If you think about things like a toilet or a vending machine, you would think of them as mundane and everyday objects, just simple machines you see almost everyday. When you think of sharks, you instantly think of massive deadly creatures that slaughter beachgoers and attack boats. Yet, your toilet and vending machine are more likely to kill you than a shark. So why the shark slander? Well, sharks appear threatening, at least the stereotypical tiger or great white, and pop culture has made them appear as bloodthirsty beasts. I know Jaws is an excellent movie, but it’s unironically responsible for the death of billions of sharks.

First, as stated earlier, sharks are more non deadly than almost anything. The Florida Museum of Natural history said that, in 2023, there were 69 shark attacks, and 14 (0.00000000175% of the population) were fatal. Compare this to, say, the astronomical odds of being struck by lightning killing 2,000 people every year. The International Fund for Animal Welfare, meanwhile, reports that humans kill around 100 million sharks every year, which is about the equivalent of dropping a nuke on Vietnam every year. 

Removing a near apex predator has disastrous consequences on the food chain, as well as the environment. The finning industry, in which sharks are caught, have their fins cut off, and then thrown back in the sea to die, in order to make shark fin soup, has decimated their population. Sharks have dropped a whopping 70% of their population in the past 5 decades, which allows invasive species and smaller prey to explode in population, which kills plant life, and impacts us as a whole. It’s eerily similar to the well documented Yellowstone case, where, in Yellowstone park, the wolf population was hunted to a man, and this caused the deer population to explode. This meant that the deer ate too many plants by riversides, which caused flooding and damage. When the wolf population was reintroduced, the food order shifted and went back to the status quo. We don’t have to be best friends with sharks, but I wish we could regulate overfishing on sharks and cut down on the finning industry, for the good of all sea life.