Ever since I was little I’ve loved the ocean! The sand between my toes the smell of salt in the air. And I love what’s in the ocean, specifically sharks. They protect the ocean, and we need to protect them.

When I go swimming on a coral reef, I see different colors and different kinds of fish. What if I told you that was work of the sharks. Since sharks are the apex predators they are in charge of the oceans diversity.

Sharks help keep the food chain balanced. Since sharks eat both herberous fish and semi-carnivorous fish, they make sure no one species can dominate and destroy the habitat. Sharks contribute to the existence of coral reefs. There is an ongoing war for the coastal shelves. The macroalgae and coral fight for the shelves. The only thing that keeps the coral for being destroyed is the harborous fish that eat the algae. The only thing that keeps all the herborous fish from being eaten are the sharks.

Okay, now how many of you like to eat scallops and clams? Well you might as well eat them now while you still can. Tan of the eleven great sharks are being hunted and murdered. As more and more of these sharks die their prey population continues to rise. The most common prey items that are rising are the rays. As the rays get more and more desperate for food, they uproot the sea grasses which are the fish’s breeding grounds to get to the clams, scallops, and so on. Since clams, scallops, and other bivalves are the oceans filtration system, without them the ocean will die. If you kill sharks, you set off a chain of events that don’t just harm them, but harm everything as well.

About how many people were killed in 2008 by sharks, do you think? Ten or more? Wrong, fewer than four people were killed. In 2008 alone, 793 people were killed in bike accidents, forty-nine died from dog bites, yet we are hunting and killing 100 million sharks annually. Compared with this death rate, you are more likely to die from a bee sting or a falling coconut. Now does this seem fair to you? I mean forty-nine people died from dogs, but you don’t see people going and killing them, or hunting them for sport.

So why do we keep killing sharks? You might think that it’s because of shark fin soup or bycatch. Yes, this is a big part of the problem, but them main problem is Jaws, the fake shark Hollywood made us fear. Before that movie, people didn’t think twice about sharks. But now it seems like we’re on a mission to kill them all. This has to stop now. People have to realize what we are doing. This mass murder has to end, and the more people who know about the problem, the better the chance we have of stopping it.