Making A Case For Saving The Shark

In partnership with Discovery Networks, "Shark Week" on The Early Show kicked off Monday. To dive right in to this week-long series, we dispatched CBS News science and technology correspondent Daniel Sieberg to the Bahamas.

Words to describe the shark often include scary, powerful and predator, but there's another word that should come to mind: endangered. In fact, a recent study found that about one-third of all sharks around the world face possible extinction because of overfishing.

Twenty miles off Grand Bahama Island, at a place called "Tiger Beach," dive master Stuart Cove is trying to lure sharks to our boat using a fishy mixture.

"The tiger sharks are elusive, so we're chumming them up," Cove explained.

So they cut pieces of fish, toss some onto the surface, lower more to the bottom and stir the rest into a watery mixture. After several hours, the lure worked.

Armed with nothing more than a couple of metal batons, they dived down 20 feet with about a dozen lemon sharks and one tiger shark - among the ocean's most feared predators.

"Once you are in the water with these sharks and you see how beautiful and magnificent they are, the fear quickly dissipates and you become at one with them. You become one of their allies," Cove told Sieberg.

It's a breathtaking sight. At times lemon sharks came towards Sieberg's leg and veered away at the last second.

Sieberg had been told it's all about "projecting confidence," and of course not making any sudden movements. At one point, a diver needed to push the tiger shark away as it got a little aggressive. Fortunately, Sieberg was out of the water at that point.

"They are all around you. They are swimming right beside you. They are in front of you. The most disconcerting thing is when they are behind you," Sieberg noted after his dive.

And such encounters in the Bahamas are big business: at Stuart Cove's Dive Bahamas, divers head out by the boatload to see sharks every day.

Critics say these types of organized dives can disrupt the natural behavior of sharks and introduce artificial levels of food from the baiting. But Cove says the bait used is the equivalent of giving the sharks one grape.

"I don't think we are seriously disrupting them, but we are doing in a positive way is we are bring people to them and showing them that 'Hey it's important to keep these sharks alive,'" Cove said.

Many researchers agree and hope the dives show humans are a far greater threat to sharks than the other way around.

Marine biologist Andy Dehart told Sieberg that 250,000 sharks are killed every single day of the year. "And that's through targeted fisheries for sharks for their fins. Their fins are extremely valuable," he explained. "Luckily there is still time to save the sharks. We just have to act fairly quickly."

And why should we care if sharks are dying off? Being at the top of the marine food chain, sharks help keep the ocean in balance, killing weaker fish and controlling populations of creatures like rays and smaller sharks that feed on shellfish, like scallops and oysters.