: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2011/05/18/2019489/floridas-adopt-a-shark-program.html#ixzz1MpCPyRtV

Thanks for reading!