[Coral-List] CITES may protect many shark and ray species

Wed Nov 23 00:05:38 UTC 2022

https://www.science.org/content/article/international-body-likely-protect-many-shark-and-ray-species

"about 75% of coastal shark species are threatened with extinction"  which
include coral reef sharks like the pictured black tip reef sharks (Check
out the photo in the article: are they beautiful, or what??), and also grey
reef sharks, white tip reef sharks, tawny nurse sharks, Galapagos sharks,
Caribbean reef sharks, Atlantic nurse sharks, and quite a few others.

Keep in mind that CITES only regulates international trade, it does not
directly affect what happens within countries, and a lot of reef fishing is
for local consumption, not international trade.

The IUCN Red List of Endangered Species lists Grey Reef Sharks as
"Endangered," Blacktip Reef Sharks as "Vulnerable," white tip reef sharks
as "Vulnerable,"  Tawny Nurse Sharks as "Vulnerable," Caribbean Reef Sharks
as "Endangered, and " Atlantic nurse sharks as "Vulnerable,"

https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/39365/173433550

Did anybody notice how many sharks were in some of the video from the reefs
of the southern Line Islands that we were discussing recently?

Reef sharks are heavily overfished almost every place there are humans in
the world, only a few reefs are so extremely remote, like the Northwestern
Hawaiian Islands and the southern Line Islands, to have pristine coral reef
shark populations.  They show what we have lost.  Most of us have never
seen such a reef or so many reef sharks.  Rick Pyle once came up from a
deep decompression dive in the NW Hawaiian Islands and said that while on a
deco stop he counted sharks and gave up at 200 in sight at once.  Any of us
seen anything like that on reefs with nearby humans??  The loss of sharks
on reefs is a "phase shift" though no one seems to call it that, probably
because almost no reef researchers have seen natural reef shark
populations, which are orders of magnitude, wildly greater than on almost
ALL coral reefs, and the reason is people fishing.  They have long
lifespans and very few pups, which means they can't tolerate hardly any
fishing without becoming overfished, and they are likely to recover
slowly.  Just one more human impact on coral reefs, which we ignore because
it is nearly universal.

      The classic study of natural reef sharks compared to fished
populations is:

Friedlander, A. and De Martini, E. E. 2002. Contrasts in density, size, and
biomass of reef fishes between the northwestern and main Hawaiian Islands:
effects of fishing down apex predators. *Marine Ecology Progress Series*
230, 253–264.

https://www.int-res.com/articles/meps2002/230/m230p253.pdf

Jeremy Jackson once said it should have been a Science or Nature article,
it is so important.  Take a look if you've never read it.

  Hawaii once had a campaign to kill as many sharks as possible, because
people in the water there are periodically subject to shark attacks, and
about one person every few years gets killed.  Bad press for tourism, the
number one segment of their economy.  So they laid down baited hook long
lines on reefs, and caught lots of reef sharks.  Of course, the people
being attacked and killed in the tropics are usually attacked by Tiger
Sharks, which are larger and attack larger prey.  Tiger sharks are roving
apex predators, not really reef sharks, they even eat reef sharks at
times.  But shark hysteria is common, like the movie "Jaws" and "Shark
Week," one of the most popular events on the Discovery Channel, like
"Jurassic Park" huge dinosaurs, people love big dangerous animals, so media
pander to the interest, including making up all sorts of fantasy and
selective reporting to exaggerate the danger.  That sells.  In fact, humans
kill vastly more sharks than sharks kill humans, a hundred million sharks a
year or so killed by people vs maybe something on the order of 10 humans
killed world wide by sharks per year?  So WHO is the dangerous one, sharks
or humans???

Indeed, the entire world had 440 fatal shark attacks in 50 years, so less
than 10 a year and about 120 total attacks (mostly not fatal) per year in
recent years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_attack

      Also, I remember reading that Kiribati sold the right to fish the
sharks in the remote Phoenix Islands before they made it into a giant
Marine Protected Area.

I wrote a review of the overfishing of large reef fish including sharks:

Fenner, D. 2014. Fishing down the largest coral reef fish species.  *Marine
Pollution** Bulletin*. 84: 9-16.

http://fishingdown.org/pdf/Fenner-Coral-Reefs-2014.pdf

The loss of the largest fish species is a fingerprint of fishing, no other
human activity I know of has such a size-selective effect on fish.

More recent papers document this size-selective effect on reef fish:

Williams, I. D., Richards, B. L., Sandin, S. A., Baum, J. K., Schroeder, R.
E., Nadon, M. O., Zgliczynnski, B., Craig, P., McIlwain, J. L., and
Brainard R. E. 2011. Differences in reef fish assemblages between populated
and remote reefs spanning multiple archipelagos across the Central and
Western Pacific. *Journal of** Marine Biology* Vol. 2011: Article ID
826234, 1-14.

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jmb/2011/826234/

And that reef sharks in the US Pacific are generally at about 3-8% of what
they would be without humans (fishing).  Overfishing is present when a
species is below about 30% of the unfished population:  Sharks also move
around more than many other reef fish and it takes a larger MPA and more
time for them to recover.  Few MPAs have anything close to natural levels
of sharks.

Nadon, M. O., Baum, J. K., Williams, I. D., McPherson, J. M., Zgliczynnski,
B., Richards, B. L., Schroeder, R. E., and Brainard, R. E. 2012.
Re-creating missing population baselines for reef sharks. *Conservation
Biology* 26: 493-503.

https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2012.01835.x

Yet almost no governments regulate the take of reef sharks to make sure
they are not overfished, virtually none do.  Allowing overfishing does not
help fishermen catch more over the long haul, rather the opposite, how is
that a favor??  WHERE IS GOOD REEF MANAGEMENT OF SHARKS???  Guess what,
fishermen don't like being regulated, and the general public doesn't care.
"Squeaky wheel gets the grease." aka special interests like fishing.
Granted, in many countries, fishermen are desperate to make a living, and
are very close to starvation.  (but some places don't have that excuse and
still don't regulate)

Cheers, Doug
-- 
Douglas Fenner
Lynker Technologies, LLC, Contractor
NOAA Fisheries Service
Pacific Islands Regional Office
Honolulu
and:
Coral Reef Consulting
PO Box 997390
Pago Pago, American Samoa 96799-6298  USA

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1 in 6 deaths worldwide can be attributed to pollution, new review shows
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