Endangered Marine Species Essay Example

70.8% of the earth is water. 25% of everything that lives in there is on the verge of extinction, due to the selfishness of humans. I therefore plead with you to join me and protect endangered marine animals. 

I will be talking about sharks and turtles to base my evidence and speech, though there are many other animals I could have chosen. I have chosen these as they are important in the ecosystem and are negatively affected by humans.

When I was younger, I believed that sharks were extremely dangerous predators to humans, that killed millions of us each year. I now realize that we are the real enemy. What is the second most dangerous species on earth? Humans. What is the most destructive species to the environment? Humans. What is the most invasive species? Humans. Sharks are mainly killed by humans fishing for their fins, used to make shark fin soup. This causes more than 100 million sharks to die just from humans each year. But sharks barely kill people at all. In fact, only 5 people die each year to a shark. That means that every one human dies to a shark, 20,000,000 sharks die to humans. It might be just me, but that ratio certainly doesn’t seem fair. Now on to turtles. There were about 6.5 million turtles alive in the year 2020, and every year 1000 turtles die due to plastic waste. This may not seem like much, but these turtles were only ones found on the beach. 52% of all turtles consume plastic in their lifetime, and each turtle has about a 22% chance of dying from just one piece of plastic. 

Possible things we could introduce to help these species are laws or programs. The national plan of action or NPOA for the conservation of sharks has been adopted by many countries but is still yet to be used by 6 of the top 15 shark catchers, including the top 2, Indonesia and India. Indonesia and India contribute to 181,286 of shark catches from 2000-2007, but keep in mind this is just catches. 99% of a lot of shark species have been eradicated since the 1970’s, with the main sharks being at around 80% of the species being eradicated. This means numbers of shark deaths will certainly rise, if no-one takes major actions to prevent this. If we somehow manage to get NPOA taken in by most countries, we could significantly reduce shark deaths from fishing and other harmful reasons. In terms of turtles, we could introduce programs, laws, and regulations to promote or enforce recycling habits and to reduce use of plastics in everyday objects. We can also open sanctuaries for sea turtles to maintain a stable population while these problems continue.

My final point will be speaking about the impacts of losing marine species. Losing a primal species in an ecosystem can cause drastic changes, sometimes causing the entire ecosystem to collapse. Conservative scientists have recently been monitoring the populations of 4 key species, cod, swordfish, bluefin tuna and sharks. Many scientists believe that we are in the process of the 6th mass extinction, such as Dr Richard Leakey, author of The Sixth Extinction- biodiversity and its survival, who thinks that 50% of animals will be dead in 100 years. The loss of these four species could make this a reality for the ocean. For example, sharks’ main prey are seals, which eat many fish each year. If sharks were to die, seals, now with its biggest threat gone, could cause devastating damage to fish populations. Sea turtles keep sponge, jellyfish, and seagrass populations healthy, as well as their hatchling and eggs providing plentiful needed resources to many species, such as birds, fish, and racoons, as well as to coastal plants. The loss of them would also mean the loss of animals that rely on them in their diet, and coral reefs which can be impacted by invasive sponges.