How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 087: Great White Shark Dies in Japan Aquarium After 3 Days
A Japan Aquarium in Okinawa tranferred a Great White Shark that was accidentally caught of the coast of Japan into its Dangerous Predators Exhibit on January 5, 2016. 3 Days later it died. Why did the aquarium feel that it could take care of a Great White Shark when other aquariums have failed in the past? We explore this and more on this episode.
Support the Podcast:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/patreon
Shop for the Ocean:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/shop
10 Ocean Tips to Conserve the Ocean:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/wordpress/sufb_optinpdf
Show Notes:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/session87
Welcome to the Speak Up For Blue Podcast, session 87. Big news out of this weekend is a great white shark dies in an aquarium in Okinawa, Japan after three days of being in said aquarium on the news today on the Speak Up For Blue Podcast. Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the Speak Up For Blue Podcast, your voice for the ocean. I am your host, Andrew Lewin, founder speakupforblue.com, marine ecologist and self-proclaimed ocean printer. Today is Monday, and unfortunately, I do not have good news coming out of this weekend. But before we get into that, I'd like to thank our supporters for this podcast, Claire and Chris Jefford for supporting me on patreon.com, as well as Dr. Judith Weiss. Thank you very much for your support and here's your podcast. So today, I have some bad news, the big news out of this weekend is a great white shark died in a Japan, in Okinawa, Japan aquarium only after three days of being in said aquarium. This shark, it's a tragedy and it's kind of surprising that the shark is even in an aquarium in the first place. And we're going to go over a bunch of stuff in this podcast that just my thoughts on the whole process and what I know about the aquarium industry, great white sharks, conservation and so forth. So bear with me. You may not love everything I say, but just remember this podcast is the start of a discussion. So if you don't like anything, I say you're more than welcome to come in and just put a comment on the session notes, you can go to speakupforblue.com/session87 and let me know how you feel about this article and the content and what it's all about about great white sharks and having them in captivity. But you got to remember too that sometimes I say things just to kind of spark a conversation. I look at both sides of the coin and see where we can go. However, this one is very hard to look at both sides of the coin. So I'm going to just talk about first what happened. So a great white shark was caught off the southwest coast of Japan accidentally. So this aquarium said, bring the shark in, let's put it in our tank. We have an exhibition, I think they call it dangerous predators or dangerous sharks exhibit. The shark was brought into the exhibit on January 5th on a Tuesday and then died January 8th on a Friday. Now it didn't eat and critics and Aquarius think that's the reason why it didn't survive. It didn't eat for about three days. Of course, stress is probably involved in it. A lot of fish get stressed when they're moved. I can imagine that the size of this one would even bring more stress on. And then the aquarium is actually investigating why it died. However, it's difficult because I have a hard time, I think I'm going to have a hard time believing whatever the aquarium says. And I'm going to get into that in a little bit. But there's always a question, an ethical question with aquariums because aquariums are really the whole base point of it is that they're for education, they're bringing people closer to the ocean or bringing the ocean closer to people so they can see what's going on underwater and they can see what's happening in the ocean. It's kind of fun to see and people get connected to the ocean and once you get connected, hopefully you want to protect it and really get involved. That's the basic theory with aquariums and really any exhibit. However, we really have to look at what happens to these animals. Are they happy? Are they not? Can they be happy? Can they not? Can they feel pain? Do they get sensitive? So forth. And really, are they there so that the aquarium can drive profit and revenue so that they can satisfy their customers because a lot of aquariums are for profit organizations. When you have a for profit organization, the question that comes up especially when there's an animals health involved is the best case being put in for the aquarium to generate revenue or for the health of the animal and conservation of that species. That's really the big question. Now people can fall on very different sides of the coin and to be honest, I think it really matters as long as like there's certain fish that can actually be in an aquarium for a long time and be healthy and happy. If they have short home ranges, they're easy to take care of. They don't stress out a lot. They have maybe a higher range of tolerance in terms of water temperature and water chemistry in case something goes wrong. There are a lot of fish who can actually handle those conditions. There are other, however, other fish who may not be able to