*Cue ‘Jaws’ theme*
Here’s How Sharks Do More Than You to Fight Climate Change
Cows eat the grass. Sharks kill the cows.
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If I learned anything from the movie Jaws (and I haven’t) is that sharks don’t have the type of face you’d wanna ask to buy a recycled bracelet for your beach clean-up initiative.
But the truth is, sharks do contribute to the fight against the global warming mess we have going on on the surface. Not by wearing a “Save the bees” shirt and handling pamphlets, but by doing what they do best.
Murder.
The cows eat the grass; the sharks kill the cows
The seagrass of Shark Bay is not like your typical land grass; only useful to hide dog turds and wallpaper your Windows XP desktop. A seagrass meadow traps twice as much CO2 per square mile as a forest would do back on land.
Top-of-the-line, crème de la crème, carbon dioxide trap.
But then, this global-cooling garden business is completely ruined by sea cows: chubby, torpid marine mammals that look like they have a thyroid gland malfunction.
Each sea cow can engorge as much as 40kg (88lb) of precious seagrass a day. If their population is left unchecked, they’ll trim the meadow down to the clipper size number of the crotch of an Instagram model in thong season.
This is where a murdering spree comes in handy.
A 500kg (1,100lb) sea cow is the perfect kind of snack for a tiger shark. And every time they snatch one out of the meadow, more seagrass is left to capture CO2.
Maybe not enough to stop a climate cataclysm, but someone needed to balance the emissions of the Toyota Tundra anyway.
And that’s how sharks would fight climate change
They would be doing a great job if their population count wasn’t being brashly decimated by overfishing and bycatch.
Without sharks, no one’s left to prevent sea cows and other herbivores from overgrazing. More CO2 is released into the atmosphere. Habitats become more vulnerable to heatwaves and other climate change-driven events. And then we have to take David Attenborough out of the cryo chamber to release a short documentary on why this is a stupid course of action.
It’s like every biome has a species of cow that wants to poke a hole in the ozone layer. Land cows burp methane, sea cows eat the seagrass — and it’s a matter of time before we discover the species of air cow that’s been shitting napalm all over the Amazon rainforest.
Sharks clearly need some sacrifice on our part.
Hence I hereby pledge to flush all my poo (manure for the meadows) and never fly in a private jet. I will also buy movie tickets for when Hollywood inevitably releases the empowering female-led reboot of the Jaws franchise.
Maybe I’m getting one of those bracelets too. What the hell.
This was secretly a test issue of the newsletter for annoyingly intelligent people that I’m putting together. Warning: if you read to fall asleep quicker, this fun newsletter is not recommended for you. Read more about it here:
