The Silver Spring Penguin

A cartoon shark and its illustrator hope to draw attention to dwindling shark populations, and they’re recruiting readers to help.

Jim Toomey, who produces the daily comic strip “Sherman’s Lagoon”, wants readers to mail NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service a message: Support stricter limits on hauling sharks from the ocean.

“In marine conservation, the United States is a leader, and we should be proud of that,” Toomey said Thursday inside NOAA headquarters on East-West Highway. “We have an opportunity to preserve our front-runner status.”

In Sunday’s funnies, the character Sherman the Shark and his turtle friend told readers that sharks were overfished to the brink of extinction. They also asked kids to draw their favorite shark species, and to snail mail their drawings to the director of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

“Kids have less of a bias towards sharks,” Toomey told The Penguin. By reaching out to the post-“Jaws” generation, Toomey hopes to change the way people view the big fish.

“They [kids] can make adults aware of sharks, and they can grow up to be conservation-aware adults themselves,” he said.

Attitudes towards sharks have changed already for some, said Sonja Fordham, shark conservation director with the Ocean Conservancy, an advocacy group. Nature programs, like those featured during the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, have contributed to a better understanding of the shark’s role in the marine ecosystem, she said.

Still, overfishing and finning — where a shark’s top fin is removed and the rest of its body is dumped back into the ocean — threaten global populations, according to the Ocean Conservancy. Finning is banned in US waters, and the government has set limits on commercial and recreational shark fishing. This fall, scientists will reevaluate international limits.

“We create a demand for certain fish species that aren’t sustainable,” Toomey explained. “But we as consumers have a lot of power.”

The Green Guide, an online publication of National Geographic, recommends avoiding products containing shark — like shark fin soup — as well as products containing other threatened species.

Lead image of Sherman the Shark courtesy of Jim Toomey.