Shark Surfing in NZ, Missing the Mark Completely?

We have to admit when we saw the Facebook video coming out of New Zealand featuring beer swilling locals surfing a dead shark our impression of NZ shark conservation dropped another notch.

While global sharkies went to town in a series of cascading outrages, petitions and angry chatter they missed the mark - completely.

How so you might ask?

New Zealand is one of the few Western countries left on the planet that not only allows shark finning, it has set and growing quotas for it. New Zealand is a main purveyor of legal shark fins to the Asian market.

Gasp.

And where is the shark army for that stunning fact? They all know it, and yet NZ seems to inhabit and strange and bizarre bubble of indifference when it comes to outrage against shark fins.

Four years ago we posted, When One Dead Shark Helps a Species, the idea that one dead shark could help turn public opinion. For the hundreds of thousands of dead sharks that get finned each and every year in NZ as part of a draconian quota system, the outrage over this dead shark was hollow, shallow, and completely misguided.

We all want shark finning to end, and yet the lowest hanging fruit of this effort, a western government adding metric tons of shark fin legally to the system remains untouched and unchampioned by the wider shark conservation world while they chase after shadow boats and shark finning in the remotest places on the planet.

Shark conservationists in New Zealand rage at images of dead shark in Japan while the same images, sanitized, legalized, and part of a fisheries profit machine get little to no mention at all.

Because there are no images.These same finned animals, these same quotas, go by the wayside.

New Zealand needs to wake up to shark fin in their own backyard.

The global shark conservation machine needs to wake up to this as well because the outrage over some misguided locals and one shark is a joke, because somewhere in a glass jar at $350 a kilo are the fins of New Zealands legal system. And somewhere in a dusty warehouse are the thousands and thousands of bags of these same fins that say "Fisheries New Zealand" on the side.

We would like to see pictures of those one of these days. It would be a good first start.

More from GrindTV.

New Shark Species - "Single Toothed Carcharodon"

Santa Cruz - Shark researchers with the Pacific Coast Research Center have announced the discovery of a new white shark sub species at famed California big wave surf spot Mavericks. Following a recent attack on a surfer where a single 2 inch tooth was recovered from the surfers leg, marine biologists have confirmed this attack was from a hereto unknown subspecies now being called the "Unidenta'tus Carcharodon" or "Single Toothed Carcharodon".

"We estimate this animal to be at least 14 feet long with one very large tooth in the middle of it's mouth" said David Munns spokesman for the PCRC. "There's really no other explanation for the single tooth and corresponding video we saw on You Tube":



The following Underwater Onion was brought to you by Shark Diver. Always check your media.

Thomas Peschak-Good Idea

One of the more creative ways of pushing shark conservation from the Save Our Seas Foundation and one of our favorite photographers Thomas Paschak this week.

What happens when you pull shark conservation messaging from disparate sources? Great things apparently:

A new kind of shark board
If you say shark board in KZN, you’d be referring to the guys who man the shark nets off the province’s beaches. However, a national art exhibition that aims to bring together two sworn enemies — sharks and surfers — all in the name of conservation has changed that.

Eleven top South African artists — including four KZN ones in Ross Turpin, Trevor Paul, Kim Longhurst and Scott Robertson — will use surfboards as canvases to highlight the predicament of one of Africa’s most endangered predators. They will be accompanied by 40 haunting photographs of sharks by award-winning photographer Tom Peschak from the Save Our Seas Foundation, a non-profit marine conservation group.

Editors Note: Hopefully these boards will go on auction, and when they do count us in for one...or three.