The plight of the sharks

It's a very bad time for the sharks. When I moved to California almost 25 years ago, I frequently had shark for dinner, but I haven't bought any for a decade or more. Shark needs to be removed from the menu. Hilary Parker reports for Scientific American: Forget Jaws. The scariest thing about sharks is their tenuous future. Though often misperceived as villainous denizens of the deep, these top predators play an important role in preserving the balance of the ocean's ecosystems by keeping their prey's populations in check. And so, much to the chagrin of biologists and environmentalists, the decimation of some 1,200 species of sharks and their closest relatives, including skates and rays, is likely to have negative ecological and economic consequences. Yet, for many reasons, the decline continues. First, their biology is... [read full story]