Guardiansharks

Thousands of kilometres of untended, unregulated nets full of rotting sharks are fishing UK and Irish waters. Endangered deep sea sharks are the target of a little known gillnet fishery operated by Spanish owned but UK registered boats. Targeted for their valuable liver oil, used in cosmetics and health products, numbers of Leaf Scale gulper shark and Portuguese dogfish have crashed by 80% in ten years. These animals are listed in the  IUCN Red list as vulnerable and under threat but the fishery continues, killing up to 3.75 million animals a year.  Ali Hood of the Shark Trust comments, ‘This is typical of a lack of joined up thinking between conservationists and fisheries regulators. Because there is no quota for deep sea sharks, the feeling is, no quota, no problem. The fishery is a criminal waste of a rare marine resource.’ The European Commission is considering an emergency six months ban under the reformed Common Fishery Policy to consider the best course of action.   Maurice Clarke, a shark specialist at the Marine Institute in Galway said at last week’s International Council for Exploration of the Seas (ICES) scientific conference in Aberdeen, ’The sheer scale of this fishery is enormous. There are between 5800 km and 8700 km of nets 1000 metres down, fishing at any one time. At the very least, that’s more than the distance between London and New York.’   Compounding the environmental impact is the length of time that nets are left in the water and the quantities lost at sea every year.  ‘We think that about 1200 km of net is lost every year, to continue ‘ghost fishing’ for years to come. With sparse biological activity in the deep, the nets don’t foul up quickly, so they keep on working and killing unattended,’ says Clarke, ‘the animals are slow growing, and slow to reach sexual maturity, so populations just cannot sustain such high levels of mortality.’ Clarke is chair of the Elasmobranch group at ICES.

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Deep Sea Sharks

Guardian Oct 2005