"Extinct" Shark found at busy fishmarket
Despite an excess of bad news being reported about how the planet and all its inhabitants are doomed (almost certainly immediately) due to things like nuclear war, climate change, depopulation, overpopulation, pollution, the ozone layer, and Kim Kardashian, there are some news stories that make you realize that things aren’t as completely catastrophic as some are ready to announce.While sharks and marine life in general are under great threat from habitat destruction and commercial fishing, there are threads of good news about extinction - or lack thereof.
A shark species thought to be long extinct has been found in a busy Kuwait fish market.
I was here the whole time!
A single specimen of the smoothtooth blacktip shark was discovered in 1902, and because no other specimens of the fish had “ever been found by scientists” since that time, it was declared extinct.
Fast forward to 2013 and smoothtooth blacktip sharks are not only NOT extinct, they’re regularly on the menu at fish markets across the Middle East. Someone should have informed the ’experts’.
This isn’t the only recent reporting of ’extinct’ animals who were just keeping an understandably low profile. Namely:
a deadly jellyfish,
an elusive whale,
a Saint Lucia serpent,
an Israeli frog,
among many others.
There’s even the modern possibility of bringing extinct animals back from the grave, as seen with the Lazarus Project, where scientists recreated the genome and dead cells of an extinct frog. Scientific teams are hoping to use DNA from a mammoth to resurrect the great wooly beasts, stirring debates on ethics.
[De-Extinction: Who wants to live alongside sabre-toothed tigers? ]
So while threats to ourselves, our environment, and our whole planet are real and need to be addressed, it’s also important to recognize that evidence demonstrates it’s not yet an irreversible downhill spiral, and things are often not as bad as they’re reported.
Unless we’re talking Fukushima. That’s pretty bad.
By Elizabeth Leafloor, Red Ice Creations
Sources:
TreeHugger
Grist
