VOICE TWO:
But an activist organization opposes the feeding of sharks. The Marine Safety Group led the movement for the Florida ban on feeding sharks and other water creatures.
The head of the group, Bob Dimond, says sharks normally do not want to be with people. But their excellent sense of smell leads them to food. The smell also causes more sharks than normal to enter the same waters. Mister Dimond says the presence of many sharks increases risk to humans.
He adds that shark feeders do not face the most danger from the animals. Instead, people who come near a shark later face the greater threat. By then, he says the fish has linked people with food.
VOICE ONE:
George Burgess heads the International Shark Attack File and the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida. He also opposes the feeding of sharks. He supports watching them doing normal activities in their natural surroundings.
Professor Burgess notes that hundreds of millions of people use the world's oceans. He says this has caused shark attacks to increase during the past century. Still, the Shark Attack File reported only one deadly shark attack last year. The victim was skin-diving off Tonga.
Professor Burgess says the total number of shark attack deaths through two thousand seven was the lowest in twenty years. He says people have more to fear from some snakes, insects and lightning than from sharks. Taken together, shark attacks are far from the most dangerous threats to humans.
VOICE TWO:
The International Shark Attack File describes shark attacks as either provoked or unprovoked. An unprovoked attack means the person is alive when bitten. The person is in the shark's environment. Also, the person must not have interfered with the shark. Professor Burgess says the death of Markus Groh will surely be recorded as provoked.
Surprisingly, the International Shark Attack File has records of attacks back to the sixteenth century. How does the group know about attacks hundreds of years ago? With some difficulty, says the professor. His volunteer team of researchers investigates reports. They study old newspapers, books and historic documents. He also says the media provide stories about shark bites. And people who have observed attacks communicate with his team.
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VOICE ONE:
Many people think of sharks as a deadly enemy. But these fish help the environment. They perform activities that help people. They eat injured and diseased fish. Their hunting means that the many other fish in ocean waters do not become too great. This protects other creatures and plants in the oceans. Sharks also may someday be valuable for treatment of human diseases.
During a recent year, business and sport fishing killed an estimated one million or more sharks. Most sharks reproduce only every two years and give birth to fewer than ten young. For this reason, over-fishing of sharks is a danger to the future of the animal.
Julia Baum of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography worries that some sharks may disappear from Earth. She has noted major decreases in sharks in the northwest Atlantic Ocean.
VOICE TWO:
Miz Baum and scientist Ransom Meyers carried out studies for Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. Their work showed special danger to large coastal sharks. Populations of tiger, scalloped hammerhead, bull and dusky sharks all had dropped by ninety five percent over five years. The two researchers placed most blame on intensive fishing. This overfishing included catching sharks by mistake.
Some scientists say about half of the thousands of sharks caught each year were not the target of the fishing. But no one really knows whether these sharks would survive if they returned to the water.
VOICE ONE:
People hunt sharks for sport, food, medicine and shark skin. Collectors pay thousands of dollars for the jawbones of a shark. Shark liver oil is a popular source of Vitamin A. Sharkskin can be used like the skin of other animals.
Some people enjoy a soup made from shark meat. The popularity of the soup has grown greatly over the years. Today, fishing companies can earn a lot of money for even one kilogram of shark fins. Some restaurants serve shark fin soup for one hundred dollars a bowl.
Finning, as it is called, means cutting the fins off a live shark. Some areas ban finning. But illegal shark-fishing is big business.
Fishermen often cut off the shark's fins and throw the animal back into the water. The shark is left to bleed to death to save space on the boat.
In two thousand four, sixty-three nations approved laws to protect sharks. Some rules are effective near land. But, as George Burgess notes, laws are difficult to enforce on the international waters of the high seas.
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