Sharks on the line: Part 1 - On the menu
March 21, 2025 at 2:00 AM EDT
Sharks worldwide are imperiled by overfishing. Yet experts disagree on whether policies in Florida and the U.S. aimed at protecting sharks have in fact done the opposite. In Part I of this three-part series, The Marjorie investigates how a federal ban on shark fins shrunk a commercial fishery and satisfied shark advocates — but did little to curb shark deaths.
This story was funded by the Schooner Foundation as well as readers like you.
“Maybe it was a sin to kill the fish,” muses the fictional character Santiago in Ernest Hemingway’s famous novella, “The Old Man and the Sea.” As he drifts along the Gulf Stream offshore of Cuba, the old man contemplates his guilt for catching this “great fish,” a striped marlin that is longer than the skiff itself and which glimmers in shades of purple.
But it was not a sin to kill the dentuso, nor the galanos, Santiago thinks to himself. They are the fisherman’s biggest rivals — sharks — and he is nearly defeated after they devour his prized marlin down to its skeleton. He describes certain sharks as hateful, bad-smelling scavengers and killers with slitted yellow eyes, yet others as strong and intelligent.
The classic was published in 1952, a time when commercial shark fishing in the U.S. was already in full swing, but shark populations were healthier back then. It was also an early account of what modern-day anglers complain about the most: depredation, when sharks prey on a hooked catch. Fishermen have been interacting with sharks for as long as humans have been fishing, but in the modern era, overfishing is the root challenge facing fisheries, anglers, and sharks the most.
“There [was] all sorts of knowledge that has been lost on how to coexist with sharks because it hasn't been an issue in so long,” says Jasmin Graham, a marine biologist who specializes in sharks and co-founder of the nonprofit Minorities in Shark Sciences. “If we have a healthy ocean, sharks and people can coexist — they did so for a really long time. [Depredation] is a recent development where it's becoming an issue because we've forgotten how to coexist.”
In this three-part series, The Marjorie spent eight months investigating Florida’s role in sustainably managing the ocean’s most infamous apex predator, including four weeks of field reporting across the state. Our reporting encompasses interviews with dozens of experts and individuals invested in the topic.
It starts with soup.
A miscalculated campaign
In 2009, Chinese basketball star Yao Ming appeared in what became one of the most well-known wildlife conservation commercials. The WildAid ad shows Ming ordering a cup of shark fin soup in a restaurant, when the narrator asks, “But what if you could see how shark fin soup is made?”
In a restaurant aquarium tank, a shark whose back fin has been cut off bleeds out, disturbing the restaurant’s patrons. One by one, they push their bowls away, following Ming’s lead. “Remember,” he tells the camera, “when the buying stops, the killing can, too.”
The commercial, among other campaigns, was effective. It helped raise awareness of how shark fins are often harvested internationally, inspiring individual states like New Jersey and Hawaii to ban shark fins and shark fishing altogether.
But in reality, threats to sharks go well beyond shark fin soup and the practice called finning, when shark fins are sliced off the animals at sea. Even as some countries pass laws intended to protect sharks, overfishing on a global scale remains the primary cause for population declines across dozens of species.
“There's this widespread misunderstanding among the well-intentioned public that the only major threat — or the biggest threat by far — to sharks is the trade in shark fins and shark fin soup, and that hasn't been true since the ’90s,” says David Shiffman, a marine conservation biologist who wrote the book “Why Sharks Matter.”
In 2022, in an effort to combat the problem, Congress enacted the Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act, which prohibits the sale, import, export, or possession of shark fins in the U.S. It was designed to take the U.S. out of the global market for shark fins. But in practice, the ban did little to curb the root of global shark mortality — and in some ways made the problem worse, Shiffman and other experts say. By banning all shark fins in the U.S. — even those harvested sustainably — other countries are likely to lose the motivation to make their fin-harvesting practices more sustainable if the U.S. won’t buy their fins anyway. Meanwhile, finning is an ongoing problem in other parts of the world.
