You can help
The David Suzuki Foundation is requesting your support by writing your own letter to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. It is inconceivable that this species may not be afforded full legal protection.
Comments can be emailed, faxed or mailed to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans:
Attn: Species at Risk Consultations
Fisheries and Oceans Canada
200-401 Burrard Street
Vancouver, BC V6C 3S4
Email
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Fax 604-666-3341
Points to consider in your letter:
- this species is at imminent risk of extinction in Canada's Pacific waters
- listing this species will have little to no economic impact on commercial activities
- to not list this species would be a clear abdication of responsibility under the Species at Risk Act
To Whom It May Concern.
I am concerned with the decline of shark populations on a global scale.
I recently learned about the plight of the basking shark. Basking sharks (second largest fish in the world) were once considered abundant off the coast of British Columbia.
In the late 1940s, gillnet fishermen began to complain about these gentle giants destroying their precious salmon gillnets. While the sharks are plankton eaters, they would nevertheless swim into nets in their path, get entangled, and die.
In 1949, basking sharks officially made it onto the federal fisheries "Destructive Pests" list, an official endorsement that basking sharks were simply a natural hazard to be eradicated or culled.
1953 was a bad year for basking sharks. They were responsible for destroying the gillnets of at least 30 fishermen, and although insurance covered all the damages, fishermen were becoming more vocal. Two years later, their whining resulted in the addition of a retractable blade to the fisheries patrol vessel Comox Post, which would seek out and ram basking sharks just below the surface. The idea was to slice the sharks in half.
A quote from the Victoria Times on June 22, 1955: "This is a basking shark, basking and leering. But the smirk will soon be wiped off its ugly face by the fisheries department, which is cutting numerous sharks down to size."
A quote from the Vancouver Sun on April 24, 1956: "The great shark slaughter began at noon and continued for hours. We littered the beaches with their livers and the bottom with their carcasses. Up and down the length of Pachena Bay we sailed, slashing and rendering [sic] with the huge knife on the bow of the Comox Post. It was a colossal fight between the ship and the sea monsters, with the ship winning all the matches."
Over a 14 year period, the blade on the bow of the Comox Post recorded 413 kills.
In addition to this, other fisheries patrol vessels were under orders to ram any basking sharks encountered on patrol, and the seagoing public were asked to help out any time they came across these sharks by ramming, harpooning or shooting them. For many coastal residents, killing basking sharks was simply a way of life in the 1950s and 1960s.
In April 2007, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) designated the species endangered because of its vulnerability to fishing and entanglement in fishing gear. According to them, the reason for this designation is the species' vulnerability to incidental fishing "... because of its low intrinsic productivity", and their number in our waters "is virtually nil, implying a rate of decline exceeding 90% within less than 2 generations."
Sightings of basking sharks are now rare, with only six confirmed on Canada's Pacific coast since 1996. Plane surveys conducted in 2007 and 2008 by the Pacific Biological Station did not result in any new sightings.
Now we have a species on the brink, and it is therefore imperative DFO recognizes the next logical step required is legal protection for basking sharks under SARA.
Sincerely,
