By Enric Sala
We have been destroying the best way to solve our global crisis
Sharks contain a molecule called squalene that may help produce a vaccine against the coronavirus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic – by eliciting a stronger immune response in humans. Producing one of these vaccines to inoculate everyone on the planet once could take the lives of a quarter million sharks. Sounds like a great solution: we cull a predator that kills humans, and get a vaccine for us at the same time. What’s not to like?
Not so fast. This is precisely the attitude that got us in trouble in the first place.
First, we need to remember the cause of the pandemic that has the world struggling to produce a vaccine in record time. The coronavirus spilled over from a wild animal to a human in China, and thanks to our globalized lifestyle, it spread like wildfire across the world. Today, it is COVID-19; yesterday it was SARS, Ebola, HIV, and many others — all “zoonotic” viruses, meaning they are transmitted from other animals into humans. These diseases arose because people trade wildlife around the world for food, medicine or pets, and because we encroach upon and destroy their natural habitats. Therefore, it is the destruction of biodiversity that got us in trouble in the first place.
It is also worth mentioning that sharks kill an average of five humans a year. That’s a tiny fraction of the 475,000 people killed by fellow humans every year. And it pales in comparison with the up to 100 million sharks that fishing fleets catch every year.
Sharks are just one of many species of animals and plants that contain chemicals that are used in medicine. Indigenous Peoples have a long tradition of using a sophisticated pharmacopeia of plants to treat ailments. Modern medicine is catching up, but it has been very successful at extracting precious compounds from animals that scare most people. Snakes kill over 50,000 people every year worldwide. But their venom saves many more lives. Molecules extracted from venomous snakes help lower blood pressure, reduce heart attacks, break up blood clots, and stop bleeding.
Other species prevent pathogens from getting on our doorstep. In the shallow ocean, sponges and giant clams filter water through their bodies and capture microorganisms from it for food. They are natural water filters, removing bacteria out of seawater. We have studied inhabited coral atolls where giant clams have been removed for food or their shells, and remote atolls without people where the lagoon harbors pavements of giant clams. Half of the microbes in seawater at the inhabited atolls are pathogens, including the bacteria that causes cholera – whereas at the pristine atolls, pathogens were undetectable. Experiments showed that the giant clams remove these bacteria from seawater. They are the N-95 masks of the sea.
But there is another reason why wildlife is useful to us. Everything we need to survive depends on the work of other species: the food we eat, the clean water we drink, the oxygen we breath. Even bats, which are reservoir species for coronaviruses and many other types of viruses, give us many benefits. They are voracious insect-eaters with the potential to keep malaria-carrying mosquito populations under control and to reduce agricultural pests, thus helping farmers. The mammalian equivalent of bees, bats pollinate more than 258 species of plants, including important crops such as bananas, mangos, breadfruits, agave, and durians. Researchers have estimated the global economic value of bats’ pollination service at $200 billion.
Among the most important species are the large predators that humans are so keen to remove from our planet, as if we did not want any competition on top of the food web. Sharks, wolves, jaguars are the glue that binds ecosystems together. Studies show that removing sharks from coral reefs destabilizes them. I have seen with my own eyes the difference between pristine coral reefs full of sharks, and reefs where sharks have been fished out. The former are productive and thriving; the latter are on a fast track to become coral graveyards covered by slime, with little fish life. Sharks are the keystone on top of an architectural arch: you remove it and the whole arch collapses.
The climate crisis and the current pandemic are other symptoms of our destroying the natural world. Doubling down on the destruction will not save us; it will only enable the next pandemic. But it doesn’t need to be like this. Protecting the wild – at least 30 percent of the planet by 2030 – and rewilding much of the rest is our best vaccine. It will also allow functioning ecosystems remove much of our carbon pollution from the atmosphere, thus mitigating the impacts of climate change, and provide the lost stability on our planet that we so badly need now. What’s not to like?
Enric Sala is Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society, and author of The Nature of Nature: Why We Need the Wild
This piece was prepared online by Panuruji Kenta, Publisher, SEVENSEAS Media