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COPYRIGHT 2005 Smithsonian Institution
It's a good day for fishing on the Gulf of Mexico, hot and breezy, with smooth seas. The eight men and women bobbing on the swells aboard the 50-foot cruiser Eugenie Clark, named after a shark research pioneer, are catching sharks, not for fun or food but for information. They're affiliated with the Mote Marine Laboratory's Center for Shark Research in Sarasota, Florida, and their sometimes risky work is generating important new insights into how these notorious but surprisingly little-understood creatures live. Just now, four of the scientists are hauling in a wildly thrashing, nine-foot-long lemon shark. "OK, guys, lemons are nasty," warns biologist Jack Morris, wearing a T-shirt stained with grease and blood. "They'll even bite the metal platform on the boat."
Biting is one of the things sharks do best, as several dozen swimmers, surfers, snorkelers and divers are horrified to discover each year. Although some attack victims have time to fight back, others never know what hit them. This past June, in Destin, Florida, 14-year-old Jamie Marie Daigle was swimming on a boogie board about 100 yards offshore when she was attacked by a bull shark. She bled to death, probably even before she reached the beach. Two days later, about 80 miles southeast of Destin, Craig Hutto, 16, was bitten by a shark while fishing in waist-deep water; his leg had to be amputated. Diving for abalone on the Mendocino coast just north of Fort Bragg in California last August, Randy Fry, 50, was decapitated. Near Adelaide in December, 18-year-old Aussie surfer Nick Peterson was ripped almost in two. Both had fallen prey to great white sharks.
With more people spending more recreational time in the water, the number of shark attacks has risen steadily, peaking in 2000 with 78 attacks and 11 deaths. Since then it has slacked off somewhat: 61 men, women and children experienced violent encounters with sharks last year; 7 died. Biologist George Burgess, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the University of Florida in Gainesville, is not reassured: "I think we will see more attacks in this decade than we did in the last one."
As novelist Peter Benchley understood so well when he wrote his 1974 bestseller Jaws, the mere prospect of a chance encounter with a shark--any shark--is nightmarish. Never mind that on average, for every American killed by a shark, 37 are killed by snakes and 45 by pet dogs. Whenever a shark-caused human fatality occurs, it makes headline news. But the real story is not the rare threat that sharks pose to us, tragic as individual cases invariably are, it's the profound harm we are doing to them. Before too much longer, we may reduce many shark species' once-teeming numbers to a remnant few.
Decades of commercial fishing have devastated shark populations in every quarter of the globe. According to the World Conservation Union (IUCN), a Switzerland-based scientific and governmental consortium that keeps tabs on endangered plants and animals, nearly two dozen shark species have been driven to the brink of extinction. "They are in such distress," says Burgess, "that even if all fishing and killing stopped right now, we're still talking about a recovery that would take decades." And if those species don't bounce back? There will be "serious and unforeseen consequences," says Ramon Bonfil, a fisheries expert with the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York City. He warns that the loss of one of the ocean's top predators could throw the entire marine ecosystem out of whack. "We need to use a lot of caution," he says.
Most marine researchers and conservationists agree that sharks are victims of the same go-for-broke mentality that over the years has ravaged cod, bluefin tuna and orange roughy populations. The fishing industry, seemingly having learned little from those fiascoes, still deploys gigantic fleets that relentlessly deplete shark species while national and international regulatory agencies quibble over "management plans" that offer too little protection too late. "It took many years before fisheries management cared about sharks," says Robert Hueter, a biologist who directs the shark lab at Mote.
Data on the number of sharks being taken worldwide are sketchy or outdated. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that 100 million sharks, skates...
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