Sharks International Valencia 2022

Sharks International is the world's largest conference that literally gathers all those who deal with sharks and rays and, like the Olympics, is held every 4 years. After the first conference was held in Australia, the second in South Africa, and the last in Brazil, the Mediterranean was chosen as the new destination, and the fourth conference was held in October in Valencia, Spain. In the beautiful surroundings of the City of Science and Art, a theme park that is today one of the symbols of Valencia, more precisely in L'Oceanogràfic Valencia, which is the largest European aquarium, hundreds of scientists socialized for days and exchanged their experiences through lectures and presentations, which were additionally followed online by thousands of others considering that most of the events were constantly transmitted via the web platform. Given the occasion, the IUCN Shark Specialist Group also took advantage of the situation, and two days before the opening of the same conference, a workshop was held, the main goal of which was to produce a Global Report, a report on the state of the population of sharks and rays in the world, individually for each coastal state. Several hundred scientists were involved in the preparation of the report itself, and all are led by regional presidents led by IUCN SSG President Rim Jabad. Clearly, the main topic of the conference, as well as the IUCN SSG workshop, is the protection of sharks and rays, which are considered the most endangered group of animals in the world, because although in recent years the level of awareness of the need to preserve these "living fossils", as they are often ca lled for their perfection which they reached thousands of years earlier, over 100 million specimens are still k illed annually in the world. As these marine animals are mostly at the top of the food chain, their biological-ecological characteristics such as slow growth, and late maturation of a small number of young, do not give them the opportunity to restore their populations with constant k illing. Therefore, an increasing number of sharks and rays are receiving some kind of protected status with the aim of preserving them in the future as residents of this blue planet.