The basking shark’s eradication program in the 1950s led to a sudden loss of the species in the Pacific Northwest.
Before the 1950s, a silent and mysterious shark visited our coastline in droves. The basking shark, though enormous and closely related to the great white shark, shares none of the ferocious characteristics associated with most predators. True to its name, it basks on the surface of the water with its mouth gaping wide open, and its gills raking in plankton by the ton. Now, the creature has become somewhat of a unicorn, sighted only a few times a year.
Its gentle nature was no deterrent for Canada’s Federal Fisheries Department. In 1949, the basking shark made it into the list of “destructive pests” with a sizable bounty of $36 to $ 48 on its head. The crime by which it was guilty? Being a nuisance to commercial fishing.
The sharks possess a slimy mucus coating and would often get caught in expensive fishing gear. Their extremely slow metabolism and lack of movement worsened the entanglements, and the rise of commercial salmon fishing meant expanding their operations. Finally, harvesting of the fatty shark livers for traditional medicinal purposes worsened the attacks and made the target on their back even bigger.
All this prompted the launch of the “Great Shark War.” The goal was to completely eradicate the basking shark from the coasts of Washington and British Columbia. At first it was a struggle to catch and cull such large beasts, as their size gave them an advantage. However, eventually a surprisingly simple method of attaching a large knife to their boat was invented in 1955. This would be the catalyst for the eradication of basking sharks from once-daily sightings, to only 30 since 1996.
Fishers began to equip the prow of their boats with a large blade, meant to slice through the bodies of the sharks. The basking shark, despite its 30 million years of evolution, was unable to adapt to this sudden onslaught and the “Great Shark War” was a tragic success.
Newspapers were enraptured by the idea of a knife capable of taking down a 30 foot shark. An illustration of a basking shark with the caption, “Huge 30-foot basking shark is almost cut in two by a sharp-edged ram. The sharks, floating lazily near the surface of the water, are no match for the skillfully handled vessel, which heads directly into a school and catches an individual shark before it is aware of its plight,” was published by Popular Mechanics describing the “shark knife” fitted on the vessel, the Comox Post. By 1956 there were no more newspaper articles being published. The sharks were eliminated, the public swiftly moved on and the basking shark became forgotten.
