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

Wed Nov 23 17:14:22 UTC 2022

People panic at the thought of death, even when they put themselves voluntarily in harms way. Thus humans must kill any animal that could potentially hurt a human being (because we are the supreme beings in the Universe, right?). Not just sharks but wolves, lions, grizzlies, etc. etc. And even more so when money is to be made: tourism, ranching, fishing. We don't need to manage sharks, we need to do more to manage people, but that isn't popular either. As long as 'popular' and 'economic gain' rule, nature doesn't have a chance. Too many people with power and money on the wrong side of the equation.

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-----Original Message-----
From: Coral-List <coral-list-bounces at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> On Behalf Of Douglas Fenner via Coral-List
Sent: Tuesday, November 22, 2022 7:06 PM
To: coral list <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
Subject: [Coral-List] CITES may protect many shark and ray species

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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