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Operation Apex Harmony
Why are Sharks Important?
As apex predators, sharks have shaped marine life in the oceans for over 450 million years and are essential to the health of our oceans, and ultimately to the survival of humankind.
Studies are already indicating that regional elimination of sharks can cause disastrous effects including the collapse of fisheries and the death of coral reefs.
Sharks ensure our very survival
Sharks play a crucial role on this planet. Remove sharks from the oceans, and we are tampering with our primary food, water and air sources.
Sharks keep our largest and most important ecosystem healthy. Our existence, in part, is dependent upon theirs.
Sharks have sat atop the oceans’ food chain, keeping our seas healthy for over 450 million years. They are a critical component in an ecosystem that provides one-third of our world with food, produces more oxygen than all the rainforests combined, removes half of the atmosphere’s anthropogenic carbon dioxide (greenhouse gas), and controls our planet’s temperature and weather.
A world without sharks
One study in the U.S. indicates that the elimination of sharks resulted in the destruction of the shellfish industry in waters off the mid-Atlantic states of the United States, due to the unchecked population growth of cow-nose rays, whose mainstay is scallops. Other studies in Belize have shown reef systems falling into extreme decline when the sharks have been overfished, destroying an entire ecosystem. The downstream effects are frightening: the spike in grouper population (thanks to the elimination of sharks) resulted in a decimation of the parrotfish population, who could no longer perform their important role: keeping the coral algae-free and therefore reducing the oxygen quantities in our atmosphere.
Why we care...
No one knows for sure what will happen globally if shark populations are destroyed, but one should fear the results. Two hundred and fifty million years ago, this planet suffered the largest mass extinction on record, and scientists believe this was caused in part by catastrophic changes in the ocean. Sharks play a keystone role ensuring our seas remain in a healthy equilibrium and do not reach that point again.
Future generations need healthy oceans and healthy oceans need sharks to maintain them.
"If there is one message we are trying to get across here is it that, if we can't save the whales, and the sharks, the turtles, the fish, the great whites and tiger sharks, we are not going to save the oceans. And if the oceans die, we die; we can’t live on this planet with a dead ocean" - Captain Paul Watson.