What happens if sharks become extinct

Be sure to check out the video to learn more about how sharks balance out the food chain. It's a good reminder of how vital sharks are to the marine ecosystem, and why we have ways like Shark Week to celebrate these awesome, scary creatures.

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Without scallops to eat, the rays have moved on to other bivalves. The decline of the quahog, a key ingredient in clam chowder, is forcing many restaurants to remove this American classic from their menus. The disappearance of scallops and clams demonstrates that the elimination of sharks can cause harm to the economy in addition to ecosystems. Sharks are also influencing the economy through ecotourism. Close Would you like to view our EU site? The study, published in the journal Nature , includes over scientists working together to go through 15, hours of underwater video from reefs in 58 countries, states and territories to show that sharks are absent on many of our coral reefs.

In fact, this new research from Global FinPrint shows they are functionally extinct — which means they are so rare in certain areas they can no longer fulfill their role in the ecosystem. Since , the Global FinPrint team — which is led by researchers at Florida International University FIU — has used underwater cameras to pinpoint specific strongholds for sharks and rays. In one of the largest collaborative projects yet, the impact these threats have had on our global Guam, a USA territory, was among the worst-ranked locations identified in the survey.

But how did the researchers rank each nation? With an Abundance Status Score, which ranks how viable a nation is for supporting the reef shark population against the size and proximity of the nearest market, poor governance, commercial fishing regulations, and other variables. The problem is that we don't have good baselines for what reef shark populations should look like in the absence of humans.

It is possible that different regions e. This score basically gives an indication of how the country does to the average in the region. Higher scores mean that a nation is among the best in the region, lower scores mean that sharks are much less common than the average. Only a combined total of three sharks were observed during more than survey hours in these locations. But why so little sharks in these areas? As a broad generality, such a loss of sharks likely arises from overfishing or a lack of enforced regulations.

These possibilities are not mutually exclusive - some places suffer from all of these problems at the same time. By taking sharks out of highly complex ecosystems like coral reefs, it has triggered a phenomenon