Nonprofit Spotlight: Shark Angels

CharityAuctionsToday’s social media manager Kelly Plyer sat down with Cheryl McCarran of Shark Angels to learn more about this vastly misunderstood animal.

Turning Passion into Action

As the education and outreach director for Shark Angels, Cheryl McCarran’s goal is to turn fear into fascination and passion into action. 

“There’s a lot of myths and misconceptions about sharks out there, and we hope to dispel those and educate people on the reality of how amazing and important sharks are.”

Shark Angels was founded in 2007 and is based in New York City. “Which people think is kind of odd sometimes, but there are actually sharks off of New York, there’s sharks in every water of the world. So it doesn’t matter where we’re located, we can always find some sharks.”

The documentary Sharkwater partly inspired the founders to pursue shark conservation. Sharkwater explains the practice of shark finning and its detrimental effects on sharks and the ocean at large. 

Shark finning is the act of slicing the fins off a live shark and throwing the shark back in to die. The fins were once the most valuable part of the shark, and thus all fishermen were interested in. 

Now, most countries have laws demanding that the shark be landed whole rather than finned. However this has given rise to a growing market for shark meat. Instead of saving sharks, these laws have almost had the opposite effect.

“Slicing the fins off a live animal is just cruel…The sharks can no longer swim, which means they’re either going to starve to death or be eaten by predators…It’s a really inhumane thing to do.” 

Not only that, but McCarran points out that shark fishing is unsustainable, accounting for roughly 40% of all shark deaths annually.

Cascade Effect

When you take the large predators out of an ecosystem, such as the sharks, it has a trickle down effect called a trophic cascade. For example, in an area where sharks were overfished, there was an explosion in grouper populations. Groupers eat parrotfish: parrotfish eat the algae off the corals. 

With an overabundance of grouper and a lack of parrotfish, there was now algae growth on the coral, which smothers it. Coral reefs house and protect hundreds of species. The overfishing of one animal negatively affected hundreds of others in that area.

This is just one of the important facts Shark Angels wants people to understand about sharks and their impact on the environment.

Media Misinformation

Shark Angels also fights misrepresentation of sharks in media, both fiction and nonfiction. Absolutely. As McCarran says, “When you see a photo of say a surfer with a shark fin nearby, with a headline that the surfer narrowly escapes death by shark: what’s happening is literally just coexisting. The sharks living in its home and the surfer’s doing this thing and they’re coexisting.”

“There was a really great study that came out recently in California. They went over multiple beaches with a drone and they found that 96% of the time that there was a person in the water, there was a great white shark near them. And during this study, there were absolutely zero bites. Nothing happened.”

“People get this perception from media that every time there’s a shark encounter or shark in the water, it’s a near death experience, which is ridiculous because most of time you’re in the water there could be a shark near you and you’d never know it. Most of the time they don’t want anything to do with us. And it’s their home and we have to be the guests, the respectful guests.”

Promoting Understanding with Fun

In addition to educational workshops for children and adopt-a-shark activities, Shark Angels carefully produces stuffed sharks that resemble the real deal. 

“We are working on creating our own stuffed sharks so that they are not just a cute stuffed animal, but they’re an educational tool. The saw shark is the first one that I designed and created. And I wanted the details to be correct. So if you look at the rostrum, the teeth are alternating long and short, which is what’s really happening on a rostrum on a saw shark.”

“We’re working on making some great whites and tiger sharks first, and we’re trying to have the details in place so that you can actually say, ‘Look at the shape of the fin, and that’s why this shark swims faster than this shark.'”

While people are familiar with great whites, hammerheads, and tiger sharks, there are over 540 species of sharks. Shark Angels’s newsletter, the Monthly Chomp, provides unusual facts about each species it highlights as well as a science article. 

“The goal for us is to be able to take science speak and make it accessible for everybody. So this monthly chomp gives you an update on what’s going on in the science about a particular shark in an understandable way…It’s become one of our most popular newsletters that people look forward to every month.”

Shark Angles also maintains a database of laws and loopholes concerning shark. Organized by country, the database discusses shark legislation and why it may or may not be very effective in a given area of the world. The database also offers ideas of what you can do if you live in or are visiting a country with limited protections.

A Brighter Future for Our Shark Friends

There are many myths and misconceptions about sharks: Shark Angels hopes to dispel them and educate people on the reality of how amazing and important sharks are. Thank you Cheryl McCarran for sitting down with us and explaining the great work Shark Angels does to ensure that these fascinating animals can thrive in their ocean homes.