Help Change the Perception of Sharks: Shark Conservation

Increasing Shark Conservation Efforts in the Public 

By: Louis Borelli, Maya Drabik, Lily Haggerty and Maddie Gates

Shark conservation has been an ongoing struggle for years to date. We find that many shark species are becoming more and more endangered as we continue to lose the battle of shark conservation. Similarly, sharks hold a vital part in our ecosystem and without them, the ecosystem will greatly suffer. 

    As a group, we felt that we all had a strong concern about how shark conservation is portrayed to people. We all agreed that we had seen many misleading facts and that it was difficult to find information out there regarding shark conservation. Along with this, we had all witnessed how poor conservation efforts were affecting the shark populations. The consensus we came to was that not many people truly understand, or have been exposed to, how shark conservation actually works. To combat this, we wanted to advocate for their protection in an attempt to impact the way people interact with sharks. 

    This all led us to an overarching goal which was to increase awareness about the value of sharks in the environment, eliminate potential negative stereotypes that people have about sharks, and increase conservation efforts. In doing so, we aimed to bring more people’s attention to the idea of shark conservation, which has been declining in recent years, along with providing information and resources for their management and protection. 

    In order to achieve these main goals, we established three measurable goals: get 500 followers on our shark conservation Instagram and Twitter pages, have Hank Green interact with one of our posts, and get featured on a shark conservation page. 




To increase awareness about shark conservation and provide valuable information about sharks and conservation efforts pertaining to them, we chose to start an Instagram and Twitter page. Using Twitter and Instagram was the most logical way to educate people and spread awareness since we would be able to filter what information we present to the public, provide easily accessible links to other shark conservation resources for those that were interested, and build a platform for shark conservation. In doing so, our social media pages were an act of journalism, which is the collection and distribution of news and related commentary through materials such as books, blogs, and social media sites. In our case we used social media to distribute the information. To present our information we chose to create a series of infographics that would utilize visual rhetoric, which is when images are used to both persuade and construct or challenge a particular environmental problem. (Pezullo and Cox, 2018). In our case the environmental problem was the lack of information regarding sharks and their proper management, and using infographics allowed us to easily share with people useful information about the problem in an engaging manner that would draw their attention. The information presented in our infographics utilized apocalyptic rhetoric. This is a literary style used to warn others of ecological crises that may occur as a result of people’s desire to control nature (Pezullo and Cox, 2018). In our case we shared information on the dangers posed to our ecosystem that are associated with poor shark conservation practices




Through the use of Twitter and Instagram, we posted infographics that we made. The infographics provided information about sharks that included why they’re valuable to the environment, threats that they face, ways to eliminate potential dangers, and additional resources for how people can get involved in their conservation. Along with posting our own facts, we also provided links to different types of information every week as well as changing the website bio between a fact website and a donation page every few days. 



To gain publicity for our shark conservation pages and reach a larger audience, we attempted to gain Hank Green’s attention and earn his support in our mission. To do this we continuously commented and interacted with Hank Green’s posts on Instagram and Twitter, and reached out to him to share our mission. 


Over the duration of our project, we were able to accomplish our overarching goal which was to increase awareness about the value of sharks in the environment, eliminate potential negative stereotypes that people have about sharks, and increase conservation efforts which was all done through our Twitter and Instagram pages. In doing so, we were successful in reaching our goal of having Hank Green interact with one of our posts by viewing an Instagram story. However, we were not successful in getting the amount of followers we hoped to. In the end we gained 135 followers on Instagram and 25 followers on Twitter. However, we did receive over 1000 interactions with all of our tweets that were posted and 500 interactions with all of our comments to Hank Green. We were also not successful in getting featured on a shark conservation page. We did repost content from over 20 different organizations and reached out to many of them to see if they could create awareness for our platform, however they did not respond to our efforts. 


In moving forward with this project, we would most likely take a different approach to the style of posting. We would work on making our posts more engaging and interactive, including incentive to share the documents from the page. This would give us the chance to reach more people through a unique style of posting. This would hopefully lead to more people joining our efforts to increase shark conservation. We would also most likely begin doing fundraising for different shark conservation organizations at both the local and international level. In doing so we would increase support for conservation efforts on a larger scale. Some things we would like to continue doing are the shark fact infographics. The shark facts gave us a solid base for our profile. Similarly, we would continue reaching out to those who follow our page through direct message and alerting them to message Hank Green and letting them know that we had more fun facts posted on our page. 


Instagram: @ecsharkconservation

Twitter: @ecsharkconserv


References:


    Pezzullo, P. C., & Cox, J. R. (2018). Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere.


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