2011 European Shark Week

written by Ania Gieroń (Pangaea Canada Nunavut Selection Camp YEP) and Anna Konobrodzka

We both found out about the threats for shark species from the PANGAEA program and since all of us know YEP’s motto: Explore, Learn, Act, we figured that having already learnt, now is the time to act!

Therefore, we decided to organize the European Shark Week (ESW) event at our school. To do so we contacted the main Polish coordinator of ESW, at the local Aquarium and, of course, Michael Scholl from the Mike Horn team, who provided us with the best support and goodies! ;)  We got some valuable advice and campaign materials which has helped us to make this event happen. Since we wanted to have as many people as possible involved in the project, we asked every class to bake a cake for this cause as we wanted to collect money in order to adopt a shark!

Even though the official European Shark Week was over, it has just begun on October 27th 2011 in Gdańsk, Poland. Early this day we arrived at our school to finish the preparations. We were surprised by the number of the cake baked by pupils of our school. One girl even made sharky (blue) cupcakes with bluish frosting. They were delicious and attracted many people to our table. 

Even before we were ready, every biology teacher had bought the Sharky T-shirt and a piece of cake. This turned out to be the starting point of the invasion of hungry and willing to help students! 

Thanks to the materials – leaflets, posters, postcards and wristbands, our event was on everybody’s tongue. People were devastated with the number of people being killed annually by sharks (5-15 people annually worldwide) and mainly by the reverse figure (around 70 million Sharks every year). Many of them weren’t aware of the shark finning situation and danger of sharks becoming extinct. Most probably the main cause of that is the fact that people are prejudiced to sharks because of the stereotypes that evolved mainly from “The Jaws” movies. Unfortunately, there were some people who did not believe us and were strongly opposing to the sharks conservation. We were trying to convince them, fortunately, successfully.

The raised money we are going to donate to Shark Research Institute in form of a shark adoption. The shark is to be our “school shark” and we hope that it will start the tradition of organizing the European Shark Week Events at our school and in a few years we will have a school of sharks ;)

We are especially proud of, but sad as well, that we were the only institution that held ESW Event in Gdansk and the fourth in the whole country – Poland. We are full of hope that the message will be spread around further and further away! 

We already have more plans for the future. We were proposed by the local Aquarium to cooperate with further marine projects. The first one that is going to start soon is making a movie which aim is to make more and more people aware of the sharks being endangered species. The other plan is to give a presentation on sharks in the elementary school near our High School. 

European Shark Week 2011 - Poland