California Coast & Ocean

Last April, Gary Adkison, manager of the U.S. branch of the Swiss-based Shark Foundation, got an anonymous call telling him of a shark-fishing tournament to be held in early June in Fort Myers, Florida. The caller was distressed; this was an annual event he thought was no longer acceptable, but he said he could not speak out in public.

Adkison sent an appeal to his worldwide e-mail list of shark supporters, and within a day tournament sponsors and city officials were flooded with protest calls and mail. He and his allies then contacted the local chamber of commerce and other sponsors of Shark Fest 2009, a two-day event with a street fair, boat show, and children’s fishing derby, as well as the shark tournament. They suggested an alternative: a catch-and-release tournament, captured on streaming video that could be viewed on a large screen by the public.

On May 20 the local Beach Observer reported that “due to an overall dissatisfaction and a misinformed general public about the killing of sharks,” the rules of the June 6-7 tournament would change: it would be catch-and-release. Five sharks would be tagged in advance, and a $10,000 prize would be awarded to anyone who caught one of these.

Adkison was jubilant as he told the story. Sure, he said, it would have been better to have no shark tournament at all, but this was a big step toward the larger goal of shark protection worldwide. “Word is getting out that the sharks are in trouble,” he observed.

Whether that information will help save these awesome ocean predators from extinction remains to be seen. Sharks have plied Earth’s waters since before the dinosaurs, but now their survival is threatened by human actions.

Within the past 50 years, populations of some large shark species have declined by 80 to 90 percent, said Andy Nosal, a doctoral student at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Actual numbers are hard to come by and most are from the Atlantic Ocean, where fisheries have been better monitored than in the larger Pacific. “Asian nations don’t monitor catches and kills as Europeans and Americans do,” said Adkison. Yet as Nosal pointed out, “a decline in one area affects the whole world,” because some sharks travel great distances. A basking shark might swim from the Atlantic around Africa to the Indian Ocean or around South America to the Pacific, for example.

The numbers of large sharks such as scalloped hammerhead, great white, and thresher--apex predators all--in the North Atlantic declined by 79 to 89 percent between 1986 and 2000, according to a report by Ransom Myers of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, published in Science in 2003. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has listed some lesser-known species as critically endangered and others, including the great white shark and longfin mako, as vulnerable.

The main culprits are longline fishers going after tuna and swordfish and snagging sharks as bycatch, and European fishers capitalizing on the growing popularity of shark meat worldwide. Shark finning is a third--and increasingly destructive--practice that is affecting shark populations worldwide. Nosal considers finning the greatest threat now, with overfishing close behind. As other species are overfished and no longer available, he said, shark meat provides an inexpensive alternative.

Protectors and Monsters
In many traditional Pacific island cultures, sharks play an important role in human lives and are revered. Fishermen seek their protection and assistance, and reciprocate with gifts of food and song. Fijians have a shark god named Dakuwaqa, who protects the people of Kadavu Island from shark attacks--so they’re not afraid to go into the water. Some native Hawai’ians continue to pay respects to their shark 'aumakua a particular animal whom they can identify and who recognizes them, and who indeed may be a reincarnated family member. Stories are told of men at sea who were rescued and brought home by their 'aumakua.

A California surfer who has spent some years on the beaches of Hawai’i said that Hawai’ian surfers "have a pact with the sharks," so that neither will harm the other. In the rare incidents when a shark attacks a surfer, it’s understood to be a case of mistaken identity: from below, a surfer paddling on a board looks like a sea lion or a sea turtle, favorite foods of great white and tiger sharks, respectively.

Adkison said he’s seen tiger sharks and great whites heading toward him from below more than once. "When you see that, the only thing to do is to dive straight toward him," he said. "He sees he’s made a mistake and turns away."
In much of the Western world, however, sharks are feared more than they are understood, and the vital role they play in the ocean is not widely known. From the 1778 painting Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley, to Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, to the movie Jaws, popular culture has painted a vivid picture of sharks as bloodthirsty snaggle-toothed horrors. Many of my friends are terrified of sharks--and they don’t even swim in the ocean.

"The fewer sharks the better," is a widely shared view. Yet one result of the North Atlantic shark decline has been the decimation of scallop beds along the East Coast of the United States. In a healthy ecosystem, the big sharks keep populations of smaller sharks and rays, which feed on shellfish, in check; throw that ecosystem out of whack and, well, all hell breaks loose. Andy Nosal suggests that a factor contributing to the recent spread of huge Humboldt squid from Mexico south to Chile and north to Humboldt County, where they are decimating hake, may be the absence of sharks that prey on them.

