Australian Shark Conservation - Makos Back on the Grill

One of the most perplexing issues with modern shark conservation is regional and local government buy in. Too often rules and regulations that protect shark species take years of legislative process, time, money, and energy to adopt.

And all too often we see a watering down or outright reversals of conservation rules and regulations. Such was the case in Australia this week, where new laws governing the take of mako shark were overturned by government slight of hand and a shameless buckling to commercial fishing pressures.

That's why we developed and support the Shark Free Marinas Initiative as an effective method to bypass government while enacting shark conservation measures.

The SFMI works with direct source points of shark traffic creating a win-win with local marinas to request that sharks are not landed at their facilities.

The metrics are there. In the USA alone 400,000 sport caught sharks arrive at marinas each year (NOAA) With just 50% of marinas in the USA adopting the SFMI we could save 200,000 sharks a year. Over the planet many hundreds of thousands more while educating fishermen to catch and release ethics making a shark fishery sustainable, without any government buy in at all.

A case study for modern shark conservation and one that has already seen 70% of Fiji go Shark Free with the help of PADI Project Aware, Stuart Gow and others.

Farallones - ABC News Investigates Tagging Disaster

ABC News I Team investigated the ethics of invasive tagging techniques and the controversy surrounding an extreme white shark tagging mishap at the Farallones. The event was documented by a reality television crew who also fund the research and provide the logistical support for the capture of white sharks.

As far as we know this is the first time in white shark research history that reality television film crews also act as quasi research team members and research funding sources.

We covered our thoughts on this matter in a previous post.

ABC I Team blog coverage post/read comments.

Australia's "Monster Shark" - The Facts

The news media is having a field day with the story of a 10 foot white shark with two giant bites out of its side, indicating that perhaps a much larger shark, as large as 20 feet might have been involved.

We took a look at the images this week and came to the conclusion "if" this animal was in fact 10 feet long, these bites could be the result of a very, very large white shark.

Some have cried foul and declared this image to be photoshopped, others have suggested this image is a complete fake. Still others have said that men, not a shark, carved up the carcass.

We decided to find out the truth and made a series of phone calls to various agencies in Australia today and here's what we know:

1. This is a real image, or so says The Queensland Primary Industries and Fisheries manager Tony Ham who told us "this is a confirmed 3.3 meters white shark, caught by our contractor, he measured the primary bite mark at 50 centimeters or twenty inches."

2. The sole contractor who catches sharks in the region has been doing so for Queensland Primary Industries and Fisheries since 1986.

3. Tony Hams team estimate from the 50 centimeter bite radius, the feeding shark was in the 5.2 meter range or 16-17 feet.

4. Samples were collected from the bitten shark. The shark was dumped at sea following standard protocol. The bites were so severe that the head actually fell off the animal during transit shortly after this image was shot.

5. These are not man made holes in the side of the shark according to Tony Ham, "it is not a faked photo, the photo is absolutely genuine."

Tony Ham went on to say after they released this image to the media and the estimated size of the feeding shark "the sharks size grew by a meter overnight."

Chlamydoselachus africana

David Ebert and Leonard Compagno.

"Chlamydoselachus africana, a new species of frilled shark from southern Africa
(Chondrichthyes, Hexanchiformes, Chlamydoselachidae)"

Abstract

Frilled sharks (Chondrichthyes, Hexanchiformes, Chlamydoselachidae), long
believed to be a monotypic family and genus, consisting of a single wide
ranging species, Chlamydoselachus anguineus (Garman, 1884), is now known to
contain at least two species. A new species of frilled shark,
Chlamydoselachus africana, sp. nov., is described from five specimens
collected from southern Africa. The new species, although difficult to
distinguish externally from the well known C. anguineus, differ internally
by the structural differences in the chondrocranium, lower total vertebral
and spiral valve counts, and pectoral-fin radial counts. The new species,
Chlamydoselachus africana, is known from off southern Angola, Namibia, and
South Africa.

Zootaxa 2173: 1–18 (2009).

Tiger Sharks - "Wandering About Like Moses"

A four year study on the movement patterns of Tiger sharks in Hawaii has once again surprised the CW folks - opening a new and better understanding of these remarkable critters.

Shark researcher Carl Meyer, a biologist with the Hawai'i Institute for Marine Biology says these animals are not the territorial hunters once thought. Rather, these animals are pelagic wanderers often traveling great distances to find and ambush prey items. Kinda like those 40 lost years Moses spent wandering around the deserts. Except Moses never brought down a sickly Humpback whale calf. We digress.

Great study and better news coming out of Hawaii where local shark diving operators need data like this to bolster claims about chumming and animal behavior. Now if the folks over there can put this data together.