Some years ago, I was working my way through thick forest, on the 9,000-foot slopes of the Shoshone National Forest, trying to spot any movement that might reveal the presence of a decent mule deer buck. I’d been hunting for a week. My sea-level lungs had adjusted to the air in high country; I could finally crawl between the trees without gasping like a beached fish.
Deer weren’t the only things that lived in the
mountains. “If we get one down,” my
guide told me, “we need to dress it fast and get it back to the truck. The grizzlies have learned that a shot can
mean food, so if there’s one nearby, it’ll come running to steal our
kill.”
A freshly-shredded tree stump, that a bear had torn apart in
hopes of finding beetle larvae, made it perfectly clear that at least one
grizzly was, in fact, nearby.
We eventually did catch up with the feeding deer, but the
only buck in the bunch was a forkhorn. It
was legal meat, but I didn’t fly across most of the country to shoot a deer
that was still negotiating the ups and downs of cervine adolescence, so I let
it walk away.
Yet, though I didn’t come away with a deer, I did come away
deeply impressed by the way the recovering grizzly bear population was renewing
its mark on the ecosystem and on people’s lives. Wyoming hunters, like my guide, were learning
to live with a fellow apex predator, one that has no qualms about chasing
people away from a downed elk or deer, and one that has, on occasion, injured
and even killed hunters who didn’t abandon their kill quickly enough to please
the bear.
Yet the bears abide.
Despite growing calls for a hunting season, they remain on
the fully-protected list; the growing population still falls far short of where
it stood a century or more ago. Having
hunted deer on the bear’s doorstep, I know that there is something about grizzly
sign that makes that country more complete and more vital than it would have been
if the bears were not there.
Off the southeastern coast of the United States, we’re
seeing something very similar happening, with the ocean’s apex
predators—various species of shark—beginning to slowly recover from years of
overfishing, becoming more abundant and, more and more, challenging human
fishermen for their kills.
It’s not exactly like it is with the bears, of course. Humans and sharks live in different
environments; a big hammerhead can’t sneak up behind you and bite off a chunk of
your leg while you’re braced against the side of a boat, waiting for a fish to
come within gaffing range. Sharks can
only steal fish that are still in the water, and pose no existential threat to
the fishermen themselves.
Even so, many anglers develop an antipathy to sharks that challenge
them for their catch. It’s no
coincidence that Ernest
Hemingway’s most heralded novel, The Old Man and the Sea, described a
Cuban handline fishermen’s heroic but ultimately futile struggle to protect his
huge marlin from a horde of feeding sharks.
Hemingway fished the blue water, and undoubtedly had his own
marlin mutilated by sharks every now and again.
But sharks were just part of the angling landscape back
then. The longline fishery hadn’t yet devastated
shark populations, and all species, from lemons through silkies, and up to the
shortfin makos, still thrived. And, as
sharks do, they often fed on hooked fish that were clearly distressed and easy
to catch.
Angler/author S.
Kip Farrington, Jr., in his 1949 book, Fishing the Atlantic, described
the shark situation off the Bahamas this way:
“Unfortunately every variety of shark seems to come to Bimini
waters and it is not very long before they gang a hooked fish that is down
outside the dropoff in the stream. If
your fish gets down on you, you are really in for trouble. I have seen a 386-pound blue marlin boated in
fifteen minutes with three great shark slashes in its body but not a single
shark could be seen. The blacktip shark,
I think, is the worst offender. The
sand, the gray, and the blue sharks are all bad.”
His language made it clear that Farrington wasn’t a fan of
the sharks. At the same time, he never
suggested the shark population should be reduced for anglers’ convenience. He appeared to view sharks as another
challenge inherent to the sport, the way a golfer might view the rough
alongside the fairway or the water hazard behind a fast and sloping green.
Today’s saltwater anglers seem to whine quite a bit
more.
“to address concerns about the damage to the economically
bountiful marine industry from sharks gobbling hooked fish.”
At one such meeting, Capt.
Bill Taylor, who operates a charter boat out of Jupiter, FL, complained
that
“I can’t get fish to the boat fast enough. We are overrun with lemons and bulls right
now, and I have never seen this many sharks.”