handle conditions and it usually means in the aquarius industry that I know. Usually it means that if you don't know much about the actual fish or the specimen that you bring in, the chances of them surviving are very small. They're smaller than a fish that you know, the physiology you know more about that fish and you can actually understand it more and take care of it better. However, in this case with a great white shark, we don't know anything. We don't know much about the shark. We know bits and pieces about the shark, but we don't really know a lot about it. We're just really starting to scratch the surface with great white sharks in terms of where it's home, like where its home ranges are for each population, what it eats, how it eats. We're really just diving into that kind of stuff. So yeah, I've kind of gone over just why would aquarium really want a great white shark? If you think about it, a great white shark is a great attraction to an aquarium. Who doesn't want to see a great white shark up close? To be honest, it's on my bucket list. However, would I want to see a great white shark in an aquarium or on a boat when it's swimming in its natural habitat? For me, as a scientist, as a conservationist, as someone who loves the ocean, I would probably want to see it in the ocean rather than in an aquarium because I know that it doesn't necessarily, in my opinion, doesn't necessarily belong in an aquarium. It really doesn't, in my opinion. I was going to tell you why in just a moment. But education-wise, I can see it really having value. If you think about it, people, well, one, the aquarist and researchers can really get to know the biology and physiology of the great white shark. It could be a great way to really study the great white shark. What it eats, how it eats, how it gets rid of its food, and just how it's healthy. You can measure it and do take samples and things like that. Not an ideal life for a shark, but from a scientific standpoint, a research standpoint, it would be a great way to really observe this shark and how it can do in different conditions. Of course, keeping the health in mind. It's also a way for people to really connect with the great white shark. If you see a shark swimming around, not really searching for food, not really searching to try and kill something, but just swimming and looking at its behavior and really connecting with it. That is something that's really powerful for someone visiting the aquarium and seeing the shark. They can actually fall in love with this shark and really get to see its size, its torpedo-like shape, its speed, perhaps. Who knows? Just the different behaviors that we may not understand or know about have discovered yet. There's that aspect of the education of why researchers and scientists would really want to see an aquarium hold a great white shark. The other side of it is a little darker. You've got the profit side. According to the story, one of the aquarium people said that people have been asking for a great white shark, a great white shark exhibit for quite some time. They had this exhibit for the great white shark. Of course, if people demand something, the aquarium's going to try and provide that demand. That's exactly what they did. They did it really because people wanted it. It didn't sound like they really did it for research purposes or to figure out the biology of the fish. They really wanted to find out if they can bring one in and then attract people. I'm sure during those three days that it was in the aquarium, they probably made quite a bit of money from people coming in because they use that as the attractor. They probably got a lot of press from it. Now they probably got even more pressing than they wanted because it's not great press, but they got press from it and they probably made a lot of money from that. There's that profit side and you almost wonder that profit side really outweigh the health of the shark because there are a lot of major problems withholding a great white shark in the first place. Everything is, and I told you before, I mentioned before, scientists and veterinarians don't really know much about the great white shark. They don't know much about the biology, they don't know much about the physiology other than studying other sharks and really comparing those systems, but when it comes to really taking care of a great white shark, which is what you're doing, you have control over a fish when it's in an aquarium. It's up to you to maintain its health and to keep it alive and make sure it survives properly and try and make its encounter, its enclosure, sorry, as natural as possible. But that's really hard to do with an 11 and a half foot fish, right? Let's think about that. How can you make an aquarium tank that is probably 0.00001% of its actual home range, how can you make that as natural as possible? Yes, the gray white shark is normally found in the open ocean, but we don't know anything about its habitat. We don't know anything about certain cues that it likes when it goes into spawning or feeding or just natural habitats. We don't know what it has to have on the ground, we don't know how deep it has to go. All that stuff, we have no clue of what's happening, especially in an aquarium setting. So what makes us think that we can hold them in an aquarium? Think about