Saviours of the sea

The last time we went out for lobster in Lyme Bay we found a dogfish in the creel.  A type of shark that roamed the seas before dinosaurs existed, a dogfish won’t slice your leg off the way a Great White might, but it is very scratchy to hold onto, thanks to its denticles, the teeth that cover its entire body (Speedo, the swimsuit company, is trying to imitate its streamlining qualities).

Ours was about two foot long and snappy, with a wide rictus mouth, and it rubbed us raw thrashing about before we dropped it back in the water. While its 400-million- year-old contemporaries are embedded in the Jurassic cliffs where Mary Anning found ichthyosaurs, dogfish can still be sampled in fish and chip shops as rock salmon, or huss.

At current rates of attrition, though, even huss may be off the menu. Juliet Eilperin, the Washington Post’s environment correspondent, has followed the story of sharks, and their uneasy relationship to man, across the globe; her intriguing, even-handed account is an eye-opener. Sharks patrol every sea on the planet, scouring and herding and killing; yet the only place where they reign as they once did may be Kingman Reef in the middle of the Pacific. Sharks belong to that group of top predators which include polar bears which keeps our ecosystem fit and functioning.

You may not love them the way Eilperin does, but you cannot but admire their primitive perfection, nor fail to recognise them as the ultimate monitor of the seas’ well-being. Remove the shark, and the systems begin to cloud: seal populations explode, fish stocks collapse, jellyfish multiply. If we can’t recalibrate our relationship with the shark, Eilperin suggests, we may as well turn our backs on the barren oceans.