"Large sharks are at the top of the food chain and directly control the population of species in the food web, including marine mammals," Nosal explained. "When they’re gone, there’s a trophic cascade, a chain reaction down the food web, and entangled in that are things we like to eat."

Tracking Pacific Sharks
Much of what scientists know about sharks they have learned in the last 50 years, said Nosal. With acoustic telemetry--the use of underwater receivers to monitor radio tags--researchers have gathered information about movements of several types of migratory sharks. For most of these wide-ranging species, however, very little is known about mating, or where the sharks give birth.

Sharks range in size from the world’s largest fish, the filter-feeding whale shark, which can reach 50 feet in length, to the six-inch (yes, inch) spined pygmy shark. Most of these animals go about their business quietly, snarfing up crustaceans from reefs and fish out in the open ocean, while a very few--such as the great white--have a taste for marine mammals. (Hence the occasional attack on a human in waters off California and Australia.)

The species we know more about fall into two categories: those typically smaller species, such as leopard, horn, and angel sharks, that do not stray far from their home territory; and larger species with commercial value. The Southwest Fisheries Science Center (SWFSC), a regional research branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), publishes fact sheets about 16 species of shark, but the thrust of active research is devoted to three species: shortfin mako and common thresher sharks, which, considered good eating, come to market typically as bycatch in the swordfish fishery; and blue sharks, which are also caught as bycatch in gillnets but are then discarded at sea, having no commercial value.

In 2006, SWFSC reported that in Pacific Ocean waters thresher shark stocks were possibly rebuilding after being overfished during the 1980s, while shortfin makos and blues showed a slightly decreasing trend in abundance, with decreased size as well. No crash, but trends that bear watching.

Large sharks are highly migratory, and spend at least some time far from shore. Scientists are gaining a certain amount of knowledge of their movements from satellite tagging studies and analysis of catch patterns. “Marrying . . . satellite imagery to the animals’ tracks, we’ve started to identify the ocean equivalent of desert oases or the watering holes of African savannahs, where the animals gather to feed and to breed,” states the website of Tagging of Pacific Predators (TOPP), a project that is part of the Census of Marine Life and is comanaged by NOAA’s Pacific Fisheries Ecosystems Lab, Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Lab, and University of California, Santa Cruz’s Long Marine Laboratory. A map showing “near real-time” tracks of individual mako sharks over the course of a year can be viewed at the TOPP website (http://topp.org/species/mako_shark); sometimes they are clustered off San Diego, and at other times they scatter widely. TOPP has also tagged blue and great white sharks.

The tags used on blue and mako sharks, which often swim close to the surface, are called SPOT (smart position or temperature transmitting) satellite tags, and are attached to the animal’s dorsal fin. When the antenna breaks the surface, it sends data--including water pressure, water temperature, and travel speed--to a satellite. The animal’s location is estimated by calculating the Doppler shift in the transmission signal in successive transmissions. When the animal goes beneath the surface, a saltwater switch turns off the tag.

Another sort of tag, the pop-up archival tag (PAT), is more suitable for animals that don’t spend a lot of time in surface waters, such as thresher and great white sharks. Divers insert PAT tags into the animal using a small surgical titanium anchor. At a preset time, such as 30, 60, or 90 days after the tag is attached, the battery triggers the tag’s release and it floats to the surface. The tag then sends samples of its data to a polar-orbiting Argos satellite for about two weeks. If the tag is later found, the entire data set can be downloaded and analyzed. The information collected includes pressure (to determine dive depths), ambient light (to estimate location), and internal and external body temperature.

All this information tells us quite a bit about where these fish go. The data also show which fish stray over national borders--an area of concern for fisheries management--or out into longline-infested open-ocean waters.

Blue sharks, for example, have been tracked from the West Coast of North America westward to the Hawai’ian Islands and Midway. Thresher sharks are thought to have a seasonal north-south migration between Baja California and Oregon and Washington, with pupping taking place in southern California in early spring. The SWFSC description of shortfin mako shark movements, meanwhile, is full of words like “appear to,” “estimated,” and “presumably.” Apparently, they start off in southern California waters, then move offshore or to the south. Many tagged fish have been recaptured in southern California, but some have been taken as far north as Point Arena, as far south as Acapulco, and as far west as Hawai’i.

Fish Know No National Boundaries
We have fairly solid fisheries management in U.S. waters, but what happens when a subadult thresher shark passes over the border into Mexico, or a blue shark heads out into waters crisscrossed by longlines--or simply into international waters, and into the hands of fishers interested only in their dorsal fins? Dan Cartamil, also a doctoral student at Scripps, is interested in this area where biology, politics, economics, and conservation intersect.

