SHARING WITH SHARKS

 

I still remember the morning.

It was late in May, in the late 1960s.  I was standing at the stern rail of the Sea Squirrel, a slow, aging party boat that docked at Pt. Judith, Rhode Island, on my first deep-water cod trip with my father and two of his friends.

I had fished for cod before, beginning when I was just six years old, but those trips were all aboard what might be deemed “tourist boats,” either half-day trips out of Provincetown, Massachusetts or full-day trips out of Plymouth, on boats that catered to the summer folks and never traveled very far from sheltered waters.  But this was my first cod trip on the open ocean, two and a half hours from port, riding atop a slate gray ocean that undulated with swells coming in from hundreds of miles away.

As I swallowed a little hard, trying not to embarrass myself—it was my first time any distance offshore, and those swells were making an impression on my still-unaccustomed inner ears—I dropped my clam-baited hooks to the bottom, and soon had a small cod headed back up to the boat.

It was a fast, but mostly a small-fish bite, with just about everything under 10 pounds or so, when an angler in the stern corner hooked up to something that seemed pretty big.  Looking back, he must have been one of the Sea Squirrel’s “regulars,” armed with a rod that was a good two feet longer than those most of the other people on the boat were using, fitted with a well-used Penn 500--they called it a "Jigmaster"-- that he cranked very slowly, coaxing his catch to the surface.

I craned over the rail, staring down through the clear greenish-blue water, waiting to see the fish that was putting a deep bow in his rod.  It began to materialize, first just a pinprick of lighter color that slowly grew, morphing into the shape of a cod.  But then, those of us watching saw another, larger shape in the water, that followed, then circled, and finally bit into what everyone had agreed was a cod weighing at least 30 pounds.

The predator’s teeth easily sheared through flesh and bone, leaving the angler with the front third of what might have been the boat’s largest cod of the day.  With the cod no longer fighting, the angler reeled faster, hoping to salvage at least a part of his catch, and was just lifting the head of his fish from the water when the big blue shark came in again, right on the surface, its sleek, cerulean body passing less than three feet from my toes on the deck as it raised its own head from the water, clamped down on the cod, bit through the fisherman’s line, and returned to the deep.

I might have been young when that happened, but I was old enough to appreciate the shark’s mixture of grace, beauty, and power.  I promised myself that, one day, I would pursue such fish and, as things happened, that promise was kept, although it took a few years to come true.

In the meantime, things happened that only strengthened my resolve.

Growing up on the northwestern shore of Long Island Sound, my angling was generally restricted to smaller sorts of fish, ranging from smelt, tomcod, and winter flounder at one end of the scale up to striped bass and bluefish; it was pretty well accepted by the folks at the dock that a 50-pound bass was just about the pinnacle of angling achievement, and that having caught one of those, a fishermen wasn’t likely to latch into anything larger.

But bigger fish were around.  We didn’t talk—or even think—about them much, but every year, right about the time that schools let out for the summer and the beaches began to crowd, our local paper, the Greenwich Time, would post a picture of a couple of Marine Division policemen sitting in the cockpit of the department’s largest boat, armed with rifles and staring out at the water, ostensibly on “shark patrol.”

Looking back, I suspect that it was largely a publicity shot, and doubt that the marine patrolmen spent much time looking for sharks off our beaches, but the fish were nonetheless there. 

Because of the way we fished, baiting with sandworms, clams, or various crustaceans, we didn’t have much chance of interacting with them, but once livelining menhaden for striped bass and bluefish began to gain popularity, that began to change.  So one late summer morning, as my father and I trolled sandworms for striped bass along the shore between Cos Cob and Greenwich, we saw a huge swirl in the water, and assumed it might just have been caused by one of those sought-for 50-pound stripers.

But that probably wasn’t the case, because as we approached Greenwich Harbor, we noticed a boat drifting a little offshore, with one of its anglers hooked up to a good-sized fish.  Other boats circled nearby, watching the fight, and we edged over into the fleet.  The angler had been struggling for a while when, to our surprise, a police boat pulled alongside and two patrolmen jumped aboard the fishermen’s boat.  The angler was close to concluding the fight, and a short time later, the fish came close enough to the surface for its dorsal to break into the air; rather than the expected—by us, anyway—spiny comb of a big striped bass, the fin formed the tall and triangular ensign of a shark.

At that point, the two officers began to empty their revolvers in the general vicinity of the fish; realizing that bullets hitting the water at sharp angles can ricochet in unpredictable directions, my father, a World War II vet, wisely pointed the boat in the opposite direction and sped away.  But as we approached the mouth of the Mianus River, on the way to our dock in Cos Cob, we saw another boat hooked up to something big, and had a pretty good idea of just what it was.

