Month: July 2020

July 14 last week was Shark Awareness Day with TV channels showing documentaries and movies about sharks. Created by Tom Golden, Discovery Channel will present Shark Week, a week long programming block that originally premiered in 1988. National Geographic, similarly, launched SharkFest which is five weeks of all things shark. Former heavyweight champion, Mike Tyson, is set to fight a Great White Shark for Discovery Channel’s Shark Week.

Shark Awareness Day exists to remind and educate the world on the importance of sharks to the marine ecosystems in which shark populations are steeply declining. Sharks are important to our ecosystems because of their role as apex predators. Apex predators are required to maintain the balance of the populations of the species below them in the food chain. Without sharks to regulate our rivers and oceans, the species below them in the food chain would drive their prey to extinction and then die off due to lack of food to sustain their unregulated populations.

Removing sharks will also result in the collapse of fisheries, ecosystems, and reefs across the world. Even declining populations of sharks affect the fisheries and ecosystems negatively because the remaining numbers are so widely spread that mating is a challenge. We should not support unsustainable fishing practices nor should we support restaurants that serve products such as shark fin soup.

• The Coral DilemmaJanuary 3, 2023
• The Last Wild Elephants of VietnamJune 20, 2021
• Plastic, Plastic, and More PlasticJune 5, 2021

White tigers are a fan favorite. Beautiful coat, blue eyes, what’s not to like? But there’s a dark truth behind that beautiful tiger. First and foremost, white tigers aren’t their own species. They are a genetic variation of the Bengal tiger which inhabits the Indian subcontinent. White tigers have their white coats due to a condition called leucism which causes a loss of pigmentation and their white coats and blue eyes.

White tigers are seldom seen in the wild because the chance of a white tiger occurring in the wild is so low that it is near impossible. In order to achieve a white tiger, breeders and zoos inbreed the animals. This is basically selective breeding but with parents who are close genetically. For example: brother and sister. White tigers also suffer from health issues such as lung development, spinal issues, deformed bones, reduced life-spans and immune deficiencies. It is common for white tigers to have deformed faces and crossed eyes. To obtain that picture-perfect white tiger, up to one hundred tigers may be given birth to and destroyed due to a deformed face, and other physical deformities. Due to their lack of skin pigmentation, they are more at risk from diseases such as cancer. Besides this, a white tiger would never be able to survive in the wild. Upon birth, its parents and siblings may attempt to destroy it because it is unrecognizable from its parents. If the white tiger did manage to survive infancy then it would be greeted with another set of challenges. Due to its skin color, any prey that it would attempt to hunt would spot it from far away proving it next to impossible to complete a hunt.

The white tiger suffers from a variety of problems yet breeders and zoos continue to breed them. Why? Because these tigers are adorable and people pay heavy prices to see them and pet them. They are a very profitable animal and it is financially profitable to destroy those one hundred cubs in order to obtain the picture-perfect cub which will make thousands of dollars. The breeding of white tigers should not be supported.

The great apes are the closest living relatives of the human species. Orangutans share 97% of the same DNA as humans with gorillas sharing 98% and chimpanzees and bonobos sharing 99%. The remaining great apes were endangered before the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic but with the absence of the rangers who protect them, the extinction of the great apes may be nearer than previously estimated.

Since the 20th century, the mountain gorilla population was in steep decline and numbered only 480 individuals as of 2010. Thanks to conservation efforts funded by ecotourism, they number over 1,000 today. All that success may soon be undone. Great ape tourism has been suspended causing the national parks that are home to these species to be short of resources. As the great apes are so closely related to the human species, they are also prone to the diseases and infections that we carry. For example, gorilla-trekking, where visitors take a guided walk to see the gorillas in their natural habitat required the trekkers to wear a face mask even before the Covid-19 pandemic due to the fact that a common cold can be deadly to the gorillas, the Covid-19 virus to which they are potentially vulnerable may prove deadly to their dwindling numbers.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, home to gorillas and chimpanzees and the sole habitat of the bonobo, was already struggling with the less deadly and less contagious Ebola pandemic and it has been set back further by a new pandemic. In the absence of great ape tourism, we need to find different ways to support our closest living relatives.