He is looking at how artisanal fisheries affect elasmobranch (sharks and their ray and skate cousins) populations in Baja California. “We’re starting to understand [these animals’] movements in U.S. waters, but we don’t know anything about their habits in Mexico or [commercial uses] in Mexico,” he said. The study involves a detailed survey of traditional, small-scale fisheries from the U.S. border to the Vizcaíno Peninsula, halfway down the Pacific coast of Baja. “We visit every single camp at various times of the year to determine what the fishing effort is there, what the target species are, how many fishermen are at the camp, and what kind of gear they use,” he explained. “Once you know that, though, it doesn’t tell you much about what they’re doing with the catch.” So he’s chosen two camps to focus on, going once a month and spending five days. “We’re on the beach the entire day when the boats come in, and we collect data on every animal that comes in--what species they are, what sex they are, how they were caught.”

Some 30 species of sharks and rays are taken in the study area, and all except two species are being used (because they’re too small and don’t have any market value). “The catches are being correlated. The basic idea is to get some biological information of the species being caught. If, for example, you’re getting a lot of juveniles of one species, that indicates that the area is a nursery for these animals. If you’re only getting males at one part of the year and females at another part, that tells you about sexual segregation of these animals.”

The study also involves looking at the animals’ market value; where they end up--whether in local cooking pots or in markets in Ensenada; and what the impact of the fishing enterprise is on the local economy. “The economic part is more complicated, so we’re going to be teaming up with people who specialize in that,” Cartamil said. In particular, he points to a working group of Mexican and American fisheries biologists and managers that has come together to address issues of conservation, known as the Southern California Bight Elasmobranch Consortium (www.sharkbight.com, site now under construction).

Threats to Sharks
Research like Cartamil’s will add to our knowledge of sharks and shark fisheries, but will it be enough, and come in time to prevent decimation of these populations? Cartamil’s doctoral adviser, Jeff Graham, points to three factors that are working against sharks, especially outside U.S. waters, where fishing regulations lack teeth. The first is sharks’ natural history--their story from birth to death, including how they find food and where and when they bear their young. The fact that as a group they reproduce late in life and have relatively few offspring is especially critical. “They simply don’t have the reproductive potential to recover from overwhelming mortalities,” Graham said.

The second is commercial fishing--not for sharks necessarily, but in other fisheries in which sharks are bycatch. Graham pointed to the gillnet as being particularly harmful; he called it “the scourge of fishing” because it kills everything that blunders into it. Off California, beyond the three-mile limit, drift gillnets are used in the swordfish fishery. Bycatch includes mako and thresher sharks, which are taken to market, and blue sharks, which are not. “Every time a drift gillnet is set, which usually means every night” during the season, said Graham, “eight blue sharks are killed.”

Longlines, too, kill sharks. A 2007 report published by the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council and Blue Ocean Institute summarized a study of 12 longline fisheries from eight countries; it found that sharks comprise more than 25 percent of the total catch in the Australian longline tuna and billfish fishery and Fiji longline tuna fishery. Prior to a prohibition on the use of squid for bait, sharks comprised 50 percent of the catch of the Hawai’i-based longline swordfish fishery; now they make up 32 percent of the total catch. The largest proportion was blue sharks, ranging from 47 percent to 92 percent of the total shark catch. The study noted that “incentives to avoid sharks vary along a continuum, based on whether sharks represent an economic disadvantage or advantage.”

The third factor that is rapidly leading to sharks’ decline worldwide is finning, an inhumane and largely unregulated practice that has increased dramatically in the last 20 years. Dried shark fins are a principal ingredient of shark-fin soup, which--ever since its political “rehabilitation” in the late 1980s in China (Mao Zedong had discouraged its consumption, declaring it “elitist”)--has become increasingly popular, a “must” at most weddings and corporate functions. Because a fin is so much more valuable than the fish itself (one pound of dried shark fin can sell for up to $500, and the tailfin of a huge basking shark can fetch nearly $10,000), fishers will, if they can get away with it, keep only the fins and discard the fish. The World Conservation Union’s Shark Specialist Group estimates that tens of millions of sharks are finned worldwide every year. The true number is impossible to determine, given an active black market.

In U.S. waters, finning is allowed, but the body may not be discarded; only two percent of the total shark catch can be in the form of fins. A bill introduced by Sen. John Kerry would close the loophole in the law, which exempted boats that stopped in a U.S. port while in transit. Other countries with similar laws include Australia, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Oman, the Seychelles, and South Africa, as well as the European Union. However, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, the only organization maintaining a database on the shark fin trade, the world leaders in shark fin production are Indonesia, Singapore, and India, collectively accounting for 80 percent of production. China, which together with Hong Kong accounts for 90 percent of shark fin imports worldwide, has never reported any shark fin production to the FAO. These countries have no laws regulating the practice of finning.

