THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE • Winter 2018-19 25 TheCoastalBend.com (Above) Offshore oil tanker facility like the one proposed by Trafigura, a Swiss-based trad- ing company; (Middle) The $11 billion Cheniere Liquefied National Gas (LNG) shipping facil- ity in Ingleside; (Lower) Renderings of the planned Exxon plastics plant in Gregory. and other sea life considered tasty to bigger fish of over three feet. Awesome for anglers seeking Bull Reds—and just as awesome for some of the most prolific and viscous predators in the Gulf of Mexico, namely Tiger and Bull Sharks of over 12 feet, which find easy and well-stocked feeding waters as close as ten yards from the beach. From Bob Hall Pier, south through PINS, Padre Island is one of the top on- shore fishing beaches in the world, especially for the most feared beasts of the sea, the widely-loathed and universally-reviled shark. Spielberg’s epic film, based on Peter Benchley’s best-selling novel, which was based on the stories of the world’s great shark fisherman, the late, great Captain Frank Mundus of Montauk, Long Island, New York—Jaws—created a horrifying and loathsome identity for a fish known well only by a small minority of fisherman, surfers and other ocean-goers. Talk about bad P.R. It was not until the late 1990’s, two decades after Jaws was released, that sharks were even looked at as valuable to the ecology of the oceans by anyone outside the world of marine science. The Chondrichthyes class of fish species, which includes sharks, skates and rays, is among the most enduring and successful in the entire animal kingdom. Most sharks reside at the top of the food chain and have remained essentially unchanged for more than 60 million years, appearing in the fossil record going back over 400 million years. They were here long before we were, and they will be here long after we’re gone. After just a few thousands years of coordinated fishing activity at sea, however, Man has manage to threaten the existence of numerous shark species that have otherwise survived multiple ice ages, shifts in the continents, and an asteroid strike that is thought to have killed off the dinosaurs and left the earth in darkness for as long as a thousand years. Far Eastern fisheries, especially those from Japan, Korea and China, harvest as many as 250 million sharks each year, up to 7% of the ocean’s entire shark population, strictly for the Asian delicacy, shark fin soup. In a brutal practice known as finning, sharks are caught in nets, their fins are cut off, and the live fish is thrown back into the ocean. Just in case there was any question that large swaths of world culture exhibit no respect whatsoever for the planet or its crea- tures—it’s the same thinking that nearly wiped out the bison in America. For decades, Padre Island, including the National Seashore, has been one of the top shark hunting destinations in the world. Just a few years ago, a Corpus Christi angler set a world record for the largest fish caught in the surf, land- ing a bull shark of over 800 lbs. from Bob Hall Pier. Sharkathon was organized by a group of Coastal Bend shark fishermen who wanted to inject competition into their favorite pastime, but in a catch-and-release format that promotes a message of conservation for the most reviled and feared class of animals on the planet—and it worked. Over Sharkathon’s 14-year history, which began in 2004, participation has grown from 50 participants to 950, with prize money climbing from $2,500 to over $80,000 in 2018. With the cooperation of the shark tagging research program at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi’s Harte Research Institute, Sharkathon has become a catch-TAG-and-release tournament that now serves a shark research function, further promoting their survival. Now a registered non-profit organization, proceeds raised from Sharkathon fund field trips to PINS for the Coastal Bend’s least-privileged schoolkids, as well as for the Billy Sandifer Big Shell Beach Cleanup. One question still persists, however. Why are Padre and Mustang Islands in Texas valued and protected environmentally, by all sides of the political spec- trum, seemingly over and above just about any stretch of the Texas coastline? Maybe it’s because these island have been protected successfully so far, and thus hold a special place in the minds of the powers-that-be. Maybe, like in Port Aransas and the states of Florida and California, the value of clean beaches outweighs the value of oil and gas production in the minds of voters. Perhaps.