Scientists Seek Limit On Shark Killings

December 11, 2004

Release from: ExpressNewsline.com

An international decision that it's illegal to cut the fins off of a shark and then dump the carcass is a great first step, but more is needed to protect sharks, experts say.

The biggest need is an international limit on the number of sharks which can be killed each year, agree William Hogarth, director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, and Sonja Fordham of the Ocean Conservancy, an environmental group.

Without catch quotas, the finning regulations will only slow shark declines, they said.

Once considered only a menace and prone to wandering into international waters where no laws curtail their slaughter, the ocean's top predators proved no match for modern fishing fleets. Delegates at a 63-nation fishing commission meeting in New Orleans recently agreed to ban "finning" from the Gulf of Mexico, across the Atlantic and into the Mediterranean Sea.

But they shelved other proposals to protect sharks. There still are no quotas on how many sharks can be caught in international waters, or on the size and number of shark-fishing fleets.

As a result, a vast divide persists between rules governing U.S. waters, where shark restrictions in the Gulf and Atlantic have been in place for a decade, and sparse regulations in place internationally. That means sharks and other species found within domestic waters become fair game when they swim past the 200-mile zone of U.S. control.

"A shark may be protected in U.S. waters, but two days from now, it could be off the coast of Nicaragua and not have any protection," said Bruce Thompson of Louisiana State University, who has spent the past three decades studying sharks. "A guy anchored a short distance off the beach at Grand Isle who catches a black tip shark, it could have been down off the coast of Mexico relatively recently. It's just not a Louisiana or regional issue."

The United Nations (news - web sites) estimates the global shark catch at about 1.8 million pounds a year. Japan, Taiwan, Spain, Mexico and several other nations lead the industry.

The ban agreed to by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, which also regulats international rules for other ocean-spanning species, goes into effect within the next six months.

As the first international shark regulation, "it's something we can add to," said Hogarth, of the Fisheries Service.

The ICCAT agreed to more population research on two shark species, blues and short-finned makos, but it omitted others considered imperiled including silky sharks, thresher sharks, white-tipped oceanic sharks and porbeagle sharks.

The population data are used to set annual fishing quotas. Without it, nations can argue that further limits on sharks are not scientifically justified.

"The practice of finning, that is not acceptable behavior for fishermen of any country. How many are caught, and how much is killed are much more problematic," said Masanori Miyahara, ICCAT chairman and a delegate from Japan, which initially resisted any restrictions on shark fishing. "We have very limited data, and we have to improve that."

LSU's Thompson said it's "bogus" to suggest that more data are needed before tougher controls are put into place.

"How many different ways do they have to be in trouble before we can say they're really in trouble?" he asked.

Sharks are not the only species for whom the slow pace of international agreements is affecting a domestic fishery.

The United States also failed at the ICCAT meeting to make significant headway on a front considered vital to the tuna industry: curtailing the overfishing of bluefin tuna in the eastern Atlantic. Scientists, government officials and fishing industry representatives agree that heavy fishing by European countries and others working the eastern Atlantic has slowed the recovery of tuna stocks in the western Atlantic, where many U.S. fishers work.

ICCAT quotas on bluefin differ widely across ocean regions. Western Atlantic catches are capped at 2,700 tons annually. In the eastern Atlantic, the cap is 32,000 tons.

Recent studies suggest that tuna, like sharks, can range over thousands of square miles. Hogarth said drawing a line halfway across the Atlantic to differentiate western and eastern bluefin has proved to be arbitrary and needs to be changed.

The consequence for domestic fishers, said Steve Loga, owner of Tuna Fresh Inc. in Venice, is that "no matter what we do in the western Atlantic, the overfishing in the eastern Atlantic makes it all for naught."

Andy Rosenberg, a former National Marine Fisheries Service biologist now at the University of New Hampshire, said a 15-year struggle over bluefins, much like the emerging debate over sharks, underscores the limits to the United States' leverage in international fisheries management.

"The goal is clear at this point. We're talking about the preservation of these species," Rosenberg said, "and yet we're still arguing about whether we really need to take action."