The following Monday, the Greenwich Time carried a front page photo of two good-sized sandbar—what we called “brown”—sharks strung up at the police boat dock; the paper claimed that they were each about seven feet long, and weighed a (very optimistic) 200 pounds.

Sharks were just part of the landscape back then.  If you went codfishing, you assumed that they’d steal a few fish.  Offshore, they gnawed a few tuna.  Back home, they just quietly lived their lives beneath the surface, provoking a little excitement from time to time, and providing anglers with stories about the huge “striped bass” that picked up their bait and stripped all the line from their reels before they even had time to pull up their anchors.

Further back in time, sharks appear to have been even more common.

A New York Times article from July 13, 1884, grandly titled "Fishing for Man Eaters:  Killing Sharks off the Coast of Fire Island” describes the author’s exploits within Great South Bay, where sharks were apparently abundant enough that he was able to hook up only ten minutes after deploying his bait; although the species of sharks were not identified, at least one was described as being seven feet long, thus making it clear that he was not just catching for dogfish. 

About 30 years later, another individual reported harpooning about 375 sharks, and observing about 2,500, over the course of 15 years in the same body of water, with the interactions occurring between Lindenhurst and Oakdale on the north side of the bay, and Cedar Beach and Cherry Grove to the south.  He referred to such sharks as “ground sharks,” then made a more precise identification, saying that almost all of the fish, with the exception of a few small sand tigers, were either sandbar or dusky sharks.  While sand tigers are still common inside the bay, neither sandbar nor dusky sharks are often seen inside Fire Island Inlet today.

In other places, sharks were also far more abundant than they are today.  Off Bimini in the Bahamas, anglers were frustrated, time and again, by sharks “apple coring” their bluefin tuna before they could be landed.  “Apple coring” referred to the sharks eating all the flesh off the tuna—and also many blue marlin—so that only the head and the tail were left, leaving the spine to resemble an apple core connecting the two.  It wasn’t until May 21, 1935 that Ernest Hemingway landed the first unmutilated giant bluefin off Bimini, doing so by putting unrelenting pressure on the fish and beating it quickly enough to keep the sharks at bay.

In doing so, Hemingway pioneered a new way to fight large gamefish and reduce mutilations, although the sharks still managed to get their share.

Sharks fell on hard times some time after that, with longlines and gill nets depleting their numbers.  Anglers got used to having the fish for themselves, as sharing with sharks became a far less frequent occurrence.  But recently, effective management programs are beginning to build up shark populations.

It’s still not the way it was before—you can spend quite a long time in Great South Bay without seeing a single andbar or dusky—but many shark stocks seem to be rebounding a bit from recent population lows.

And anglers, who so long had the fish largely to themselves, are becoming annoyed by what is hopefully becoming a conservation success story.  The hot new word in recreational fisheries circles is “depredation,” which describes what occurs when a shark feeds on a fish being fought by an angler (or otherwise caught by a commercial fisherman).  Anglers, who weren’t fishing back in the day when sharks were abundant and populations healthy now complain that sharks are too abundant, and argue that

“a rebalancing of the ecosystem is in order—removing sandbar sharks or perhaps others from the protected list,”

and even encouraging a new commercial fishery for some species, so that anglers can again have coveted sport fish largely to themselves.

Things have gotten so bad that, at last year’s markup of H.R. 4690, the so-called “Sustaining America’s Fisheries for the Future Act of 2022,” sponsored by Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), Rep. Garret Graves (R-LA), who frequently carries the water for various “anglers’ rights” and angling industry organizations, successfully proposed amendments to the legislation, one of which instructed the National Marine Fisheries Service to prioritize

“Projects to better understand shark depredation, what causes increases in the behavior, and how to best address the behavior.”

His other amendment would require that.

“No later than one year after the enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall enter into an agreement for an independent analysis to be done on shark populations in the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coasts and, before starting the survey, develop a plan to integrate the results of this study into the Secretary’s own data sets and fishery management measures.”

The latter is a fairly interesting requirement, given that it requires NMFS to develop a plan to integrate the results of the shark population study into its own data and management measures without knowing exactly what such study will look like, what methodologies it will employ, whether or not it passes peer review, and whether its resulting data is statistically compatible with the data developed by NMFS.  But that’s probably not a difficult requirement to understand, given that Rep. Graves is primarily interested in keeping the angling crowd happy, not in maintaining healthy and fully rebuild shark populations.

After all, sharks don’t vote.  Not even in Louisiana.

