After half a billion years, are sharks heading for extinction?

Sharks were never far from our minds as we grew up on the beach in Adelaide. Although attacks were rare, they were real. My grandfather was witness to the fatal mauling of a swimming instructor in the 1930s, and later a friend from university was killed while scuba diving off Port Noarlunga. Yet for the most part sharks were more an idea than a living presence. Other than an unsettlingly close encounter with a bronze whaler when I was 20, my interactions with the creatures as a young person were mostly confined to observing gentle Port Jackson sharks, wobbegongs and grey nurses while snorkelling and diving.

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This tendency to see sharks only through the prism of their vastly overestimated threat to human life obscures the many wonders of these remarkable animals. As John Long, professor of Palaeontology at Flinders University, explains in his wonderfully rich book, sharks are one of our planet’s great success stories. Incredibly ancient, enormously various in their design and possessed of a range of remarkable adaptations, they also play a vital role in our ecosystems. They regulate food chains and maintain the health of sea grass beds, coral reefs and kelp forests by controlling fish populations; and they contribute to the carbon cycle by transporting nutrients between different parts of the ocean.

The Secret History of Sharks is both an evolutionary and a personal history. It is an account of the immensely long process of adaptation and change that has given rise to more than 1,200 species of sharks, rays, skates, sawfish and chimaeras that populate the world’s oceans and waterways today; and it’s the story of Long’s lifelong fascination with sharks, ancient and modern.