Controversial NOAA research may be driving killing of endangered shark species at fishing tournaments

UN considers one-third of shark species at risk

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the US government’s premier scientific agencies, with a mission “to better understand our natural world and help protect its precious resources,” is helping drive the killing of sensitive shark species by encouraging reckless sport fishing, according to an investigation.

NOAA directed hundreds of thousands of dollars in research funding into instances where sharks bite off a piece of a different fish that’s already been hooked, encounters known as “depredations” or “bite-offs,” according to government documents obtained by The Nation.

Key grantees behind the research, encouraged in part by private interests who argued such bite-offs were driving down hauls from sport and tournament fisherman, suggested culling of sharks would be an appropriate solution to the bite-offs, even though some shark experts doubt this is an appropriate response.

In this drone image provided by researchers with the Shark Lab at Cal State Long Beach, shows an aggregation of juvenile white sharks swimming along the Southern California coastline, May 30, 2023

“I’d like to simulate increases in shark harvest,” one grantee, Mississippi State University marine biologist Marcus Drymon, wrote in an email.

Citing scientific advice from Professor Drymon, the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, the world’s largest fishing competition, reinstated shark hunts in 2022 after previously banning them, even though the practice may run afoul of state law.

Another grant, which funded research in the waters off Florida, included collecting genetic samples from sharks caught in competitions.

Such events have questionable records when it comes to protecting species.

At the 2022 Daymaker Memorial Tournament in Palm Beach County Florida, anglers hunt exclusively for bull sharks, and are supposed to catch and release other shark species, tagging them for research purposes.

However, activists going undercover at the tournament recorded participants talking about taking fins and meat for personal use, while one crew was seen by reporters beating a protected sandbar shark, as another bragged about dragging a bull shark for two hours  behind a boat until it died.

“They’re calling it a tournament, but it’s really a cull,” conservationist Ryan Walton, who monitored the event, told Local10 news at the time. “It’s not the first time we’ve seen it. What’s crazy, though, is it’s legal every day of the week here in Florida.”

“This is a spiteful, spiteful killing event by individuals who realise that through the State of Florida, the bull shark is a legal species to catch,” he added. “So they’ve taken advantage of that, and they’re doing everything they can to wipe them out.”

NOAA also largely doesn’t recognise the International Union for Conservation of Nature listings for protected sharks, only considering one Pacific shark species endangered and none in the Atlantic, even though the IUCN considers about one-third of sharks to be on the “red list” of species at risk.

NOAA told The Independent it doesn’t operate or sponsor any tournaments that include shark-hunting, and that all such events must comply with federal law.

“The US Atlantic Ocean has some of the best-managed and sustainable shark fisheries in the world,” the agency said in a statement. “NOAA Fisheries manages all of these species to end overfishing and rebuild populations consistent with the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.”

The agency added that it is currently accepting public comment on potential changes to the management of the Atlantic shark fishery.

Some scientists have argued that proposing to kill sharks to stop depredation is missing the point, noting that overfishing of shark’s prey species can cause them to bite fish already on someone’s line, and that they are equal-opportunity predators who will seize an easy meal if fisherman are operating in their waters.

As The Independent has reported, climate change and other human impacts are driving massive changes to shark populations, who play a key role as an apex predator in keeping ocean ecosystems in their proper balance. The climate crisis has pushed sharks into new territories, where they’re changing their feeding habits.

“Nature has many ways to tell us the status quo is being disrupted, but it’s up to us to listen,” Monterey Bay Aquarium chief scientist Dr Kyle Van Houtan told The Independent. “These sharks – by venturing into territory where they have not historically been found - are telling us how the ocean is being affected by climate change.”

Couple that with social media and the internet making sharks more visible than ever, and experts worry the public is getting a mistaken impression of a dangerous shark invasion, even when shark bites are extremely rare, a fact statistically unimpacted by the massive increase in beach use in the last hundred years.

“I’m incredibly struck by how rare shark attacks are. There are lots of sharks out there. That’s where they live and they’re pretty numerous. Any time anybody goes in the water for any amount of time, you’ve probably been within a few hundred yards of a shark,” Professor F Joel Fodrie of the University of North Carolina’s Institute of Marine Sciences, noting the state’s famed beaches only average 2 or 3 bites a year, told The Independent. “That’s amazing to me. There’s millions of people spending millions of hours in the water.”