“A ban on shark finning is not supposed to reduce shark mortality,” Shiffman explains. “It affects how sharks are killed, not how many sharks are killed.”
In Florida, shark management is at odds with stakeholders who depend on sharks for a living. As the commercial fishery fights for a shark-meat market — and as the recreational fishing industry continues to grow largely unchecked — the Sunshine State’s role in sustainably managing sharks comes down to managing three other things: people, perceptions, and policies.
Marjorie Sharks 2.mp4
Science meets culture and policy
When I reach out to Shiffman for an interview, I don’t realize how famous he is. With more than 81,000 followers on Bluesky and more than 12,000 on Instagram, his playful memes about shark education reach a wide audience. But it was his research that piqued my interest.
In 2017, five years before the U.S. fin ban, Shiffman and marine biologist Robert Heuter co-authored a paper arguing why such legislation would fail to target the underlying causes of shark mortality: namely, overfishing.
“At the time that we wrote this, the United States was responsible for slightly less than 1% of the global volume in shark fins,” Shiffman tells me. In other words, taking the U.S. out of the equation does little to reduce the global supply and demand of shark fins.
There’s also a widespread misconception about what “finning” means. It’s when someone catches a shark, cuts off its fins, and dumps the body back into the ocean — the imagery in Yao Ming’s commercial. Oftentimes, the shark is still alive, leaving it to suffer and die on the seafloor. “That’s wasteful, it’s inhumane, it’s unsustainable,” Shiffman says. And it has been illegal in U.S. waters since 1993.
The more sustainable way to harvest fins, on the other hand, is to bring the entire shark back to land intact. Then, fishermen can prepare the shark for sale to seafood markets and restaurants, including the fins. But the 2022 fin ban criminalized this, too, prohibiting the sale of any fins — even from sharks that were harvested whole.
Fishermen in Panama City Beach, Florida, display their catch in 1967. (746x610, AR: 1.222950819672131)
Regardless, overharvest and bycatch (marine creatures that fishermen catch unintentionally while fishing for other species) account for the whopping majority of shark deaths, Shiffman says. The global demand for shark meat has continued to rise over the last two decades as a cheap form of protein, and other shark products have become more popular as well, according to research from the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Among them is shark liver oil, which fishermen have consumed and sold for centuries — including in Hemingway’s portrayal of the 1950s-era Cuban fisherman.
The fin ban had other unintended consequences, too. By criminalizing the sale of fins — the most profitable part — each harvested shark became less valuable to commercial fishermen.
“This is a policy that did nothing and was portrayed as: ‘We fixed it. The ocean is saved,’” Shiffman says — and a mark of how shark conservation policy has become more performative than scientific.
Underlying Ming’s WildAid ad was a subliminal message, Shiffman adds: that it’s easy to blame a global problem on people who live far away, such as in China and other Asian countries where shark fin soup is popular.
Yet in Florida, “go to Publix, look at your seafood counter, and you can see several kinds of shark meat for sale,” Shiffman points out. “No one talks about that.”
Marjorie Sharks 1 031925.mp3
Marjorie Sharks 2 031925.mp3
Indeed, shark meat is sold in seafood markets across the U.S. Sustaining a commercial shark-meat industry is tricky when fishermen aren’t allowed to profit from the fins. The few remaining fishermen who have active commercial permits for shark fishing in Florida see a bleak future for its sustainability.
‘We’re almost going to be extinct’
Multigenerational commercial fisherman Rusty Hudson grew up fishing for snapper and grouper near Daytona Beach. He also remembers seeing a lot of sharks, especially on his shrimp boat, where he would frequently pull them up as bycatch. By the early 1980s, a domestic shark fishery was beginning to flourish. Rather than fish for them, Hudson became a fin dealer back when it was still legal. He sold Florida-caught shark fins to China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, New York City, and San Francisco.
