Shark Killing Is Unsportsmanlike

Earlier this week, UrbanDaddy.com offered this idea for a fun San Francisco Bay outing: Why not spend the day in a chartered boat, baiting and hooking sharks? The story noted that while it’s unlikely you’d enjoy a Jaws-like encounter with any thrashing great whites, “there’s a slew of other prehistoric, big-jawed fish — leopard sharks, giant seven-gills, threshers and soupfins — ready and waiting.”

It also advised that “a bat comes in handy” for the more powerful sharks, once you manage to get them on board.

Change.org member Patricia Terry was shocked when she read the article. A scientific diver, oceanography professor at Humboldt University, and engineer who has worked for the Department of Fish and Game and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Patricia started a petition demanding that UrbanDaddy.com stop the promotion of shark fishing as sport.

Patricia wants to spread the word that despite what the article implies, there is hardly an abundance of sharks in the San Francisco Bay. Apparently UrbanDaddy.com’s fact checker, if it has one, was asleep at the helm.

"I care because I hate seeing people wasting life and disrupting the balance of the ecosystem," Patricia said. "I fish, but I eat what I catch. I think sharks keep our ecosystem in balance and they are fantastic to see in the wild — alive."

Patricia found out about the article in an email from Greg Barron, who she once worked for at Incredible Adventures, a company that takes people out for encounters with great white sharks ... but to observe them in their natural habitat, not to kill them.

On the other hand, Greg wrote that he had personally witnessed sharks from the chartered fishing boats left on the docks to die. Well, as the UrbanDaddy.com story warns, “Nearly eight out of 10 catches will be leopard sharks, with the occasional seven-gill at the end of your line, so with a per-boat limit of three, you’ll have to choose wisely.”

David McGuire, director of Sea Stewards, a group working to restore the health of oceans and the San Francisco Bay, is conducting research on the effects of shark fishing.

“Writing like this helps reverse years of study and shark conservation,” he wrote in a letter to the editor of Urban Daddy. “Sharks cannot sustain a focused fishery. They have late reproductive age, have few young and cannot have many pups in their lifetime.”

As for the fear factor element of the shark fishing trips, David dismisses it. Millions of surfers, swimmers and kayakers have enjoyed the San Francisco Bay, yet only one shark bite has ever been recorded.

Instead of promoting the hunting and killing of sharks solely for the purpose of photo opportunities, Patricia wants UrbanDaddy.com to retract the story and instead urge sport fishing companies to use a catch-and-release method, or only allow killing for food.

Or maybe UrbanDaddy.com — which calls itself “devoted to bringing you the single thing you need to know every day about your city” — could one day do a story about Patricia’s idea for a fun, shark-related outing: “If people want to see leopard sharks, they only need to go to La Jolla Beach in the summertime and put on a snorkel and mask.”

Photo credit: Capt. Dave Sipler