A New Hurdle in the Fight To Manage Fish Stocks

There is a new problem facing our fisheries all over the East Coast that in the long run is going to be something that regulations are going to have to account for: sharks.

Whether its a surge in actual shark numbers — there have been some improvements in longline bycatch — or just natural changes, sharks stealing hooked fish is becoming a real problem.

In Florida, there are some reefs where anglers can lose as many as three out of every four fish they hook before the remnants hit the deck, sometimes almost comically beheaded right to the gill plates. At some of the great tarpon passes, the sharks can kill dozens of tarpon a day, adding to the species’ decline.

Locally, in the last 10 years, we see more and more striped bass chomped in half beneath boats or even at the feet of surfcasters — zoinks! — as the local shark population has surged.

No matter where you go, you hear the same thing from seasoned fishermen: It has never been this bad.

There are more sharks nowadays. Longlining has been curtailed somewhat, and the same benefits that have allowed swordfish and bigeye tuna stocks to rebound probably means more sharks, too.

And the old practice of recreational fishermen killing tens of thousands of sharks a year just for sport, often discarding their carcasses back at the dock, is a thing of the past. Most coastal shark species — which includes the bull, brown and black tip sharks that account for substantial portions of the thefts from fishermen up and down the coast — are protected.

And that is all a good thing. Healthy and well-balanced ecosystems are important.

Except that in a well-balanced ecosystem there isn’t something putting a very heavy finger on the scale of survival of the fittest the way human fishermen are in the shark-vs.-prey contest.

A big part of the problem is the huge jump in fishing “effort,” as the scientists call it: More people are going fishing than ever before. Instagram, economic prosperity, the pandemic — they all contributed to the explosion in popularity of fishing in the last 10 years.

And more hooks in the water means more hooked fish struggling to escape, sending out a beacon of distress signals, of just the type that sharks hone in on to find vulnerable prey.

We have essentially trained sharks to target hooked fish. We’ve taught them that there are buffets where the pickings will be easy peasy thanks to the dark shadows at the surface that will drag fish that could normally hide from a predator under a reef or rock or wreck, out of their fortresses.

In the Bahamas, fishermen have learned that when they hook a wahoo trolling, they cannot throttle back to fight a fish, because the sharks will hear that change in the tone of the motors and come charging in like someone is ringing a dinner bell.

Whatever the reason for this deluge of shark interference, the problem with this loss is that it is certainly not accounted for in the estimates that fisheries scientists make when figuring out how many fish of a given species are being “taken” each year, either by harvest, bycatch or dead discards.

If a fish species like red snapper, which is one of the most sought-after species targeted by hundreds of thousands of recreational anglers each year, are seeing 2-to-1 or 3-to-1 or higher levels of predation as anglers try to catch their limits, then the math that led to those limits being set no longer makes sense.

I think that we are already outpacing assumptions made about the number of people going fishing each day and the impact that has on fish stocks. If scientists start taking into account that more fish are dying in a shark’s mouth than in a cooler of ice and realize we are depleting natural stocks faster than the old formulas show, they are going to have to find ways to reduce the number of fishermen hooking fish.

That will mean either lower bag limits or shorter seasons — or both. Either will mean reduced effort and greater economic losses.

Locally, we are seeing more shark predation of striped bass, but probably not on the level that would be significant enough to affect the striper stock, at least at this point.

I know that shark predation of big stripers that are protected under the slot limit has been used as an argument against the slot — much like the related fact that big stripers get exhausted in warm waters of summer and may die. To both points, I say that it’s better in the grand scheme of things for some of them to die in the water than for all of them to die on a boat.

What’s the solution to the shark problem? Kill more sharks? Just wasting them to try and thin the herd? That will never work.

I recently heard one tarpon guide — one who relies on fishing in a spot where tarpon are routinely killed by sharks — suggest that killing a few sharks on a regular basis and hanging their carcasses from bridges or buoys would scare off other sharks. I don’t pretend to know much about sharks, but that seems even more harebrained.

The shark problem is probably not going away anytime soon. It will be interesting to see if, or how soon, fisheries managers see reason to start paring back regulations because of it.

Or maybe we’ll never see it.

Have a great Labor Day weekend. See you out there.