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Health & Fitness

Shark Survivor shares story in Pacifica

White Shark Cafe’ Movie night Thrills and Educates, speakers engage audience.  

The Pacifica Beach Coalition and Pacifica Libraries partnered together to host a Sharktober shark evening with David McGuire, Shark expert and filmmaker.  In addition to McGuire’s talk and Q&A, the evening included the movie White Shark Café by local great white shark scientist Sean Aronson along with a talk by Erik Larsen, shark advocate, survivor of a great white shark attack in Davenport, CA in 1991.  Sharktober is a celebration of the return of the great white sharks to the Bay Area coastline after spending most of the year in an area in the middle of the Pacifica Ocean known as the “White Shark Café”.

Sharks, the 2013 Earth Hero, have been honored and studied all year long the Pacifica Beach Coalition and Earth Day, CCCD, and all cleanup volunteers.   The mission for the year is to learn and take action for this hero who needs global help. This event was another opportunity for the public to learn more about this misunderstood fish critical for a healthy ocean.   The movie, Great White Café, showed how the great white sharks migrate thousands of miles and return to the same sea lion rookery in the Bay Area each October. They do not criss cross the sea or meander through the waters. Only recently have tracking devices discovered that they swim directly to and from their yearlong home to the same rookery each year.   The adult white sharks spend around 5 months feeding on seals and sea lions off our coastline before returning to the vast Pacific Ocean – shark café where it is suspected they are feeding and possibly breeding.

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The featured speaker of the evening David McGuire, is a researcher at the California Academy of Sciences, who leads Shark Stewards a local action group dedicated to educating about shark biology and making nations aware that sharks are being killed as by-catch in fishing nets and deliberately mutilated and killed for their fins in an unsustainable practice that is harming the entire ocean ecosystem.

“We know very little about great white sharks and most shark species,” said David McGuire, “and most of what we know about white shark behavior is just being learned thanks to satellite tagging technology.  Sharks are fish, made of cartilage, which makes them lighter, faster, and more agile and able to swim faster and turn on a dime to catch prey.  There are approximately 500 species of sharks not including the rays and ghost fish which also have cartilaginous skeletons.  They are the top predators of the sea and without them the balance of the ocean ecosystems collapse.  As the top predator they help all species to evolve by removing the weak, the slow, and the not so bright. Sharks are extremely diverse.  Some sharks patrol the deep waters feasting and clearing out the dead on the ocean floor.  Others patrol the reefs, yet even others including the largest fish in the sea, the Whale Shark, eat only krill.”     

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After the movie, a local shark attack survivor, Erik Larsen, sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trust, thrilled us all with his true-life story of how he very narrowly escaped death in an attack by a very large, great white shark just down the coast at Davenport in 1991. Larsen, now an advocate for sharks, pointed out that his odds of being attacked were greater because he was sitting on a surfboard, wearing webbed gloves and footwear, he splashed on the water to attract a nearby sea lion.  From below he looked and even acted like a sea lion.  He joked that his odds were probably slightly higher than usual as he had also been struck by lightning, almost hit by a comet, and won several hundred dollars on a slot machine in Reno where he had put in just a quarter.

Two boys, Eamonn and Griffin Likens, from Ocean Shore Elementary School won a trip to the Farallon Islands Wildlife Cruise with David McGuire and had their photos taken looking through a juvenile shark's jaw, with huge teeth. Another student with a shark passion, Katie Scribner, is trying to save $1000.00 so she can adopt a shark, go on a shark tagging expedition, and then name the shark and follow it’s tag for as long as it stays on. 

"How do sharks breathe?" asked one 5-year old child in the audience.  He was told that they breathe like fish, absorbing oxygen from the water in their gills. Also, we learned that great white sharks rarely eat fish, preferring seals and sea lions because of their caloric requirements which are extremely high because they are warm blooded.

We were thrilled to watch Ocean Shore teacher, Virginia Szczepaniak, and 4th grade student Eamonn Likens present McGuire a check for Sea Stewards to adopt a shark.  Both of Szczepaniak’s classes from 2013 and 2014 pooled their money and saved for this moment because they are known in the school as the class of Sharks!

The shark has been a fascinating Earth Hero this year, one that has deserved media attention to its plight during years of horrific, blatant killing for fins, that has brought global shark numbers down to record lows.  This year, the California Fish and Game Commission is considering listing the white shark as a candidate for the California Endangered Species Act.

The Pacifica Beach Coalition invites everyone to be an Earth Hero, to learn more about sharks, to pick up litter, and to use their voice to speak out against shark finning, shark fin soup, and long line fishing which kills fish and turtles indiscriminately. 

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