|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
“Mountain lions don’t keep me from hiking in the hills around the Bay Area, even though there could theoretically be one hiding behind every tree… the same applies to the ocean.”
For Erika Shepard, the Marine Biology teacher at Menlo Atherton High School, the media-fueled stigma surrounding sharks has always struck her as misplaced. “Sharks live in the ocean, so of course you might see one if you enter their home,” she says. “But more often than not they will avoid or ignore you, just as the mountain lions do on land.”
Before joining M-A, Shepard worked alongside a range of juvenile sharks– leopard and brown-smoothhound alike, she told me– at the Marine Science Institute in Redwood City, tagging and monitoring them before releasing them into the Bay. In addition, she introduced young students to the creatures– showing them how to gently touch their skin without causing any mutual harm.
For Menlo Park and Palo Alto students such as myself, MSI field trips were a rite of passage, from my elementary school to summer camps. I still remember leaning over a touch tank in the fourth grade and giggling as a leopard shark twirled around my hands.
But for many, awe has been replaced by fear– and by this, I mean a fear that was kickstarted by film.
This summer marks the 50th anniversary of Jaws, still one of the highest-grossing films of all time. However, its cultural legacy not only made sharks villains of the ocean, but convinced generations, including my own, that they are inherently dangerous to humans. In fact, Shepard still meets students who hesitate to approach the juvenile leopard shark brought into class from the MSI, flinching, although it is harmless.
The reason for this pattern, however, is unimaginably horrific. Around the world, humans kill 100 million sharks annually for their body parts. 100 million, in comparison to the less than 70 annual unprovoked shark attacks on people.
While the MSI sharks are safe from human predation, such non-vegetarian squalene– an oil derived from sharks– continues to appear in cosmetics, vaccines, and even some processed foods locally. There are some repeat offenders– products which can be found throughout the most familiar convenience stores– in the CVS in Palo Alto’s Town and Country Village and Sharon Heights, Walgreens in Menlo Park, and Target in Redwood City.
Although Shepard believes Bay Area consumers make thoughtful purchases, she urges that they still may not know when shark products slip into their carts. “The more people who know, and the more selective people are about their purchasing, the more power we have to stop the systematic extermination of sharks,” she told me.
Near the end of the school year, Mrs. Shepard showed us Sharkwater, by the late marine conservationist Rob Stewart. His work exposed not only ecological devastation but also the emotional disconnect that drives shark hunting. Shepard has shown his films to her students for nearly a decade and hopes the message will follow them long after they leave the class.
A broader societal change of heart, Shepard thinks, is possible, but requires persistence. “There was once a time when whales were seen as villanous– think Moby Dick– but due to a huge media campaign, people learned to love and respect whales,” she said. “I can only hope that people realize that sharks have been set up to be the villain in much the same way, and hopefully will change before they are pushed to extinction.”
To be sure, as Shepard stresses, the greatest danger in the shark-human relationship is not the risk they pose to us, but the violence we inflict on them. Many of us even in Redwood City, Palo Alto, Atherton, — all cities local to a Bay that is notoriously a protector of sharks — unknowingly buy products made from creatures caught far from protections. To contribute to healthy oceans, as sharks are the backbone of countless food chains and ecosystems, we can start by simply researching product labels.
Penelope Chapman is a senior at Menlo Atherton and lives in Menlo Park. She is the president of two clubs at Menlo-Atherton High School.
What an inspiring article about an important program at such an excellent school.