Say Goodbye to the Grey Nurse Shark

Australia's Grey Nurse Shark seems to be on the way out. Reason, recreational fishing. Xenocide sure is fun, the hobby of hobbies...

NICOLA BEYNON: Divers who regularly dive at those sites will tell you that up to 70 per cent of the sharks there are trailing hooks from line fishing.

ANNIE GUEST: Australia's grey nurse shark population has dwindled to about 500. It's considered extinct off Victoria and most of its population lives off New South Wales.

Conservationists believe the whole population could be extinct in a decade.

Link

In fact, you might want to say goodbye to shark's in general. If trends continue--and there are no reasons, social, political, economics, or otherwise to suggest the contrary--sharks species across the board will be wiped out, this after 400 million years of evolution. Already, the IUCN Red List indicates that the following species are close to the end: ganges shark, borneo shark, basking shark, speartooth shark, whitefin tope shark, angular angel shark, smoothback angel shark, spinner shark, pondicherry shark, smoothtooth blacktip shark, blacktip shark, dusky shark, grey nurse or sand tiger shark, great white shark, gulper shark, basking shark, school or tope shark, bluegray carpetshark, porbeagle shark, whale shark, thresher shark, java or pigeye shark, kitefin shark, salmon shark, megamouth shark, broadnose sevengill shark, bigeye sand tiger shark, narrowmouth catshark, great hammerhead shark, and the argentine angel shark.

This isn't some abstract, at some future point, if we don act now, let's have a conference and implement recommendations in 10 years kind of a situation. This is now. This slaughter goes on as we speak, 100 million sharks will be killed this year. We are living in the middle of an ongoing and entirely pointless mass extinction, and I can feel the heat of future generations' judgement and scorn. Our generation will be blamed as the generation that destroyed the planet (mostly through inaction), and rightly so.