Evaluating the attitudes of the public towards sharks

Sharks have always reawakened contrasting feelings in human, from fear to attraction. The occasional occurrence of shark attacks against people and the message regarding these species delivered by books and movies reinforce the picture of animals dangerous for human. On the other hand, shark constitute commercial species, in some context of high value (for instance, shark fin trade) and their exploitation led them to severe depletion worldwide.

To promote shark conservation, the attitude of common people towards these animals should be evaluated and then programmes to raise public awareness should be developed. To this aim, we set up an online multilingual questionnaire to be diffused in different countries with the goal to collect as many answers as possible from all over the world, from people of different educational levels, different ages (10-60+) and different backgrounds.

This study is a collaborative project involving the Department of Biology of the University of Padova ( http://chioggia.biologia.unipd.it/en/ ) (Italy), iSea ( http://isea.com.gr/en/ ) (Greece), OGS (National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics (http://www.ogs.trieste.it/en/content/institute ), (Italy), CHAM - Portuguese Center for Global History, FCSH/NOVA University ( http://www.cham.fcsh.unl.pt/ac_actividade.aspx?ActId=160 ) (Portugal), NIWA ( https://www.niwa.co.nz/ ) (New Zealand).

For further information: info@tshark.org

To participate to the questionnaire: http://www.tshark.org/questionnaire

Thank you for the contribution!!!