it. We just don't know much about it. Like I said before, in an aquarium setting, if you don't know much about the species, then how can you take care of it properly? And the chances of its survival in the first place are really, really low. And history will actually tell you that the chances of survivability for a gray white shark in an aquarium is actually really low because another aquarium, Monterey Bay Aquarium, which is a world-renowned aquarium, a nonprofit aquarium that holds a lot of different fish and is very conservation-focused, very respective in the conservation community. In fact, it has a research side to the, the aquarium has a research side that is in charge of doing the seafood watch program and many, many other programs that really bring conservation to life for the public. And they tried it in the 80s. They tried it twice in the 80s, once in 1980 and once in 1984. Both times the shark died. One time the shark died after 11 days, it didn't eat. The next time after I believe it was two days or not much more, or not much longer, they realized that the shark was not doing well and the Aquarius reintroduced it back into the ocean and then it later, it died almost immediately, going back into the ocean. So there's obviously something going on with the transferring of fish from ocean to aquarium and then maybe even back to ocean to reintroduce them. Now, I can understand from a rehabilitation perspective of getting a shark that might be hurt, bringing him in, nursing him back to health, and then bringing him out like we do with a lot of marine mammals and other sea turtles and other form and other species in the ocean. However, we don't know much about these species and if you think about it, the transfer is such a large species from one place to another is, is difficult, it's expensive and now we know that it doesn't really do much for the species that actually probably brings down their survivability. So we have to take an account the history of this and I understand you learn from your mistakes but obviously people haven't learned from the mistakes. I don't know if there was an information exchange, I don't know if people from Monterey Bay Aquarium went over there, I don't know. It doesn't necessarily mean that it happened or you know a lot of times in conservation you think everybody speaks together but most of the time it doesn't happen. So you can't really expect and then it happens so long that you can't expect even the research to be around to give offer advice. So that is a big, big problem. So now let's just talk about should like the overall question is should Great White Sharks be held in an aquarium? And there's, you have to, you have to think about where Great White Sharks are right now in terms of conservation. Certainly right now the IUCN Red List lists them as vulnerable species. So they're not, you know, they're not at the brink of extinction but they're vulnerable to extinction meaning they're on that ladder, that's the lower end of the ladder but you know they're getting there. A lot of researchers now after the studying of Great White Sharks have noticed that there's been a bit of a boom in some of the populations which means there are more sharks available which is great because they're starting to recover from the hunting and sort of the misrepresentation of movies and they're the consequences of that which is basically killing as many sharks as possible because they're, you know, quote unquote, man eaters. But because they're vulnerable, don't you think we should just leave them alone? Stop trying to bring them into an aquarium setting into a setting that they're not familiar with. We're not familiar in providing and they just don't need it. And they have long home ranges, sometimes up thousands of kilometers of range of where they will actually go, you know, on the on the west coast, there have been some sharks that have been tagged or I'm sorry, in the Atlantic with the ocean arch, they've been tagging sharks and they've been saying the some sharks go from Cape God down to Jacksonville, Florida, sometimes out to the mid Atlantic drift, which is basically right in the middle between North America and Europe and the Atlantic Ocean and then back. So they can travel thousands of kilometers. So are you going to be able to put an aquarium that's thousands of kilometers wide? Hell no. No, that's that's impossible. So how can you think that the a shark is going to do well when it's got these these transparent boundaries, you know, it's got these walls that they can't go from. They can't move from, you know, so if they're if the aquarium waters bad, they're going to they can't get out of it, they're stuck there forever, you know, we don't know what it requires to keep a shark alive, a great white shark alive. They should not they do not belong in an aquarium, they are a large body shark, they travel thousands of kilometers and we don't know their biology. That is one of those are three major reasons why we shouldn't put them in. The other thing is is let's look at the the situation here. If this Okinawa Japan aquarium were allowed were successful in keeping a great white shark, don't you think other aquariums will want to follow? Think about the headline, we have a great white shark. There are some aquariums actually hold whale sharks, multiple whale