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Today the 28th of July 2007 there is an astounding headline in the “Sun” newspaper. “Great White shark filmed off Cornish beach!” (Or words to that effect.) A tourist filmed dolphins frolicking and ‘porpoising’ 150 metres of St Ives north beach on the north Cornish coast. But while being filmed they were in fact also being hunted by an estimated 12 foot long great white shark... This shark was filmed literally shooting out of the water, breaching and twisting in an attempt to grab a leaping dolphin in mid-air, just like great whites attack seals in South African waters. The huge size of the shark’s jaws and very distinct white delineated underside were clearly observed discounting basking sharks which are common on the Cornish coast. A basking shark fin is laughably different in both shape and dimensions to a great white’s. However there is the chance that this story and footage did not actually originate from this area at all. But the following encounter certainly come from there! A woman wind surfer from Cornwall described a recent experience there. This was when a huge great white shark passed slowly underneath her surfboard’s large clear plastic sail, as it lay flat in the sea while she stood on her surfboard watching. This lady belongs to a scientific marine conservation group; she really knows her basking sharks from her great whites and other sharks. She was not scared at the time but was simply overcome by a great sense of priveledge to be able to observe such a magnificent and rare creature up close. There is a significant great shark population in the Mediterranean Sea and it’s only a short swim to the UK. Great whites have been tagged and found to be able to travelling thousands of miles. They can hunt in new waters relocating in just 6 months time from the South African coast to the south Australian coast! The nearest great white to the UK on record appears to be a juvenile caught in fishing nets from the Bay of Biscay off France about 4 decades ago. Why have scientists been so blind in not accepting possibility of great whites even occasionally visiting our waters. Surely if giant blue tuna weighing nearly a thousand pounds can visit our waters then so can big sharks... both must surely use the warm currents flowing up from the Southern Atlantic as in the North Atlantic Current. Of course scientists were just a blind as they were to the existence of giant squid and octopus. Unfortunately to the scientists embarrassment it turns out there is an even bigger squid than the famed original ‘Archietuthus dux,’ one which can dwarf that in body size and very possibly length too. Also what about the Greenland shark which can reach sizes even exceeding those of average great whites – oh what a surprise... Scientists seem so blinkered by what they ‘think’ they know already. They’re so arrogant - They don’t know the half of it and that’s the real truth! It’s becoming more and more obvious that Charles Darwin’s ‘The origin of the species’ is only a part of the true explanation for the diversity and evolution of life on earth. Scientists have even got their theories incorrect about when large mammals first appeared and even the real ancestors of birds and various aspects of this have been overturned by new fossil findings that put real ‘spanners’ in the theories. Scientists may claim that global warming is to blame for a white shark being spotted off a UK coast. They say it’s warming up the seas around the UK and bringing with it creatures not normally found in our waters. But many unknown and very rare creatures have turned up in our waters and washed up on the shores over the decades which have not even been identified in our present zoological archives... As sharks do prey on dolphins, I for one will not be swimming anywhere near a dolphin again in murky water! But sharks are hunted by humans and slaughtered by the millions each year for something as crackpot as their dorsal fins to make soup. These fins are chopped off and the still live shark is thrown into the sea to die. That’s very civilised of modern man. It makes you wander just how much ‘true progress’ we’ve made, despite our intellectual and technological advances. – And were scared of sharks! The fact is you’ve more chance of getting knocked over by a car any day, than ever being in danger from a shark. Even the author of Jaws realised he’d made a massive error in demonising this highly evolved top predator and turning into some kind of man-hunting insatiable unstoppable terror of nightmares. In fact he did everything he could following the film to become far better educated about them and to become a major force in worldwide shark protection and conservation and in public education about them. Every year the wild population of these peak predators declines even more rapidly due to increasingly detrimental human activity; sea pollution, over-fishing of juvenile and adult sharks, over-fishing of prey fish, environmental destruction and pollution of many kinds etc. Time is running out for so much life on this planet. It’s just disappearing – never to return. Just look at the cost of sea fish compared to it’s relative cost even merely 30 years ago. Catches are dropping increasingly fast... There are now vast barren areas of our once bountiful seas, devoid of any significant numbers of fish or even shellfish. Who can ignore the lessons of the cod glut and bust of the notoriously over-fished “Grand Banks” where it seemed the entire sea was crammed with fish from surface the bottom. Great whites can teach us far more by their presence than their extinction... Headlines or deadlines? By Tim Richardson.
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shark, sharks, great, white, whites, UK, Cornwall, jaws, dolphins, tuna, cod, squid, octopus, dolphin, Darwin, South, African, Australian, dorsal, fin, fins, Mediterranean,
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