BIMINI, Bahamas — Who can forget the unsettling images of hundreds of sharks amassing right off South Florida’s beaches recently? It made some people wonder if sharks were invading.
But the experts say it happens every year, as sharks gather to head down to the Florida Keys to mate. And, experts say, they pose no imminent danger to humans.
But now, some of those same sharks are themselves in real danger from a little-known threat. Sharks’ violent and intimidating presence has led humans not just to fear them, but hate them too.
“‘The only good shark is a dead shark.’ This was the prevailing view,” says the University of Miami’s shark expert Sonny Gruber. “Now I have 17 to 18 kids here that think sharks are just the absolute most fantastic thing. And they would be right.”
Gruber hs run his “shark lab” in Bimini for 20 years, doing world-class research into why sharks are so important to humans. “There are 13 species of sharks that thrive in this water,” he says. “Big, you know, these big rapacious sharks.”
But studies say humans kill 100 million sharks every year worldwide. If you remove sharks from the top of the food chain, you disrupt the web of life we enjoy in Florida: coral reefs, seafood, fishing. Bimini’s extraordinary ecosystem fuels ours. It’s just 50 miles from Miami, closer than Key Largo. Many of those sharks seen off the Florida shore recently were from Bimini.
Scientific research goes around the clock at the Bimini shark lab, measuring juvenile sharks and releasing them in the moonlit seas. “It’s a shark researcher’s paradise,” says Gruber. “But it won’t be much longer.”
Bimini’s pristine environment is under threat. The critics say that a massive construction project, if allowed to be built out to completion, will dramatically and permanently change Bimini’s rare and fragile environment.
Jeff Burnside, NBC 6 Reporter
http://www.nbc6.net/news/4465014/detail.html