To Love Them Like Dolphins
Nosal, also in Graham’s lab, sees outreach as the key to shark conservation: communicating the value and beauty of these animals, and educating people about what they can do to protect sharks. “We need to love them,” he said, “just as we love dolphins, whales, and seals.”

Humans who are at ease in the underwater world tend to appreciate their magnificence. “You have to see a shark, see it move, almost like a plane,” Nosal said, his voice rich with emotion. “They soar through the water, graceful, not at all erratic; their movement is beautiful. They have an amazing sense of smell and can detect electric signals. They have inspired submarine design. Their skin, too, is amazing. It has denticles, like microscopic teeth. Olympic swimmers wear suits made with denticles to help [them] swim faster.”

Because it is so easy to appreciate marine mammals, said Nosal, “we now have the Marine Mammal Protection Act, but we have nothing like that for sharks.” He does not advocate as stringent a law, but does believe comprehensive and international protection against finning, overfishing, and other threats is essential.

Some countries have moved to protect certain species. In 1991, South Africa made it illegal to hook a great white shark within 200 miles of its coast. In 1997, the United States shut down commercial fishing for great whites, and limited recreational fishing to tag-and-release along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. In California that year, Governor Pete Wilson signed a bill that afforded great white sharks complete protection, and Australia did the same a few months later. Other sharks are beginning to receive similar treatment.

These efforts, however, can only go so far, due to the highly migratory nature of the most threatened sharks. Sean Van Sommeran of the Pelagic Shark Research Foundation noted, "Local independent grass-roots education and advocacy are crucial to the efforts of wildlife conservationists and management officials.” One example from our own coastal waters is a regulatory change instituted in March 2009 in the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, prohibiting people from getting closer than 50 meters (165 feet) to a great white shark within two nautical miles of the Farallon Islands. The rule also prohibits the use of decoys or chum to lure sharks. Mary Jane Schramm, spokesperson for the sanctuary, commented, "We have had cases where people in vessels come charging up to the sharks, scaring them away from food they have just caught.” In making this change, sanctuary managers relied not only on scientific research, but also on public comment--underscoring the importance of education and advocacy.

Nosal tries to get the public "to be more conscious of how their fear of sharks has developed, and how it has been fostered over time.” People have access to sharks in three main ways, he said: directly, through a personal encounter; at aquariums (the Monterey Bay Aquarium has even had success in displaying great white sharks, an incredible and awesome sight); and--the predominant way--through the media, which, he said, typically show sharks in a sensationalist and negative light. "The background music they use is always scary. It affects you emotionally.” Direct encounters, in contrast--except of course for the exceptionally rare shark attack--are "invariably positive,” Nosal said. "Scuba divers will tell you it’s an amazing experience to be able to share company with a shark.” Independent filmmakers have weighed in to counter the frightening media image (see For the Love of Sharks).

And then there’s our consumption of sharks, as meat, cartilage (as in chondroitin supplements taken for arthritis), and, most commonly, in shark-fin soup. Nosal said, "I don’t want to vilify people who buy shark meat--it’s tasty, it’s good. Finning is the big thing. There is a demand for it. We can do all we can to make shark finning illegal, but the bottom line is, if there’s demand, there’ll be a black market.”

Gradually, efforts to educate people on this barbaric practice are bearing fruit. In 2005, Walt Disney Co. bowed to pressure from animal rights groups and agreed not to offer shark-fin soup at the new Hong Kong Disneyland theme park. Celebrities have gotten into the fight as well: in August 2006, Yao Ming, the seven-foot-six Shanghai-born star of the Houston Rockets, publicly swore off shark-fin soup at a Beijing press conference held by the environmental advocacy group WildAid. When WildAid conducted a survey in Hong Kong and China, said Nosal, "the vast majority didn’t know what was in shark-fin soup, because in Chinese it’s known as 'fish wing soup.'" But when told how the soup comes to their banquet table, the majority immediately said that they would find an alternative. A discussion thread on www.singaporebrides.com, in fact, offers many scrumptious-sounding substitutes for the traditional soup.

The combined efforts of people who have come to love sharks are building momentum. The Shark Foundation’s Gary Adkison draws inspiration from a famous saying by Margaret Mead: "Never doubt for a single minute that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Perhaps it’s not yet too late for these ancient and amazing fellow creatures.

Anne Canright can often be found at the Monterey Bay Aquarium gazing in awe at the various species of sharks on display there.