Photos

A little variation on the types of pictures I normally post...

This Great White shark scared the living day-lights out of me. I went on a shark dive near Cape Town (since I'm deathly afraid of sharks, I figured, why not get in the water with them!?). Shark diving off the coast South Africa is amazing. They come right up to the boat (and sometimes even attack the propellers on the motor). I must confess, I didn't see a thing from the underwater cage, but the view from the boat was great!

The great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) has been around for at least 3.5 million years, but now it is acutely threatened by extinction. It remains to be seen whether the species is already "genetically extinct" - in other words there are so few individuals left that the survivors are genetically very similar to one another and are less likely to be able to withstand other insults that nature can throw at them. The number of sharks, of all kinds, caught every year is estimated at 100 million.