WHY NO AQUARIUM IN THE WORLD HAS A GREAT WHITE SHARK!
Aquariums are great places to see what animals are in the ocean, without setting your foot on the beach. They allow us to explore and see stuff that we would never be able to see. While you might almost see anything from an octopus to a dolphin, you won’t see a great white shark.
It’s not as if you won’t see any sharks, you can still see bull sharks, tiger sharks, sandbar sharks, sand tiger sharks, and many other varieties. You just won’t see a great white shark. Why is that?
According to Vox, aquariums all over the world used to order great whites during the 1970s up until the 1990s, but none of them survived. The one that lasted the longest died after only 16 days in captivity.
In the early 2000s, the Monteray Bay Aquarium in the United States managed to keep their great white shark alive for six months. Their secret? They got a baby shark that was less than a year old, kept it in a pen in the ocean for a while to make sure it will survive, and only then did they take it to the aquarium.
But soon they had to let the great white shark go because it started killing other sharks. Over the next few years, they again tried to keep a great white shark alive in captivity but failed every time. In 2011 they decided to stop, and have since announced that the Monteray Bay Aquarium would also not hold great white sharks in captivity anymore.
In 2016 a Japanese aquarium decided to give it a try after a great white shark was caught in a fisherman’s net. Within three days after arriving at the aquarium it was dead.
The Japanese aquarium was the last aquarium to try and fail.
Marine biologists believe that, because we are unable to create a suitable artificial environment for them, it causes the sharks to become depressed. They aren’t at all happy with their new environment.
A common behaviour among great whites in captivity is to ram their heads into the walls of their tanks. There are several theories for why this happens. Some scientists believe that being in a tank disrupts the great white’s keen sense of electroreception, which allows them to sense the electrical charges in the water around them, making it difficult for sharks to detect the tank walls.
It seems as if humans eventually understood that a great white shark should not be held in captivity and should be left in the ocean to move freely.
Mother Nature 1. Humans 0. And we totally respect that.
Watch the Vox video below for more on why aquariums don’t have great white sharks.
Image credit: Cape Town ETC