Irish Sharks ‘Massacred’ by Huge Nets

February 27, 2005

Release from:
By Siobhan Maguire and Lynne Kelleher
Times online

One-and-a-Half million sharks have been killed in Irish waters over the past decade, mostly by foreign fishermen.

According to a new report, the population has fallen by 80% since the 1990s because of unrestricted fishing practices and the deep-sea fish now face elimination from our waters.

The report, which was funded by eight state-run fishing agencies in Ireland, Britain and Norway, blames gill-net or ghost-net fishing for the decimation. The practice involves the dropping of 155-mile-long nets into the sea and leaving them unattended for long periods, sometimes for up to a month. It allows fishermen to catch vast quantities of fish but also leads to high waste levels. According to the authors, between 54% and 71% of fish caught in these nets are not fit for human consumption and are discarded.

Maurice Clarke, who works at the Marine Institute of Ireland and is one of the authors of the report, said that a fleet of up to 50 vessels, mostly Spanish, had been operating a gill-net fishery around Ireland since the mid-1990s.

He said: “This has been going on for 10 years and it is surprising that it could go on for so long without anyone knowing about it or looking into it. We are facing a situation where shark stocks have been driven down to a very low level and we are talking years before the numbers will start to build up again.”

The report found that more than 5,000 miles of nets can be left on the ocean floor around Ireland and Britain for weeks at a time, snaring sharks and other deep-water fish including monkfish.

Dominic Rihan of Bord Iascaigh Mhara, the fisheries board, said: “These boats are destroying a huge percentage of marketable fish simply because they cannot physically haul in the length of gear they are using. The nets are too long and soaking times are excessive.

“These fisheries are discarding half of what they catch.”

Up to 70 different shark species are believed to live in Irish waters, making them fertile ground for deep-water fishing.

In 2002, Britain’s Joint Nature Conservation Committee published a report into the depletion of the two main deepwater sharks west of Ireland, the Portuguese dogfish and leafscale gulper. It was estimated that the population of these two species fell from about 75,000 tons in the late 1980s to about 30,000 in 1998.

According to Clarke, this amounts to the removal of 6.3m Portuguese dogfish and leafscale gulper sharks from these waters before 1998. It can take up to 25 years before some adult sharks can reproduce.

The report found that from 1999 all deep-water sharks caught were for human consumption, initially sold into the French market for use as liver oil and more recently into the Spanish market, where shark meat is a popular food.

Clarke said: “Until we started asking questions, nobody knew these fisheries existed among the most vulnerable species in the North Atlantic. There are two things that need to be done: remove the nets that are still in the sea and regulate these fisheries. We need to allow for proper data to be collected that will allow us to understand the number of shark species in our seas.”

The European commission, which has seen the report, is considering the introduction of stricter controls on deep- water fishing as a result of its findings.

Tom Blasdale, from the Joint Nature Conservation Committee and co-author of the report, said: “We need to reduce the fishing effort in deep water. Instead of the quota system, we need to limit the number of days they are fishing. In general, people don’t consider the possibility of marine fish becoming extinct because usually species can bounce back. But the deep-water sharks are an exception.”

Kevin Flannery, a director of Dingle Oceanworld, said: “It is an absolute massacre. It’s a frightening type of fishery that is targeting a species that is slow to grow. It’s killing fish for no good reason and they are targeting a species we know very little about. It is a cause for concern and genuine fishermen would like to see it stopped.”