Australian Water Animals
Somewhere I can only hope, with wide eyed wonder, someone is having a whale shark feeding on plankton swimming directly towards them so they have to back peddle furiously to get out of the way. When this happened to me, instantly I had a memory embedded in my brain to remain with me the rest of my life. I followed up this encounter with these massive animals by watching movies and reading books to realize that so much is still unknown about the life cycle of whale sharks.
No one has ever documented a live birth, really knows how deep they dive, where they go, where they breed and other traits of their behavioral patterns. With all these unknowns, one would think these animals would have the highest levels of protection available, yet these highly migratory whale sharks cruise through the international oceans with little protection.
Although time is passing since we lived in Australia, my mind is still filled to the brim with an energizing drive from the animal interactions we had. The impact of encountering so many different species influences my daily actions where ever I might be around the world. As I am currently traveling though South America, I pick up trash and plastic bags from the beach whenever I can. Swimming with dozens of turtles, knowing they eat jelly fish and learning so many turtles die because they eat plastic bags from the ocean thinking they are jelly fish, motivates me to think this simple action may save an animals life. These choices matter.
What we do and how we spend our time creates the inner workings of our mind and this past week I’ve had two main thoughts:
- Thinking about these animals from the latest post, Australian Water Animals
- Being so upset over Australia’s announcement to kill sharks
If you have not heard, the Western Australian Government announced a plan to kill sharks (white, tiger and bull) over three meters as a solution in response to the recent deaths caused by shark attacks. When I first heard this news, I hoped I was reading a fake headline, yet I was gutted to find out the Australian Government was even considering this as a reasonable action. Here’s a handful of articles discussing the issue:
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/animals/shark-attack-survivor-slams-stupid-shark-cull-20140116-30vsq.htmlI have had trouble sleeping at night because of this news. It’s not the act of killing sharks that has kept me up, to me it’s the bigger picture. If Australia, a first-world developed country, chooses to come up with this as solution to sharks behavior in their natural habitat, what kind of message does that send to the rest of the world? The shark culling has not had action yet as there have been so many protests over the government announcing they would start slaughtering sharks.
I used my restless nights to send emails off to the heads of WA government and if you would like to do the same, you can easily copy and paste their email addresses from this page:
At times, personally and collectively, I feel like ‘one small person’ and at a loss as how to best stop events I do not like happening in the world around me. It’s already seven days past when the Australian government said they would start killing sharks, and it’s seven days past and counting because so many people have spoke up in outrage over this illogical solution. Our voice and how we use it matters.
As the world watches what Australia will decide over the shark culling, I hope each of us can take action in our own way this week to help our aquatic species and you can enjoy Australian Water Animals.
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Nice post with the Australian Water Animals link. Great PICS! Pretty sad knee-jerk reaction to a well known issue in Australian waters. Hopefully the government has better sense than to go this direction.
Thanks. There’s always two sides to all debates, but man I hope they do not move forward with this decision. Globally there is constantly so much effort to protect sharks and raise awareness about them, this seems like such a step backwards.
nice article. killing off a population of animals that is only acting by instinct does not seem right. hopefully your “one” voice met with other’s and stopped the shark culling.
There’s been massive protest of people asking for the shark culling to be halted. To add insult to injury, these sharks are supposed to be protected. And great white sharks do not reach reproductive maturity till after 3 meters, so there are just so many reasons this announcement just seemed to be thrown together.