Still, there are some rational voices out there as well.

As sandbar sharks slowly return to Long Island Sound, although still a bit east of where I saw them in the late ‘60s, charter boat operators are, predictably, whining.  Connecticut captain Trevor Berwick, among others, is now complaining that

“We deal with them on a daily basis now.  [The sharks are] grabbing the backs of fish.  They’re chasing fish.  They’re grabbing baits, and it’s just been getting kind of out of control.”

But maybe people shouldn’t be in control of where sharks swim or what they choose to feed on.  As a Connecticut state fishery manager noted,

“We suspect the culprit which bit a striped bass while being reeled in and was the focus of a recent [Facebook] post…was probably a sandbar (brown) shark, or less likely a dusky shark or sand tiger shark (those species a little rarer than sandbars).

“These species are native/endemic to Long Island Sound and in fact, are all threatened/protected species.  We are not formally monitoring recreational angler/shark interactions so we do not know whether there is an increase or not.  However, if it is true that there is an increasing number of interactions with anglers it is actually a positive sign of a native depleted predator species perhaps increasing in abundance.

“To be clear, sharks snagging a recreational angler catch here and there is not a bad thing, but instead is a positive sign for the Long Island ecosystem, and there is no concern for public safety.”

Of course, that sort of thing is easy for a regulator to say, so it’s nice to see an angler/outdoor writer also endorsing such notions.  Michael Wright, writing for the Long Island website 27East, noted that shark depredation is increasing, and becoming a problem that will need to be addressed by fishery managers.  He also notes that shark management has been at least somewhat successful, that Long Island’s shark numbers seem to be on an upswing, and that sharks are stealing more fish from anglers.  But he nonetheless takes a rational approach to the issue:

“There are more sharks nowadays.  Longlining has been curtailed somewhat, and the same benefits that have allowed swordfish and bigeye tuna stocks to rebound probably means more sharks, too.

“And the old practice of recreational fishermen killing tens of thousands of sharks a year just for the sport, often discarding their carcasses back at the dock, is a thing of the past.  Most coastal species…are protected.

“And that is all a good thing.  Healthy and well-balanced ecosystems are important.

“Except that in a well-balanced ecosystem there isn’t something putting a very heavy finger on the scale of survival of the fittest the way human fishermen are in the shark-vs.-prey contest.

“A big part of the problem is the huge jump in fishing ‘effort,’ as these scientists call it.  More people are going fishing than ever before.  Instagram, economic prosperity, the pandemic—they all contributed to the explosion in popularity of fishing in the last 10 years.’

“And more hooks in the water means more hooked fish struggling to escape, sending out a beacon of distress signals, of just the type sharks hone in on to find vulnerable prey.

“We have essentially trained sharks to target hooked fish.  We’ve taught them that there are buffets where the pickings will be easy peasy thanks to the dark shadows at the surface that will drag fish that could normally hide from a predator under a reef or rock or wreck, out of their fortresses…

“If a fish like red snapper, which is one of the most sought-after species targeted by hundreds of thousands of recreational anglers each year, are seeing 2-to-1 or 3-to-1 or higher levels of predation as anglers try to catch their limits, then the math that led to those limits being set no longer makes sense.

“I think that we are already outpacing assumptions made about the number of people going fishing each day and the impact that has on fish stocks.  If scientists start taking into account that more fish are dying in a shark’s mouth than in a cooler of ice and realize that we are depleting natural stocks faster than  the old formulas show, they are going to have to find ways to reduce the number of fishermen hooking fish.

“That will mean either lower bag limits or shorter seasons—or both.  Either will mean reduced effort and greater economic losses…

“What’s the solution to this problem?  Kill more sharks?  Just wasting them to try and thin the herd?  That will never work.

“I recently heard one tarpon guide…suggest that killing some sharks on a regular basis and hanging their carcasses from bridges or buoys would scare off other sharks.  I don’t pretend to know much about sharks, but that seems even more harebrained.

“The shark problem is probably not going away anytime soon, it will be interesting to see if, or how soon, fisheries managers see reason to start paring back regulations because of it.”

Which makes sense, as shark depredation is a man-made problem, and calls for a human-focused solution.

Of course, any such solution is going to get a lot of anglers upset, at least those sorts of anglers who seem to act like spoiled children, throwing fits and striking out at anyone who might try to control their behavior, and tell them that they’re not entitled to every last fish in the sea.

But it’s time for such anglers to grow up a bit, and part of growing up is learning to share.

Even if that means sharing a fish or two with the sharks.

After all, it is their ocean, not ours.