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In the seventies and eighties, sharks in general
in the U.S. were considered an underutilized resource
and in the North Atlantic, fishermen were encouraged
to fish for shark.
The dusky and sandbar sharks were targeted for
commercial fishing-there was a market for the
carcass meat and fins.
Title: Northwest Atlantic Shark Cooperative Research Fishery
The main target were the fins because especially
sandbar sharks, dusky sharks-these large coastal sharks
they have large fins that were very valuable
to the market and that's really what drove the market
and I'm talking about legal, not illegal, shark fin trade.
The sandbar shark was the main targeted species
of the bottom long-line commercial fishery.
It's also caught recreationally.
We saw the status of the stock had been
deteriorating and so our management branch
has imposed through the years
different measures to reduce the amount of catch.
In nineteen ninety-three, trip limits,
a four-thousand pound catch limit
and a five percent rule for fins was imposed.
However, stock assessments over the next fifteen years
revealed that the sandbar shark population
in the North Atlantic continued to decline and
eventually, their catch was prohibited.
If we completely forbid the take of the species
then we wouldn't be getting any information.
A research fishery program was created
which allows fishermen-between five to ten vessels
to fish for prohibited shark species.
The reason that we have this shark research fishery
is the stock assessment-
although the sharks were still overfished-
still allowed for a small-very small- quota to
be harvested and still allow the population to recover.
They have 100% observer coverage on
every single trip and the observers sample
a large proportion of the catch for science.
We collect the vertebrae for aging the animal.
We collect the reproductive tracts for
reproductive studies looking into reproductive
periodicity, looking at fecundity
the amount of pups that a shark may have.
With the imposed fishing limits and eventual
prohibited fishing over the last 20 years for
the slow-growing, slow-reproducing sandbar
and dusky shark populations,
scientists are now seeing signs of improvement.
Now we believe that because of a number
of issues, especially the imposition of lower
quotas for fisheries,
these declines have decelerated and stopped
and in some cases we are starting to see
some rebound of these populations.
What happens is that the total number or biomass of animals
has declined so much that it's going to
take a long time, in some cases decades
for these populations to be at a level that
we consider to be efficient for fishing.
We've had stock assessments for sandbar sharks
since approximately 1996.
The reason for doing these assessments is to
evaluate the status of the stock with respect
to this benchmark that we have and so to
eventually get to a point where we can
say okay the stock has rebuilt and you
can catch so many animals sustainably because
that's the goal to catch them sustainably in the long term.
Sandbar sharks are historically the most valuable shark
because of their fins and also their meat is sold
for table fare so this allows them to still maintain
some economic viability by still allowing a small segment
to still fish for sandbar shark, but it also allows us to gather
current biological information on how they're growing,
what they're reproductive status is what their abundance
trends are and all that information will be used
in the next sandbar shark stock assessment.
Sharks not only represent an important resource
for commercial and recreational fishing communities,
they are also vital to the health of the
ecosystems they inhabit.
While federal fisheries laws are designed to
ensure sustainable shark populations,
cooperative research by commercial fishermen
is a key component for supporting sustainable
fishery management of sharks in the Northwest Atlantic.