Shark Longliners decimate populations off SA coastline
The following extract was taken from a newsletter called Shark Bytes published by Cape Town based shark researchers Chris and Monique Fallows.
“I was unable to be on the last pelagic trip of the month on Saturday but Chris and the guests on board had a bad experience of coming across a shark longliner. The longline was in the process of being hauled in and the catch consisted of hundred’s of mako and blue sharks. Sharks are extremely successful predators and ironically this is greatly counting against their survival. A longline is set with baited hooks that stretch kilometers long the sea surface as well as a few hundred meters below.
As soon as one shark takes the bait and is caught it starts to struggle.
This struggling in turn attracts another shark which will also take a baited hook and start to struggle free. And so the cycle continues until there can be hundreds of sharks on one longline.
Four years ago the South African Fisheries Department issued a number of experimental shark longline permits. They went and did this without any idea of what the pelagic shark stocks are like off our coast. Now that the four years have been completed they have re-issued the permits to avoid legal battles with the companies who have these permits. Although we are not scientists we are the only group in the whole of South Africa that is actively collecting data on pelagic sharks. Since we started in 1999 our wait for the first shark has increased from 40 minutes to 2 hours. We feel this is a very telling indication of how rapidly the shark stocks are decreasing. We have brought this to the attention of the Fisheries Department and this has failed to have any impact on their decision making. We extremely upset as we feel that each shark’s life is important and we are powerless to do anything about it. The only thing that we are able to do is inform the public as to what is happening off our coast and how our Government is not doing anything about protecting our very valuable shark stocks. We have put some images of this longline on Photo’s of the Month. It is not nice, but it unfortunately this is what is happening. ”
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