If the fins were properly dried, they could last for close to 40 years. “That was our whole mantra, way back in the ’80s: full utilization,” says Hudson at 69 years old, emphasizing that all parts of the shark were used. Nothing went to waste.
But by the 1990s, Hudson’s job became more difficult. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tightened its restrictions on the commercial shark-fishing industry. Overfishing had indeed become a problem, Hudson remembers, tipping marine ecosystems out of balance. But it was also when fisheries became political, he says, pointing to stricter limits on how many sharks they can harvest due to conservation concerns.
Then, in 2022, the federal ban on selling shark fins made the industry barely profitable. Meanwhile, sharks on the high seas were facing high stakes.
“A lot of times, the management of sharks is seen as a nuisance. They don’t have a lot of economic value. They bite fish off of hooks. They’re seen as a problem to be solved, rather than a species that needs conservation.”
More sharks are now protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, better known as CITES, than ever before. And some policy experts that avidly support the 2022 fin ban argue that such policies haven’t gone far enough.
“It’s important that we set a global standard,” says Ryan Orgera, global director of Accountability.Fish, which advocates for multinational policy on fisheries and governance transparency. “It’s an ethical standard that we have to stand by, and we can’t always be concerned about the global market when we’re making state policy.”
Capt. Charles Thompson and others with sharks at the Royal Palm yacht basin in Miami, Florida, circa 1915. (746x600, AR: 1.2433333333333334)
Before the ban, Orgera says, Miami was a hub for the Latin American shark fin trade. Indeed, the Port of Miami is the 10th busiest in the U.S. and the most accessible one from Latin America. Only a small percentage of shipping containers that enter the port are actually inspected because of the sheer volume of parcels and time constraints on docked cargo ships, allowing illicit contents to make their way through.
It doesn’t just happen at shipping ports. In 2020, officials at Miami International Airport inspected a shipment of 5,000 shark fins on their way from South American to Asia. And in 2023, a company was accused of mislabeling 5,666 pounds of shark fins on their way to China as live lobster and frozen fish.
Seafood products and supply chains are notoriously complex, says Gib Brogan, fisheries campaign director for the conservation nonprofit Oceana. It’s easy to deceptively mislabel shipments as another species, or to categorize it broadly as “shark,” concealing the body part.
The Port of Miami is the 10th busiest in the U.S. and the most accessible one from Latin America. Only a small percentage of shipping containers that enter the port are inspected because of the sheer volume of parcels and time constraints on docked cargo ships, allowing illicit contents to make their way through. <br/> (970x643, AR: 1.5085536547433904)
That’s why he and Oceana view the 2022 fin ban as necessary, contrary to Shiffman’s and others’ opinions. Oceana views the U.S. as having had two major roles in the shark fin trade: as an intermediary and as a supplier.
“We see [the 2022 fin ban] as an additional hurdle that may slow the trade of shark fins around the world,” Brogan tells me. “We are hopeful that this is going to be effective in getting the U.S. out of this market.”
To his point, NOAA has reported only one seizure of shark fins since the 2022 ban: at a UPS store in Kentucky, where a Nicaraguan exporter and American importer were caught trading more than 1,400 pounds of dried fins from silky, bull, and scalloped hammerhead sharks valued at more than $75,000. (Even so, an Oceana-funded 2016 study found that sharks are worth 200 times more alive for ecotourism than they are dead for seafood markets.)
However, as the Western world became more educated about shark finning and the illicit trade, xenophobia toward Asians emerged among some shark advocates. While some Asian countries have indeed imported large volumes of shark fins, it’s unfair to overlook the European Union’s (EU) role, Orgera says.
Although the EU has advocated for anti-shark finning measures, “they weren’t doing anything to lower the number of fins leaving the ocean,” Orgera says. “It’s horseshit.” In the last decade, he adds, the Spanish international fleet has been a top exporter of shark fins in the world.
