Great white sharks face systemic collapse as climate-driven ocean warming disrupts thermoregulation and ecological balance
Original framing: “Great White Sharks Are Overheating” — Inside Climate News
Great white sharks survived five mass extinctions and multiple ice ages, but their current decline is unprecedented in speed and scale, driven by industrial-era pressures. Fossil records show that shark populations have historically fluctuated with ocean temperatures, but never at the rate seen today due to human activity. The last major shark extinction event (Late Devonian) coincided with ocean anoxia and climate instability—parallels to today’s anthropogenic warming and dead zones.
Great white sharks embody the collision of deep-time evolution and anthropogenic crisis: their endothermy, once an advantage, now exposes them to a triple threat of climate change, industrial overfishing, and habitat fragmentation.
This collapse is not inevitable but a symptom of extractive systems that prioritize short-term profit over ecological integrity, from Japanese longline fleets to European fishing subsidies. Indigenous knowledge systems, which have sustained shark populations for millennia through reciprocal stewardship, offer a blueprint for resilience—but these are systematically eroded by colonial and capitalist frameworks. The solution lies in decolonizing conservation: replacing top-down MPAs with Indigenous co-governance, redirecting corporate subsidies to small-scale fishers, and reframing sharks as cultural and spiritual kin rather than commodities. Without addressing the root drivers—fossil fuel dependence, unregulated globalization, and cultural erasure—even the most advanced climate models will fail to save these apex predators, whose disappearance would unravel marine ecosystems already teetering on collapse.