Good Manners Killing 'Canadian' Shark

November 17, 2006

Release from: Tom Spears
Ottawa Citizen (Canada)

Steve Campana is on a mission to save a shark that's the smaller cousin of the great white and mako sharks, but more Canadian in every way. For one thing, the porbeagle shark is "more polite.

"I wouldn't hesitate to jump in the water right beside it,'' the fish scientist from Nova Scotia says. "Well, maybe on a bet.''

The porbeagle shark is two-metres-long, with serious teeth and a fin that sticks up when it swims near the surface but a diet of pure fish. No seals or people. This also sets it off from its bigger and flashier cousins.

In fact, people are eating the porbeagle rather than the other way around. And its numbers have fallen drastically, to about a quarter or a fifth of the number that swam off Nova Scotia and southern Newfoundland 40 years ago.

Experts estimate 190,000 porbeagles remain, mostly inside Canada's 200-mile exclusive fisheries zone. With high demand for porbeagle meat in Europe (especially Italy), and a low porbeagle birth rate (four "pups'' each year), the overfishing has become a problem.

The federal Fisheries Department cut the quotas for catching these sharks. Yet, the big fish is very poorly understood. A basic question: Where do the females go to have their babies each winter?

"We knew the mating area was off Newfoundland Ebut we didn't have a clue where they were giving birth,'' Campana said. "We thought it might be down near the Canada-U.S. border somewhere, perhaps offshore in deep water, but that was just guessing.''

This year, he's tagged full grown male and female sharks and set them loose.

The tag "is a very, very cool device. It's about the length of the palm of your hand. It's got sensors in it that record the water temperature and the water depth. What we do is attach it to the back of the shark and every few minutes it records how deep the shark is, the temperature, and also a rough idea of location.''

A timer will release the gadgets in February or March the time pups are born. The devices will float to the surface and transmit their data to a satellite, telling the story of months at sea.

Porbeagles do show up near shore sometimes and scare people, Campana said.

"You can understand that people get very alarmed and everybody races out of the water, but in fact it's only interested in chasing fish,'' he said.

"I love this shark, and part of the reason is it's one of the very few Canadian sharks. Most of the time we're just sharing the leftovers from an American population. And it's almost like the Canadian citizen. Compared to the mako and the great white it just seems more polite.''