Since as long as I can remember, my favorite book has been Ernest Hemingway’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novella “The Old Man and the Sea.” If you’ve ever read this American classic, you might conclude that Hemingway had an antagonistic relationship with sharks. As it turns out, you’d be correct.
In the early 1930s, Hemingway was on a quest to land the first-ever, unmutilated bluefin tuna in Bahamian waters. Kip Farrington, a longtime “Field & Stream” magazine editor and Hemingway confidante, noted that “none of these magnificent fish have ever been boated near Bimini unmarked by sharks.” On May 21, 1935, Hemingway successfully landed an intact bluefin tuna in Bimini, thus ending the three-year drought.
Nearly a century after Hemingway landed his first intact tuna, shark depredation (the partial or complete removal of a captured fish by a shark), has re-emerged as contentious issue among anglers in the Gulf. Yet based on the accounts from Hemingway, depredation is nothing new. What’s changed? The answer is…complicated.
Humans preying on sharks
Sharks have been harvested commercially in the Gulf since the 1930s. Catches increased during World War II, partly because shark livers were used in the production of Vitamin A, and declined after 1950 with the development of synthetic vitamins.
Shark catches surged again in the 1980s, encouraged by federal regulators, who saw sharks as an “underutilized resource.” Yet within a decade, scientists determined that several stocks of Gulf sharks were overfished, including sandbar sharks and dusky sharks.
In 1993, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued the first federal fishery management plan for sharks in U.S. waters of the Atlantic Ocean, including the Gulf. These regulations created a pathway to rebuild stocks by requiring permits and establishing recreational trip limits and commercial catch quotas.
Today, many of the Gulf’s overfished shark stocks are recovering. As evidence grows that sharks are an important component of healthy oceans, this is a conservation success story. However, many anglers blame increases in depredation on regulations enacted to rebuild shark populations.
Shifting baselines
Experts agree that there are more sharks in the Gulf today than there were 30 years ago. But how do these populations compare with levels before 1989, when commercial shark fishing spiked?
Over time, this question becomes increasingly difficult to answer as people gradually accept environmental decline. Marine Biologist Daniel Pauly calls this habituation “shifting baseline syndrome.” For fisheries, each new generation of fishermen accepts the current, often reduced, status of a fish population as the baseline and forgets that there was a time when these species were much more abundant.
In this case, modern anglers are comparing increased numbers of sharks in the Gulf to the past 30 years – a time when many shark populations were overfished.
Lifting baselines
The recovery of populations that were once overfished can create an opposite situation, known as lifting baselines, with conservation and management efforts leading to population increases.
Instances where populations have been overfished and then rebuilt can create a perception of overabundance. When the species that’s recovering is a predator, that can lead to human-wildlife conflict.
For example, recovering populations of California sea lions now compete with fishermen for their catch along the Pacific coast. Off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the same thing happens with gray and harbor seals. The seals, in turn, are attracting white sharks.
The call to cull
Sportfishing is a popular and lucrative year-round industry across the Gulf. As reports of depredation increase, so do calls for culling shark populations.
Similar action has been proposed elsewhere for other marine predators, including sea lions in California and goliath groupers in Florida.
Sportfishing in the Gulf contributes billions of dollars yearly to the regional economy. It takes place in both state waters, extending 9 nautical miles from shore, and federal waters farther offshore.
Studies show, however, that predator removal is rarely an effective strategy. It’s particularly ineffective for species such as sharks that move around a lot and will readily recolonize areas that have been culled. Predator culls also pit people with different values, such as fishing boat operators and conservationists, against each other.
Paying the tax man
Unfortunately, there is no silver-bullet solution for shark depredation. The Gulf’s sportfishing industry has grown, and it’s likely that sharks learn to associate the presence of boats with an easy meal.
Shark deterrents are available, and new versions are continually being developed. Some fishermen are changing their practices to avoid sharks – for example, shifting locations frequently and never anchoring or fishing farther offshore to avoid coastal species such as bull sharks.
NOAA-funded research has identified sandbar sharks and bull sharks as the species that prey most often on catch. The agency is analyzing ways to better measure depredation and assess stocks of these two species to understand their population trends.
In my view, measures like these, along with better data about which sharks are taxing fishermen and where, are the most promising ways to help anglers coexist with sharks in the Gulf.
Meet the author
(J.) Marcus Drymon, Ph.D.
Marine Fisheries Extension Lead
Marcus is a marine fisheries ecologist, and his research interests are in applied fisheries ecology. The bulk of his research has focused on coastal sharks. He works on many commercially and... Read more
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