“But Spain gets away with murder (on) the ocean because they have this incredible way of pointing a finger at China and Japan,” Orgera says. “It’s too easy, too simple, and, frankly, awful to blame Asians for this problem.”
Regardless of the country, Orgera argues that few shark species can outlast fisheries pressure because of their long reproductive timelines, making it difficult for populations to recover from significant declines.
But to shut down commercial shark fisheries would mean eliminating the shark-meat market entirely.
Achieving sustainable fisheriesSo, what does a sustainable shark fishery look like?
In Oceana’s eyes, it includes basing quotas on strong science, requiring accurate reporting of caught sharks, and protecting nurseries like estuaries where young sharks mature.
“Sustainable shark fisheries are theoretically possible,” Brogan says, but “they aren’t happening right now. Most shark fisheries are failing to satisfy those basic requirements of sustainable management.”
Fishermen display a 350-pound shark in St. Petersburg, Florida, circa 1918. (450x745, AR: 0.6040268456375839)
One shortcoming of current monitoring, Brogan argues, is NOAA’s grouping system for sharks. Grouping all “large coastal sharks” and “small coastal sharks” lacks the nuance that each species needs to be managed appropriately. While they’re all large and near the coast, each species has its own unique biology, development, and role in the ecosystem, he says.
Those groups were created based on the gear used to catch those species, a NOAA representative tells The Marjorie. Regulations are also tailored to individual stocks within those groups.
“We need to improve management of sharks overall,” Brogan contends. “A lot of times, the management of sharks is seen as a nuisance. They don’t have a lot of economic value. They bite fish off of hooks. They’re seen as a problem to be solved, rather than a species that needs conservation.”
Shiffman’s research found that people who don’t believe sustainable shark fisheries can exist did not support the 2022 fin ban, which he says ignores the inevitable demand for shark meat. “It’s absolutely, unequivocally true that there are sustainable shark fisheries,” he argues.
But the shark conservation community remains divided.
“Do I believe that we should be commercially harvesting shark species?” Orgera says. “No.”
This story was produced in partnership with the Florida Climate Reporting Network, a multi-newsroom initiative founded by the Miami Herald, the Sun-Sentinel, The Palm Beach Post, the Orlando Sentinel, WLRN Public Media and the Tampa Bay Times.
“Maybe it was a sin to kill the fish,” muses the fictional character Santiago in Ernest Hemingway’s famous novella, “The Old Man and the Sea.” As he drifts along the Gulf Stream offshore of Cuba, the old man contemplates his guilt for catching this “great fish,” a striped marlin that is longer than the skiff itself and which glimmers in shades of purple.
But it was not a sin to kill the dentuso, nor the galanos, Santiago thinks to himself. They are the fisherman’s biggest rivals — sharks — and he is nearly defeated after they devour his prized marlin down to its skeleton. He describes certain sharks as hateful, bad-smelling scavengers and killers with slitted yellow eyes, yet others as strong and intelligent.
The classic was published in 1952, a time when commercial shark fishing in the U.S. was already in full swing, but shark populations were healthier back then. It was also an early account of what modern-day anglers complain about the most: depredation, when sharks prey on a hooked catch. Fishermen have been interacting with sharks for as long as humans have been fishing, but in the modern era, overfishing is the root challenge facing fisheries, anglers, and sharks the most.
“There [was] all sorts of knowledge that has been lost on how to coexist with sharks because it hasn't been an issue in so long,” says Jasmin Graham, a marine biologist who specializes in sharks and co-founder of the nonprofit Minorities in Shark Sciences. “If we have a healthy ocean, sharks and people can coexist — they did so for a really long time. [Depredation] is a recent development where it's becoming an issue because we've forgotten how to coexist.”
In this three-part series, The Marjorie spent eight months investigating Florida’s role in sustainably managing the ocean’s most infamous apex predator, including four weeks of field reporting across the state. Our reporting encompasses interviews with dozens of experts and individuals invested in the topic.
It starts with soup.
