IS ATLANTIC SHARK MANAGEMENT STARTING TO WORK?

 

Last Friday started out well.

I took some shark researchers from Stony Brook University out to the 20-fathom line south of Fire Island, hoping to find a few fish for them to tag.  Mike Mucha, my long-time friend and fishing companion, came along to give me a much-welcomed hand; it’s always good to have an experienced angler on board who knows how to “wire” a fish, taking the leader in hand once it comes within reach and dragging the fish the last grudging 15 feet to boatside.

Mike and I have been fishing offshore together for about 40 years, so we don’t have to do a lot of talking to get the lines baited and out, or to deal with the organized chaos once a shark takes the bait and lines are cleared for the fight.

So things felt pretty normal when, after maybe an hour and a half of drifting and chumming, the reel on the long float line sounded off, at which point Mike snatched up the rod and began convincing a smallish shark to swim toward the boat.  I put on the gloves and grabbed the leader when it came close, quickly dragging what I first thought was a sandbar shark within reach of the biologists on board.

Except as we started to take another look at the shark, we realized that it wasn’t a sandbar.

The dorsal fin was just a little too low, and it started a little too far back on the fish’s body.  One of the scientists gripped the fish’s pectoral fins, planning to flip it over on its back and put it in tonic immobility (turning many sharks belly-up will cause them to become largely immobile, which makes it much easier to take the desired blood and tissue samples and insert an acoustic tag into the fish’s body cavity), and noted that the shark’s fins felt very slimy.

Sandbar sharks’ fins usually feel rough and dry.

We started looking at the fish a little closer, and quickly realized that we weren’t dealing with a sandbar, but rather with a dusky shark.

That fact, by itself, didn’t come as a particular surprise.  This season, I’ve heard of a lot of dusky sharks being caught. 

Another research team reported catching five in a single day off Southampton.  The scientists that I help out had caught some duskies this year while fishing with someone else.  I had a surfcaster send me a photo of a shark that he caught from a Long Island beach, asking me what it was.  The mid-dorsal ridge and overall configuration made it clear that fish was a dusky, too.  And anglers fishing menhaden around harried-looking schools not far from Fire Island’s beaches have been steadily hooking dusky sharks while in search of other species.

When Mike and I began to regularly fish offshore in the early/mid 1980s, dusky sharks were regularly seen on the offshore grounds.  Little ones were frequently caught by anglers chumming for bluefish; every now and then, an unsuspecting bluefisherman would get a surprise when line started flying off his reel as a big dusky made off with a bait intended for a much smaller target.  

When I used to fish for cod during the summer on Cox’s Ledge, off the Rhode Island coast, it wasn’t unusual to see a big dusky—a fish that might weigh 500 pounds—try to steal a hooked fish before it could be brought aboard.  Shark fishermen sometimes caught duskies much larger than that; the now-defunct Babylon (NY) Tuna Club had one record of a member landing a dusky that exceeded 800.

But duskies haven’t fared well in recent years; both bottom longlines targeting sharks and pelagic longlines targeting swordfish and tuna have killed many of the big predators, often by accident.  Recreational fishermen killed a smaller but still significant number, sometimes eating their meat, but often entering the fish in tournaments, or weighing them in and taking photos, then letting the fish go to waste. The population declined by about 80%.

The once-common dusky shark became scarce.  Before last Friday, Mike and I hadn’t caught one in over 20 years, despite fishing for sharks on a regular basis, in waters where duskies were once very abundant. 

