In the Eyes of the Beholder
By Larry O'Hanlon

Isle of Man, British Islands, 8/17/00 — Although rain and high seas have so far prevented me from laying eyes on a basking shark here, I’ve been getting a good look at them through other people’s eyes.

It's startling how many views of the beast there are.

Scientists see the shark as a marvelous and understudied sea animal, diners in Asia value it as a soup ingredient, and politicians view it as another bargaining chip in the perennial international environmental battles. Still others just see a wonderful and perhaps frightening creature.

The very first humans to see basking sharks, historically speaking, probably thought of them as sea monsters — an accurate description even today of the mysterious and monster-sized fish. Seagoing people like the Vikings certainly must have encountered the sharks with their huge mouths agape.

More recently baskers have been mistaken for another kind of sea monster. In 1977 a Japanese trawler off of New Zealand pulled up its nets and found a large, odd-looking carcass. No one knew what the animal was, but one man onboard favored the idea that it was a dead plesiosaur, an ancient reptile that long ago lived in the seas. Although tissue samples from the badly decayed carcass later revealed it was a shark, the plesiosaur idea captured the imagination of the Japanese media and public.

In parts of Asia basking sharks are valued for food. Shark-fin soup is a delicacy, particularly in China, that has created a high-priced market for shark fins, frequently supplied by Japanese fishermen. Since often no other parts of the sharks are considered profitable, basking and other sharks are routinely caught and have their fins cut off; the still-living animals are then dropped overboard to die what are undoubtedly agonizing deaths.

It’s a practice that shark researchers like Ken Watterson of the Basking Shark Society and Sarah Fowler of the Shark Trust have been fighting. Watterson even managed to get some Japanese tourists out on one of his shark-watching boats this summer — a first in what he hopes will become a common event in years to come.

Although the hunting of basking sharks is banned in certain countries, it continues in many other waters worldwide. (Finning is illegal in Atlantic U.S. waters.) In April a proposal to protect basking sharks worldwide failed to pass at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Watterson and others see the fisheries debate as a vast and frustrating bargaining game.

It's these different views of the shark that keep Watterson and other enthusiasts hard at work. Basking sharks will be saved, they believe, only when humans see and value them as wild animals with a right to exist.

Tomorrow: Sharks Alive!

« Previous Dispatch   Next Dispatch »