So i did a lot of thinking at work tonight, i’ve been able to do a lot more thinking at work recently. I started thinking about us, mankind, and how we really are the cancer of the earth. deforestation, overfishing, the drilling for oil. I mean we have only being around for a blink of the eye compared to the 180 million years the dinosaurs were around for and we as a species have already done so much damage.

I guess a good way to put it into perspective is to look at sharks, these creatures have been around for over 400 million years! Yes! over 400,000,000 years, that’s before dinosaurs even existed! There have been at least 5 mass extinctions known during life on earth, with the 3rd one at the end of Permian period wiping out 80 - 95% of all marine life.

Yet sharks survived every mass extinction, they are the apex predator of the ocean and nature has selected them for a reason.

Then we came along, and now shark populations have decimated 80% to 90% in the last 50 years, mainly due to the popular dish ‘Shark Fin Soup’ which has fuelled the shark fin trade, where they cut the fins off alive sharks and toss them back to die at the bottom of the ocean.

If sharks were to become extinct what effect would that have on the delicate ecosystem they are apart of as apex predators? What would happen to our ocean? How will it effect the entire planet? There is the theory that without sharks, Phytoplankton, which create oxygen through photosynthesis would decline due to sharks not being able to control certain populations of marine life that feed on it, resulting in less oxygen for us to breathe…

Then i thought, what if mankind is the sixth extinction? what if due to our highly destructive nature we ourselves are the thing nature brought about to destroy ourselves and whatever resources the world has to make way for what ever comes next? In the history of life, we are nothing, the smallest event so far. And at the rate things are going it probably is going to stay that way.

But you know what, if Mankind is stupid enough to wipe out something that could have such a negative effect on the world we live in, then we deserve to die.

They say about 3 sharks are killed every second, how many seconds did it take to read this?