In 2000, the National Marine Fisheries Service listed dusky sharks as a “prohibited species” which may not be retained by commercial nor recreational fishermen.  In 2017, the National Marine Fisheries Service,

“based on the results of the 2016 stock assessment update for Atlantic dusky sharks…determined that the dusky shark remains overfished and is experiencing overfishing,”

and amended its Highly Migratory Species Fishery Management Plan by adopting measures intended to reduce dusky shark fishing mortality by 35% in an effort to rebuild the stock.  According to NMFS,

“The updated projections estimated that the target rebuilding years range from 2084-2204, with a median of 2107.  In order to achieve rebuilding by 2107 with a 50% probability, the final models project that [the fishing mortality rate] on the stock would have to be reduced by 24-80% (median = 35%) from 2015 levels.  While NMFS typically uses a 70% probability of rebuilding by the deadline for Atlantic highly migratory shark species, the 2016 update has a higher level of uncertainty than other shark assessments and presents a more pessimistic view of stock status than was expected based on review of all available information…”

The amendment to the management plan implemented

“shark endorsement and circle hook requirements in the recreational Atlantic shark fisheries; shark release protocols in the pelagic longline fishery; dusky shark identification and safe handling training in in the HMS pelagic longline, bottom longline, and shark gillnet fisheries; outreach and fleet communication protocol in HMS pelagic longline, bottom longline, and shark gillnet fisheries; and a circle hook requirement in the directed shark bottom longline fishery.”

The marine conservation organization Oceana sued NMFS, claiming that such regulations were inadequate to rebuild the dusky shark population, but the court failed to uphold their challenge.  Last month, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the trial court’s decision.

It’s probably too early to know whether NMFS’ latest efforts to rebuild dusky sharks has a real chance of succeeding, and few people alive today will still be around when we reach the 2107 target rebuilding date.

However, it’s probably worth noting that the sandbar shark, a close relative of the dusky, was also placed on the prohibited list in 2000.  While the sandbar’s situation wasn’t quite as dire, as the fish is primarily an inshore species, and not as vulnerable to pelagic longlines, they are vulnerable to inshore fisheries outside of the United States. Sandbars remain overfished, with current estimates advising that, with no fishing at all, the stock won’t recover until 2071.

Even so, Mike and I have seen sandbar abundance follow a trajectory that, with luck, might be emulated by the dusky shark population.  There were plenty around in the ‘80s, but numbers quickly declined.  For maybe a decade, we didn’t catch any at all.  But then, beginning around 2010, a few started showing up in our chum slicks.  In 2015, fishing south of Shinnecock, Long Island, I caught and released the largest sandbar that I ever hooked, a female that measured an honest 7-foot fork length, and probably weighted around 200 pounds.

Then, in 2018, while fishing with the Stony Brook team, we had a day when we were surrounded by sandbars; fishing with just a single rod, I could wait until the team was just about working up a fish, at which point I’d drop down one bait, hook another one, and the sampling and tagging process could begin again.

Without  hard data, it’s impossible to say with any certainty that sandbar abundance is increasing, but what I’ve been seen here on Long Island suggests that is so.

Getting back to last Friday, just about immediately after we released the first fish, and got the lines back over the side, something—by its behavior, I strongly suspect a hammerhead—chewed up a couple of baits and gave us a quick look at its dorsal fin, sticking out  of the water maybe 50 feet away from the boat.

So I set out a smaller bait on a smaller hook, intending to match a hammerhead’s smaller mouth.  That bait wasn’t in the water for more than 20 minutes before the reel started to sound as something took off with the small mackerel fillets that we hung just a few feet below the surface. 

The fish turned out to be a little dusky, measured to have a fork length of just 76 millimeters—about 30 inches—and was very possibly just born this spring.  Even though it will probably be close to 20 years before that shark can produce pups of its own, the fact that we’re seeing a lot of young fish—and no large ones—suggests that management measures intended to rebuild the stock might finally be bearing fruit.

When it comes to fishery management, a few anecdotal reports from a small section of coast doesn’t amount to anything of real value.  And even if there is a slight improvement in the duskies' situation, it will probably be close to 100 years--if not far more--before the stock can be rebuilt.

Still, the appearance of small dusky sharks all along the Long Island coast can’t be seen as anything other than positive news.

While it’s still too soon to say with real confidence, it just might be that NMFS efforts to rebuild the dusky shark stock may be having the desired effect, and dusky sharks will slowly be returning to the waters off the nation's East Coast.