sharks. I think this one in Japan does as well and in Georgia, Atlanta, Georgia, they actually have an aquarium in the Georgia, Georgia aquarium. Now it is very controversial because these again are even bigger species, you know, sometimes 60 foot long species and they have a huge home range and they require a lot of food, a lot of plankton and and that's what they eat and you know, there's a big controversy and says should we be holding those species because one again on I don't know where they are on the extinction level or on the endangered species level, but they're not doing very well because they're very large bodies or organisms, they're long lived and if they start to go downhill and some are hunted, they start to go downhill then they're going to they can go extinct pretty quickly, especially with the way humans put pressure on fishery stocks and fisheries. So you know, these species, if a great white shark is an attractant, then every aquarium that can hold a great white shark will want to put one in. So what's that going to do for the populations around the world that are already vulnerable, that are starting to recover? Is that going to put pressure to try and get those species to go into tanks and how is that going to work? How are people going to do it? It's just it doesn't make sense from a conservation standpoint from the health of a species standpoint, especially if they're not successful most of the time. So there's that aspect that you have to look at. And the last thing I really want to talk about is these are dangerous creatures. They are fantastic creatures, they're an apex predator, but they're also very dangerous in handling. And just imagine what happens, God forbid, there's an accident and a shark injures or kills an aquarist, the people taking care of this shark. What will happen to sharks? You know, what's going to happen to the reputation that they're really just starting to recover from the movie Jaws and from people who are petrified of sharks and say, you know, the only good shark is a dead shark. There are people who think that and people who just don't care about sharks. But the reputation is starting to come back as some as a species that's very important to the overall ecosystem. But you're handling and being around a great white shark all the time. What's going to happen? If to the reputation of these sharks, if they bite or injure or maim say a scuba diver or somebody who's trying to feed them or someone's trying to, you know, make them better, make a sore better or take care of them, a veterinarian or something, what happens to the reputation? I'll tell you, it's not going to do any good for the species. It's going to hurt them. So that's something that we have to be careful of. We really have to be careful of the reputation and how we're treating them. Now right now because of the death, people are up in arms because of the death of this aquarium, people are up in arms and they feel sorry for the great white shark and they're getting a lot of press, great white sharks are for, you know, being this kind of sucks kind of reputation is just saying we should be taking care of these sharks better. And I think it's kind of a good thing from a bad situation. However, we have a real question to ask is should this be pursued, should it be banned? In my opinion, I think it should. I just, I've named off several reasons why I think it should. Now I want to know what you think about this. Why do you think great white sharks should not be in aquariums or do you think great white sharks should be in aquariums? I'd love to hear your opinion. That's what we're all about here at SpeakUpForBlue.com. You can go to the show notes at www.speakupforblue.com/session87 and you can just put in the link below. In the comments below, we'll have all the show notes, we'll have the video of me just talking about this plus the podcast itself if you can't listen on your iPhone or on your cellular device or tablet or whatever you listen to your podcast on. But let me know what you think in that comment section. I really want to know I'm very, I'm very curious and if you're watching this on YouTube which we've just posted on YouTube, we just started posting, you know, let me know in the comments below what you think. Do you think great white sharks should be found or should be kept in aquariums for conservation purposes? Do you think it's good or bad? It'd be nice to each other if you're debating. But anyway, that's the show for me today. If you want to support this podcast, you can do so by going to SpeakUpForBlue.com/patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N and you're going to see the homepage for that, for that, it's a crowdfunding campaign. It's very secure. It's a monthly support system so you would be supporting the podcast on a monthly basis. So if you do want to support it, just keep that in mind when you're supporting. And if you have any questions, you can always contact me through the website SpeakUpForBlue.com. But I want to thank you for listening to this podcast. Very important when we talk about the conservation of species and finding out more about it through aquariums or in the wild. But anyway, thank you very much. You've been listening and speaking for Blue Podcasts. I am your host, Andrew Lewin. Happy Monday and happy conservation. [Music]