This Is Why Sharks Are Fascinating Creatures

When you think about sharks, you probably picture a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth tearing away at your body limb by limb. Thanks to amazingly awful shark horror movies, people generally share a deep fear of the creatures. While there have been various incidents of real-life shark attacks throughout history, sharks are not the natural man-eaters people imagine them to be. In fact, scientists agree that you're more likely to be killed by a coconut than by a shark. For example, without sharks, the oceans would be riddled with dead aquatic life or overpopulated with fast-breeding schools of fish. This is because sharks will often feast on carcasses and consume exploding sea life populations, which helps to keep the oceans clean, healthy, and balanced.

Did you know that some sharks can live up to 200 years? These amazing creatures have existed for over 400 million years. That’s longer than trees! They survived through an incredible 4 mass extinction events. Their eternal ears can detect a sound up to 1 km away, and over the course of a lifetime, sharks can grow around 30,000 teeth. Sharks hunt like no others. They can detect one drop of blood in 2.5 million litres of water, while small nodules can detect electrical pulses from beating hearts.

Some sharks can emit light from special skin organs know as photophores, and use it for camouflage, and to attract mates. Parthenogenesis has also been reported in some sharks. This is when females give birth without male fertilization. Sharks kill an average of five people per year, while humans kill up to 100 million sharks per year.

As sharks are apex predators, slaughtering them in such high numbers could be disastrous to fisheries, coral reefs and ocean ecosystems around the world.