Shark Words

  The review of the status of sharks that I wrote with Professor Brian W. Darvell, Shark Fishing vs. Conservation: Analysis and Synthesis has been published Open Access in the journal Sustainability. With traditional fish stocks 90% overfished, sharks (along with tuna) have become the most lucrative prey for fisheries due to the value of their fins. So, with fishing scarcely profitable any more, fishing fleets around the world have joined in the hunt for them. The meat is pushed onto consumers using other names, so it is largely the shark fin trade that drives the so-called market for shark meat. As a result, those species of sharks and rays accessible to fishing fleets are approaching extinction. Further, the removal of these top and middle predators has resulted in drastic, long-term changes in oceanic and coastal ecosystems—a complete rebalancing. Yet most ecosystem changes remain unknown and are not taken into account by Regional Fisheries Management Organizations.

Although written in an authoritative style, Shiffman et al .’s paper “ The role and value of science in shark conservation advocacy ” (2021) contains a number of lethal flaws which invalidate it. In particular, it claims that the survey on which it is based shows that conservationists favour bans over sustainable shark fishing more than scientists. But in fact the survey of scientists cited (Shiffman & Hammerschlag 2016 b) showed that 63% of scientists favour bans while this paper states that only 41% of conservationists do. This mismatch between the findings of the two surveys and the claims of these authors invalidates much of what they state. Their survey also establishes that conservationists do in fact base their published information on scientific papers, rather than public belief or moral considerations, so the authors’ conclusion is seriously in error. Leaving aside for the moment the reason why alleged “shark scientists” would spend the time it took to write