A miscalculated campaign
In 2009, Chinese basketball star Yao Ming appeared in what became one of the most well-known wildlife conservation commercials. The WildAid ad shows Ming ordering a cup of shark fin soup in a restaurant, when the narrator asks, “But what if you could see how shark fin soup is made?”
In a restaurant aquarium tank, a shark whose back fin has been cut off bleeds out, disturbing the restaurant’s patrons. One by one, they push their bowls away, following Ming’s lead. “Remember,” he tells the camera, “when the buying stops, the killing can, too.”
The commercial, among other campaigns, was effective. It helped raise awareness of how shark fins are often harvested internationally, inspiring individual states like New Jersey and Hawaii to ban shark fins and shark fishing altogether.
But in reality, threats to sharks go well beyond shark fin soup and the practice called finning, when shark fins are sliced off the animals at sea. Even as some countries pass laws intended to protect sharks, overfishing on a global scale remains the primary cause for population declines across dozens of species.
“There's this widespread misunderstanding among the well-intentioned public that the only major threat — or the biggest threat by far — to sharks is the trade in shark fins and shark fin soup, and that hasn't been true since the ’90s,” says David Shiffman, a marine conservation biologist who wrote the book “Why Sharks Matter.”
In 2022, in an effort to combat the problem, Congress enacted the Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act, which prohibits the sale, import, export, or possession of shark fins in the U.S. It was designed to take the U.S. out of the global market for shark fins. But in practice, the ban did little to curb the root of global shark mortality — and in some ways made the problem worse, Shiffman and other experts say. By banning all shark fins in the U.S. — even those harvested sustainably — other countries are likely to lose the motivation to make their fin-harvesting practices more sustainable if the U.S. won’t buy their fins anyway. Meanwhile, finning is an ongoing problem in other parts of the world.
“A ban on shark finning is not supposed to reduce shark mortality,” Shiffman explains. “It affects how sharks are killed, not how many sharks are killed.”
In Florida, shark management is at odds with stakeholders who depend on sharks for a living. As the commercial fishery fights for a shark-meat market — and as the recreational fishing industry continues to grow largely unchecked — the Sunshine State’s role in sustainably managing sharks comes down to managing three other things: people, perceptions, and policies.
Marjorie Sharks 2.mp4
Science meets culture and policy
When I reach out to Shiffman for an interview, I don’t realize how famous he is. With more than 81,000 followers on Bluesky and more than 12,000 on Instagram, his playful memes about shark education reach a wide audience. But it was his research that piqued my interest.
In 2017, five years before the U.S. fin ban, Shiffman and marine biologist Robert Heuter co-authored a paper arguing why such legislation would fail to target the underlying causes of shark mortality: namely, overfishing.
“At the time that we wrote this, the United States was responsible for slightly less than 1% of the global volume in shark fins,” Shiffman tells me. In other words, taking the U.S. out of the equation does little to reduce the global supply and demand of shark fins.
There’s also a widespread misconception about what “finning” means. It’s when someone catches a shark, cuts off its fins, and dumps the body back into the ocean — the imagery in Yao Ming’s commercial. Oftentimes, the shark is still alive, leaving it to suffer and die on the seafloor. “That’s wasteful, it’s inhumane, it’s unsustainable,” Shiffman says. And it has been illegal in U.S. waters since 1993.
The more sustainable way to harvest fins, on the other hand, is to bring the entire shark back to land intact. Then, fishermen can prepare the shark for sale to seafood markets and restaurants, including the fins. But the 2022 fin ban criminalized this, too, prohibiting the sale of any fins — even from sharks that were harvested whole.
Fishermen in Panama City Beach, Florida, display their catch in 1967. (746x610, AR: 1.222950819672131)
Regardless, overharvest and bycatch (marine creatures that fishermen catch unintentionally while fishing for other species) account for the whopping majority of shark deaths, Shiffman says. The global demand for shark meat has continued to rise over the last two decades as a cheap form of protein, and other shark products have become more popular as well, according to research from the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Among them is shark liver oil, which fishermen have consumed and sold for centuries — including in Hemingway’s portrayal of the 1950s-era Cuban fisherman.