But then, shark populations have been overfished for so long
that it’s probably not surprising that anglers are seeing more sharks than they
used to. That point was made by the
well-known angler, artist, and conservationist Guy Harvey, who pointed out that
the seeming increase in shark numbers is just the result of the fish beginning
to rebuild their numbers.
He called the complaints of sharks eating anglers catch an
example of the “shifting baseline syndrome,” which sees people, used to an
unnaturally low number of sharks in the ocean, wrongfully believe that the
animals are overabundant when they begin to return to healthy population
levels.
Harvey noted that
“These were an extremely successful group of animals until we
came back in the 1970s and knocked the hell out of them.”
Now,
“Of course there will be more interactions with these
animals, because their populations are rebounding. The problem is not with the sharks, its with
human beings. Sharks are not an invasive
species.”
Yet fishermen seem to miss those points, perhaps because
they’re not thinking about the sharks, but only about themselves. Thus, we
see a representative of the usually conservation-oriented Billfish Foundation
trying to make the argument that
“reducing shark depredation is a matter of conserving other
fish species as much as saving and angler’s catch,”
and complaining that
“10 hooked yellowfin tuna were killed by sharks before a
fisherman was able to get his legal federal limit of three tuna to the boat
intact,”
when if conservation was really the issue, the fisherman in
question could have merely stopped fishing after the sharks took his third
fish, instead of insisting on taking three tuna home.
After all, sharks have to kill fish in order to
survive. Fishermen don’t.
Unfortunately, such enlightened outlooks are rare among
fishermen.
“temporarily lift the ban on shark harvesting and allow
culling to balance the population.”
The Alliance
“noted that ‘sharks and turtles’ have become a ‘nuisance’ to
fishermen,”
and has stated that
“The protective measures are successful as we see an
explosion in the shark populations; however with this success comes the hazards
of overpopulation, which unfortunately increases the competition for food
causing the animals to seek other food sources…”
It’s important to note that there is no scientific consensus
that, or even any scientific support for, the proposition that sharks are
experiencing “overpopulation,” or that their numbers must be reduced in order
to attain any needed ecological “balance.”
However, it is likely that a rebuilding population of sharks may be
competing with some commercial fishing activities, leading for a call to drive
the fish’s numbers back to previous, depleted levels that kept them out of the
fishermen’s way.
Unfortunately, it now appears that the
National Marine Fisheries Service may be jumping on the shark depredation
bandwagon. That agency has just awarded
a $195,000 grant to two universities, one in Florida, one in Mississippi, which
will look into sharks’ thefts of anglers’ fish.
According to the news site TCPalm,
“Shark depredation has become such a problem, scientists are
launching a study to find solutions.”
It’s hard to think of “solutions” that might not go hard on
the sharks, given that the study will reportedly
“use a citizen-science approach and work with charter fishers
and private recreational fishers,”
the very people who are complaining that there are too many
sharks ion the ocean. The head
researcher has asserted that
“Incorporating fishermen’s knowledge into a scientific process
gives them more confidence in scientific results, promotes trust and, more
importantly, increases the quantity and quality of data.”
While that may be true, given fishermen’s complaints about
the shark “problem” and their demands that something be done about it, they probably
will have neither trust nor confidence in any results that don’t reduce the
numbers of fish they lose to the big predators.
It’s very possible that the study will come up with some viable findings—say,
identifying times and places where sharks are less often found, and so less
likely to appropriate a hooked fish—but unless those times and places also provide
good fishing, anglers are not likely to endorse such approaches.
Instead, sportsmen fighting for
marine balance, to appropriate the name of one Facebook group, are likely
to continue to demand that shark stocks remain semi-depleted, so that such
purported “sportsmen” won’t have to compete with other predators that have a
far more ancient and more necessary claim on the sea’s fish.
Hopefully, NMFS won’t give in.
As
the chief scientist for the shark research group OCEARCH observed,
“I talk to fishermen around the world, and the one thing they
all have said is the best fishing spots are the most sharky. It’s easier for us to adapt then for the
sharks to adapt.”
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