The Beauty of Sharks

Why sharks? because they are magnificent creatures. Here's why:

Female sharks give birth to live free-swimming young. Right from the offset of birth, a mother shark ceases to be one and the little baby shark is expelled into a mortal abyss to fend for itself and immediately find a bite to eat.  In some cases, even having to swim very far, very fast, to avoid the jaws of its own mother or bastard father(s).  So it's balls-to-the-wall right off the bat for a baby shark: avoid starvation, death, and your own parents.   

Sadly, roughly 80% of those baby eating machines won't make it to be full-grown adult sharks.  That is "natural selection" if my darwinism serves me right and for a creature that gives birth to few young and that didn't so much as get the chance to see what his mom looked like, it's a brutal natural selection process.  Some species count on hatching thousands of young to maximize the possibilities of survival, some actually go through the parenting phase to offer protection and food, some are poisinous and give off nasty smells, but for sharks, it's just a few fins, a small set of razor sharp jaws and hunting non-stop for the rest of its life. 

It's no wonder they are the kings of the ocean.  People take for granted the footage of sharks on tv in the wild.  It's unimaginable what that 20ft great white had to go through to get that big, besides the obvious massive consumption of fish, seals, and dolphins, that majestic beast had to survive and suffer an aching belly whenever its hunting efforts came up short.  

So the next time you flip by the discovery channel or natgeo and see a great white munching on seals, it took more than 15 years, hundreds of thousands of miles of perpetual swimming (maybe millions?), and everything in between that could possibly happen in an ocean to get there. Just take a second and marvel at the magic that is happening right before your eyes and the epic unseen magic that happened before you tuned to the channel.

At birth, life deals shark pups the weakest hand in the deck and unlike us, they can't fold, ever.  Thank you sharks.