JAWS NO MORE

Whe "Jaws" was released in 1975, no one would have ever imagined that just 30 years later, many of the world's shark species would be on the brink of extinction. Scientists now estimate that over the past 50 to 100 years, 90 percent or more of the world's predator fish, including sharks, have disappeared, victims of a wholesale slaughter that has escalated over the past several decades.

In the Gulf of Mexico, 99 percent of oceanic white-tipped sharks are gone. In thhe northern Mediterranean, 15 species of large sharkshave been reduced to undetectable levelsOn the world's coral reefs approximately 99 percent of reef sharks have disappeared. And the great white shark is now at risk of disappearing from most of the world's oceans.

Just as the top predators', such as lions, tigers and wolves, play on land; sharks play a similar role in the oceans.Like their land counterparts , sharks help regulate the numbers of other marine species, thereby keeping the entire ocean system in balance.

Overfishing threatens much of the the world's big fish. But for sharks they're in a more precarious position. Most fish produce fish in large numbers but sharks begin reproducing at a relative advanced age, have long gestation periods and produce few young. Most of the hunting of sharks is for their fin while the rest of the carcass is discarded. The hunting of these sharks needs to be halted if in decades to come we expect there to be any of these species left, not to mention throwing our oceans ecological system out of balance.