News from Tynemouth
Shark Week!
Staff at the Blue Reef Aquarium in Tynemouth are putting the finishing touches to their week-long 'PR campaign' to try and change the public perception of the much-misunderstood shark.
The aquarium will be hosting 'Shark Week' from May 24th - June 1st with the hope of converting young people into shark lovers rather than shark haters.
Using a mixture of exhibitions, live talks, feeding demonstrations and fun activities, Shark Week aims to dispel many of the popular misconceptions of sharks as mindless man-eaters by showing the facts behind the fiction.
As well as coming face to face with living members of the shark family ranging from native dogfish to black tip reef sharks, visitors to the aquarium will also be able to visit the 'Shark Nursery' - home to newly-hatched baby sharks.
There will also be quizzes and competitions and displays by the Shark Trust - a UK shark conservation group along with other information on what we can all do to help save sharks.
Blue Reef Co-ordinator Anna Etchells said: "We're hoping that the combination of babies, fun quizzes and our own shark workshops will help to provide our visitors with a different view of these much-maligned predators.
"We ran a shark week last year and it was one of the most popular events we have had at the aquarium.
"We got some very positive feedback from the public and I'm sure that we also managed to convert quite a few of the visitors into, if not shark lovers, then at least shark supporters!"
Sharks first appeared in our seas 350 million years ago - that's a 100 million years before the dinosaurs. Today there are over 350 different species from the 18cm spined pygmy shark to the 18-metre whale shark.
British waters are visited by around 30 different species - including the world's second largest, the basking shark, which can grow to 12 metres.
