Our friends from Deep Blue Scuba recently sent this to their members. I think what they are doing is fantastic, as we all should, to have some responsibility towards the fearsome creatures of the sea, and not just keen to get more people to pick up scuba diving.
(Extract)"
The industry certifies more and more divers with each diving season but the sharks in our seas become fewer and fewer with passing days. Why does this happen?Let’s observe what happens around us. We keep receiving promotions from major credit card companies promoting Sharks Fins Restaurants. We keep seeing programmes on TV promoting “exquisite” cuisines with shark fin as ingredient. Here we are as divers, on one hand, saying NO to sharks Fins, and yet at the same time, on the other hand, we are amongst the culprits—the consumers driving the sharks to the brink of extinction. On average, 80 sharks are killed for ONE Chinese wedding dinner. 80 sharks just for the sake of following tradition and custom. How many Chinese weddings dinners are there every week in Singapore?( I attended 4 this year alone )Times that number by 80 and you get the number of sharks dying every week. Think then about the dinners in Malaysia, in Hong Kong, in Taiwan, in China. Do your part, Say NO to Shark Fins before the family of 5 blacktips at Renggis are gone too."
Few readings (Dozens of articles on the net if you do a google search on sharks fin):
http://smallurl.co.uk/?408http://smallurl.co.uk/?409http://smallurl.co.uk/?410http://www.sharktrust.org/
More reports coming from the International Whaling Commission meeting in Madeira, Portugal seem to indicate the countries at large are more keen to not upset each other rather than to solve the whaling problem on hand. This also include further studies of declining sharks and porpoises population at large where one research reveals that more than a third of the open ocean shark population are on the verge of extinction. Guardian website also has an interesting photo gallery highlighting the plight of these giants, where most of them ended up as "supposing delicacies" on Asia's dinning tables.
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