Shark Legacy Project - Honduras 100% Shark Fishing Ban Enacted

They say big things come in small packages. In the shark world nothing is bigger then governments who enact bans on shark fishing in their waters.

Palau's recent shark fishing ban and the Maldives decision to ban shark fishing in their waters was met with acclaim both in the tourism and shark conservation worlds.

As it turns out other governments were watching, and taking note.

Thanks in part to the Shark Legacy Project headed up by a small and dedicated team in Roatan, Honduras the government just announced they will ban all shark fishing in Honduran waters while they study the issue of shark fishing and the economics of Honduran sharks which, for a Latin American country, is a simply stunning decision.

The next steps will require resources and help from the shark tourism industry and from the research side as well to make this ban a permanent and regional example.

From Peter Wilcox Director of the Shark Legacy Project:

"Thanks Patric - have a major victory down here. After our meetings with DIGIPESCA they pushed up the passing of a bill that has now gone into practice. It puts a moratorium on the fishing of all shark species in all the waters of Honduras! Think that makes Honduras the first in the Caribbean to have a shark sanctuary! Part of the drive behind this measure was to cease use of sharks as a resource until research can be done to evaluate the population/species of sharks here. So finally, a government willing to step in before the problem gets unmanageable. We met with the government this last weekend to discuss how we can assist in this research (as you may be able to guess they do not have much in the way of funding for their own research). We are travelling to Tegucigalpa this week to discuss further research and affiliations to benefit the goals of protecting sharks here."

We would Like to congratulate the Shark Legacy Project and all those who have worked to this point to get the ban in place.

This is very good conservation news indeed.

Philopatry and migration of Pacific white sharks

Fascinating reading coming from The Proceedings of The Royal Society this week (click on image) with tracking/DNA data from a multi year effort at the Farallons, Point Reyes and Ano Nuevo off the coast of California.

Paper Highlights

"Hawaii is likely to be an important foraging area for white sharks. Extensive use of waters surrounding the Hawaiian island archipelago in winter and spring was evident from 13 satellite tag records (22% of tags with offshore tracks) and five acoustic tags (10% of 2006 and 2007 deployments) detected opportunistically by receivers stationed near the islands of Oahu and Hawaii (together comprising six males, six females and six unsexed individuals) (figure 1). The most precise geopositions and acoustic records from Hawaii included Argos endpoint transmissions (n = 8) with location errors of 150 m s.d. (Teo et al. 2004) and acoustic tags detected at fixed locations (n = 5). These occurred in slope and near shore waters along the entire 3000 km archipelago from the big island of Hawaii extending through the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument to Laysan Island and Midway Atoll (electronic supplementary material, figure S2). While this distribution includes areas with colonies of endangered monk seals (Baker et al. 2007), detailed dive records from four recovered satellite tags (three females and one unsexed; three separate years) indicated that the dominant behaviour, when not transiting (Weng et al. 2007), was a precise diel vertical migration, between the surface and 600 m, consistent with foraging within the deep scattering layer community (Shepard et al. 2006) (electronic supplementary material, figure S3)."

Read study here.

Why marine biology is hard

I just finished reading "Mapping the Deep: The Extraordinary Story of Ocean Science" by Robert Kunzig. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the oceans themselves, but it doesn't include much about marine biology. The book did, however, have one passage that summarizes very well why it is so difficult to study life in the oceans. It specifically is referencing the deep sea, but the same principles apply to studying sharks. Much of the general public is flabbergasted when they hear scientists say that we don't know the answers to so many basic questions. I hope this passage helps clear up why marine biology is hard.
~David

"Trying to find out what lives on the ocean floor, and how it lives, is hard. Think about what it would be like to study our own world the way biologists must study the deep sea. Imagine that a race of space aliens, discover Earth and, being scientifically inclined, set out to understand life on its surface. These unfortunate aliens, however...cannot wishstand the crushing pressure of our atmosphere. It is utterly opaque to their eyes... they decide to blindly drag a large, sturdily framed net from their spacecraft as it cruises safely above the clouds.

The net touches down one evening in Tyler, Texas, where it first clips a flagpole off the top of the courthouse. Next it bounces through a playground in Bergfeld par, scattering children and parents without snaring a one; collects a dog that is studying a soup bone on college street, and swoops into a backyard a few blocks later, picking up an azalea bush, a clothesline bearing assorted lacy underwear, and a patch of lettuce with its associated rabbit. Finally it nearly comes to grief in a dark corner of the Sears parking lot, where the weight of a 1979 Chevy Nova and the teenagers in its backseat cause the net cable to groan audibly. The aliens quickly reel in their catch- one quadrupedal carnivore, one quadrupedal herbivore with food, assorted mysterious shell fragments, and a large metal crusted animal (the Nova) whose source of food remains obscure, but which seems to be serviced by remarkably sophisiticated intestinal endosymbionts.