The fin ban had other unintended consequences, too. By criminalizing the sale of fins — the most profitable part — each harvested shark became less valuable to commercial fishermen.
“This is a policy that did nothing and was portrayed as: ‘We fixed it. The ocean is saved,’” Shiffman says — and a mark of how shark conservation policy has become more performative than scientific.
Underlying Ming’s WildAid ad was a subliminal message, Shiffman adds: that it’s easy to blame a global problem on people who live far away, such as in China and other Asian countries where shark fin soup is popular.
Yet in Florida, “go to Publix, look at your seafood counter, and you can see several kinds of shark meat for sale,” Shiffman points out. “No one talks about that.”
Marjorie Sharks 1 031925.mp3
Marjorie Sharks 2 031925.mp3
Indeed, shark meat is sold in seafood markets across the U.S. Sustaining a commercial shark-meat industry is tricky when fishermen aren’t allowed to profit from the fins. The few remaining fishermen who have active commercial permits for shark fishing in Florida see a bleak future for its sustainability.
‘We’re almost going to be extinct’
Multigenerational commercial fisherman Rusty Hudson grew up fishing for snapper and grouper near Daytona Beach. He also remembers seeing a lot of sharks, especially on his shrimp boat, where he would frequently pull them up as bycatch. By the early 1980s, a domestic shark fishery was beginning to flourish. Rather than fish for them, Hudson became a fin dealer back when it was still legal. He sold Florida-caught shark fins to China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, New York City, and San Francisco.
If the fins were properly dried, they could last for close to 40 years. “That was our whole mantra, way back in the ’80s: full utilization,” says Hudson at 69 years old, emphasizing that all parts of the shark were used. Nothing went to waste.
But by the 1990s, Hudson’s job became more difficult. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tightened its restrictions on the commercial shark-fishing industry. Overfishing had indeed become a problem, Hudson remembers, tipping marine ecosystems out of balance. But it was also when fisheries became political, he says, pointing to stricter limits on how many sharks they can harvest due to conservation concerns.
Then, in 2022, the federal ban on selling shark fins made the industry barely profitable. Meanwhile, sharks on the high seas were facing high stakes.
“A lot of times, the management of sharks is seen as a nuisance. They don’t have a lot of economic value. They bite fish off of hooks. They’re seen as a problem to be solved, rather than a species that needs conservation.”
More sharks are now protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, better known as CITES, than ever before. And some policy experts that avidly support the 2022 fin ban argue that such policies haven’t gone far enough.
“It’s important that we set a global standard,” says Ryan Orgera, global director of Accountability.Fish, which advocates for multinational policy on fisheries and governance transparency. “It’s an ethical standard that we have to stand by, and we can’t always be concerned about the global market when we’re making state policy.”
Capt. Charles Thompson and others with sharks at the Royal Palm yacht basin in Miami, Florida, circa 1915. (746x600, AR: 1.2433333333333334)
Before the ban, Orgera says, Miami was a hub for the Latin American shark fin trade. Indeed, the Port of Miami is the 10th busiest in the U.S. and the most accessible one from Latin America. Only a small percentage of shipping containers that enter the port are actually inspected because of the sheer volume of parcels and time constraints on docked cargo ships, allowing illicit contents to make their way through.
It doesn’t just happen at shipping ports. In 2020, officials at Miami International Airport inspected a shipment of 5,000 shark fins on their way from South American to Asia. And in 2023, a company was accused of mislabeling 5,666 pounds of shark fins on their way to China as live lobster and frozen fish.
Seafood products and supply chains are notoriously complex, says Gib Brogan, fisheries campaign director for the conservation nonprofit Oceana. It’s easy to deceptively mislabel shipments as another species, or to categorize it broadly as “shark,” concealing the body part.
