With the loss of at least 90 percent of sharks worldwide, it would seem to be urgent to protect the ones that remain. Every global study of their status has reported a more dire situation than the last, and that the targeted hunt for the shark fin trade is responsible for their catastrophic depletion.
It’s early afternoon. The sun is beating down and mosquitoes are humming. Another decent day’s catch is unloaded, men sweating with the effort. If it weren’t for the breeze, the stench would be unbearable. Today’s tally: more than 100 sharks, some weighing close to 1,000 pounds and reaching nearly 20 feet in length.
The ban does not apply to people with permits issued by the state Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR), shark fishing for public safety, sharks captured for self-defence, or sharks taken outside of state marine waters with required documentation.
According to Act 51, the conditions of non-commercial permits for the take of sharks “shall include native Hawaiian cultural protocol, size and species restrictions, and a prohibition on species listed as endangered or threatened.”
At the annual meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) last week, North Atlantic fishing nations have pledged to ban catches of the shortfin mako shark.
The efforts to secure the ban was led by the UK, Canada and Senegal. The move means that the countries agreed to end overfishing immediately and to gradually achieve biomass levels that were enough to support maximum sustainable yield by 2070 for the species, according to an article in The Guardian.
Fish rubbing themselves against a shark's body may sound as if they have a death wish, but this is precisely what some fish have been spotted doing. And it turns out that such behaviour is more widespread and frequent than one would think.
A study led by the University of Miami (UM) Shark Research and Conservation Program at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science uncovered over 40 instances of fish rubbing themselves against a shark’s skin in over ten locations around the globe.
While chafing has been well documented between fish and inanimate objects, such as sand or rocky substrate, this shark-chaffing phenomenon appears to be the only scenario in nature where prey actively seek out and rub up against a predator.
Why sharks sometimes bite humans remains unclear, but potential reasons include mistaken identity, whereby sharks are thought to mistake humans for their typical prey; curiosity; hunger; and defensive/offensive aggression.
The mistaken identity theory has received little scientific scrutiny and the visual similarity between humans and pinnipeds at the surface has been debated largely on the basis of human visual perception, rather than that of sharks.
Researchers have discovered that the tiger sharks in the Atlantic are genetically different from the ones in the Indo-Pacific Ocean, according to a study published in the Journal of Heredity on 10 August 2021.
Cape Cod's slow embrace of its shark reputation comes three summers after the popular vacation destination saw its first great white shark attacks in generations.
Businesses dreaded the negative perception seared into the public imagination by Jaws, the 1975 blockbuster movie about a man-eating great white shark that made its director, Stephen Spielberg, a household name.
Several years ago, there was a concern that it might have a negative impact on tourism. But we’ve been working to educate people about sharks and what we’ve actually seen is no negative impact.
— Paul Niedzwiecki, Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce
Finding sharks off the coast of Cape Cod is not hard, with some shark tour operators using the same methods that shark researchers use to find the predators: drones, or an overhead "spotter" plane, to locate sharks and direct their boats to them.
Leaving aside the question of why shark scientists would work to undermine shark conservationists, its simplistic assertion focuses on just two unrelated subjects: the efforts to ban the shark fin trade, and the existence or not, of sustainable shark fisheries.
The great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) is undeniably the most well known of the ocean’s many predators. It has, one could say, “form” and is widely considered as a ruthless and terrifying man-eater, which has taken the lives of many innocent swimmers, surfers and divers.
Niche partitioning of time, space or resources is considered the key to allowing the coexistence of competitor species, and particularly guilds of predators such as sharks.
However, the extent to which these processes occur in marine systems is poorly understood due to the difficulty in studying fine-scale movements and activity patterns in mobile underwater species.
In this day and age, with the prevalence of anti-shark fin soup campaigns and the ease with which accurate information about sharks can be disseminated, one might have reasonably expected sharks to be better portrayed in the movies.
That it may be seen as the majestic and graceful apex predator that it is, instead of a mindless man-eater bent on chomping down on screaming humans.
Well, one can hope.
In a world-first study by University of South Australia, researchers looked into how sharks were being portrayed in movies.
