Ichida has released another since and will set more free this year. In January, Ichida released two sharks, Charlie and his sibling, a female called Kathlyn. They keep ocean food webs in check by making sure smaller creatures don’t grow too numerous and destroy the natural systems that feed billions of people.īut Ichida’s colleagues at ReShark started with a simple query: Could we also restore some of the shark populations we’ve already lost? They’re on their way to answering that question. The shark fin byproduct is then used in soup in Asia and elsewhere around the world.Ĭurbing overfishing is essential to protecting sharks, and sharks are essential to the marine world. Millions are killed yearly for meat, consumed in countries from Brazil to the United States, India and Iceland. Fishing-both legal and illegal-contributes to every at-risk shark species and is the only major threat for two-thirds of them. More than 37 percent of 1,199 species of sharks and rays face extinction risks, according to research led by Nick Dulvy, who spent 11 years as head of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Shark Specialist Group, the global body that tracks threats to sharks. But today they are the world’s second-fastest disappearing vertebrate group after amphibians. Sharks are among the planet’s oldest vertebrates, having survived five mass extinctions over more than 420 million years. ![]() Like everyone else, Ford stood in the crowd and held up a phone to document the scene himself. ![]() Moments later her palms opened, and Charlie slipped away, his long tail curling as he dove toward the sandy bottom and an unfathomable future. “I’m feeling very hopeful that Charlie is going to be the ambassador” for all shark species, she said. She held in her hands the first captive animal that would be freed in these waters, a young zebra shark called Charlie, named for a West Papuan provincial official who'd championed this project.īelow towering limestone formations in the remote Wayag Islands, 90 miles by boat from the nearest town, I watched the young shark sway beneath her fingers.īefore a small crowd of government officials, the indigenous Kawe villagers who manage Wayag, and a few celebrity wildlife advocates, including actor Harrison Ford, Ichida shared a parting wish: She hoped this shark would ignite a movement to restore ocean predators. This region has since protected sharks, and Ichida was here to jumpstart an ambitious rewilding operation.
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