The Port of Miami is the 10th busiest in the U.S. and the most accessible one from Latin America. Only a small percentage of shipping containers that enter the port are inspected because of the sheer volume of parcels and time constraints on docked cargo ships, allowing illicit contents to make their way through. <br/> (970x643, AR: 1.5085536547433904)
That’s why he and Oceana view the 2022 fin ban as necessary, contrary to Shiffman’s and others’ opinions. Oceana views the U.S. as having had two major roles in the shark fin trade: as an intermediary and as a supplier.
“We see [the 2022 fin ban] as an additional hurdle that may slow the trade of shark fins around the world,” Brogan tells me. “We are hopeful that this is going to be effective in getting the U.S. out of this market.”
To his point, NOAA has reported only one seizure of shark fins since the 2022 ban: at a UPS store in Kentucky, where a Nicaraguan exporter and American importer were caught trading more than 1,400 pounds of dried fins from silky, bull, and scalloped hammerhead sharks valued at more than $75,000. (Even so, an Oceana-funded 2016 study found that sharks are worth 200 times more alive for ecotourism than they are dead for seafood markets.)
However, as the Western world became more educated about shark finning and the illicit trade, xenophobia toward Asians emerged among some shark advocates. While some Asian countries have indeed imported large volumes of shark fins, it’s unfair to overlook the European Union’s (EU) role, Orgera says.
Although the EU has advocated for anti-shark finning measures, “they weren’t doing anything to lower the number of fins leaving the ocean,” Orgera says. “It’s horseshit.” In the last decade, he adds, the Spanish international fleet has been a top exporter of shark fins in the world.
“But Spain gets away with murder (on) the ocean because they have this incredible way of pointing a finger at China and Japan,” Orgera says. “It’s too easy, too simple, and, frankly, awful to blame Asians for this problem.”
Regardless of the country, Orgera argues that few shark species can outlast fisheries pressure because of their long reproductive timelines, making it difficult for populations to recover from significant declines.
But to shut down commercial shark fisheries would mean eliminating the shark-meat market entirely.
Achieving sustainable fisheriesSo, what does a sustainable shark fishery look like?
In Oceana’s eyes, it includes basing quotas on strong science, requiring accurate reporting of caught sharks, and protecting nurseries like estuaries where young sharks mature.
“Sustainable shark fisheries are theoretically possible,” Brogan says, but “they aren’t happening right now. Most shark fisheries are failing to satisfy those basic requirements of sustainable management.”
Fishermen display a 350-pound shark in St. Petersburg, Florida, circa 1918. (450x745, AR: 0.6040268456375839)
One shortcoming of current monitoring, Brogan argues, is NOAA’s grouping system for sharks. Grouping all “large coastal sharks” and “small coastal sharks” lacks the nuance that each species needs to be managed appropriately. While they’re all large and near the coast, each species has its own unique biology, development, and role in the ecosystem, he says.
Those groups were created based on the gear used to catch those species, a NOAA representative tells The Marjorie. Regulations are also tailored to individual stocks within those groups.
“We need to improve management of sharks overall,” Brogan contends. “A lot of times, the management of sharks is seen as a nuisance. They don’t have a lot of economic value. They bite fish off of hooks. They’re seen as a problem to be solved, rather than a species that needs conservation.”
Shiffman’s research found that people who don’t believe sustainable shark fisheries can exist did not support the 2022 fin ban, which he says ignores the inevitable demand for shark meat. “It’s absolutely, unequivocally true that there are sustainable shark fisheries,” he argues.
But the shark conservation community remains divided.
“Do I believe that we should be commercially harvesting shark species?” Orgera says. “No.”
This story was produced in partnership with the Florida Climate Reporting Network, a multi-newsroom initiative founded by the Miami Herald, the Sun-Sentinel, The Palm Beach Post, the Orlando Sentinel, WLRN Public Media and the Tampa Bay Times.