Expert warns 2016 could see a record number of shark attacks.+

[DocVikingo]

Expert warns 2016 could see a record number of shark attacks, but remember, accidental drownings are way more common

Cheers,

DocVikingo

 

[Bric Martin]

The sharks are probably pissed off that 80,000,000 of their mates ended up in soup last year.

Save the ocean, save ourselves!

 

[Basking Ridge Diver]

"Gregory Skomal, a shark expert with Massachusetts’s Department of Fish and Game Division of Marine Fisheries, told Newsweek that shark populations decreased from the late 70s to the early 90s as their meat became more popular. Since sharks grow so slowly and only reproduce a few times in their lives, they are particularly prone to overfishing. But with better wildlife and fisheries management across the country since the 90s, those populations have been slowly recovering." from the article above...

If that is true 80,000,000 are being harvested and they are still recovering - perhaps we need to increase quota's?

 

[Bric Martin]

The United Nations predicts that if current trends continue, global fish stocks will be extinct by the year 2048.

 

[scubadada]

Revenge. These are not divers, they're seals or other food items

 

[Skeptic14]

Sometimes it's good to take dire long term predictions with a grain of salt...

 

[ReefGuy]

Sometimes it's good to take dire long term predictions with a grain of salt...

Especially from the UN

 

[Kharon]

If that is true 80,000,000 are being harvested and they are still recovering - perhaps we need to increase quota's?

Just watched a documentary on squid populations (Humbolt and Giant) exploding because of the decimation of the shark population. They are being found in big numbers right up to the coast in many places (Humbolt not Giant - yet). In case you didn't know they both consider anything in the water food, including divers, and they are very agressive, and increadibly strong. Worse they are inteligent and work together like a pack of wolves.

Sharks don't hunt divers - Humbolt squid do. The shark population needs to come back to good numbers to control the squid population or we may only be diving in fresh water.

 

[HalcyonDaze]

"Gregory Skomal, a shark expert with Massachusetts’s Department of Fish and Game Division of Marine Fisheries, told Newsweek that shark populations decreased from the late 70s to the early 90s as their meat became more popular. Since sharks grow so slowly and only reproduce a few times in their lives, they are particularly prone to overfishing. But with better wildlife and fisheries management across the country since the 90s, those populations have been slowly recovering." from the article above...

If that is true 80,000,000 are being harvested and they are still recovering - perhaps we need to increase quota's?

The 80 million figure (which is a conservative estimate; usually the ballpark figure is closer to 100 million and some estimates put it well over 100 million) is the estimated global catch. Hard to tell with the lack of context provided in that Newsweek quote, but from what I know I'm willing to bet Greg Skomal was referring to shark populations in U.S. waters, where we've had fishing regulations in place since the mid-1990s that are starting to pay off now. Relatively speaking, this year's Aggregated Large Coastal Sharks quota limit for the U.S. Atlantic shark fishery - which includes silky, tiger, blacktip, bull, lemon, and nurse sharks - is a miniscule amount of that global total: 372,552 lbs dressed weight (i.e., gutted and butchered for sale), which if one were to assume an average dressed weight of 50 lbs per shark is under 7,500 individuals per year for the entire Atlantic coast. Of those, blacktips probably make up the majority; I believe the last figures I heard for lemon sharks were that they typically add up under 4% of that total. Please not however that there are other stock groups that are fished in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico: NOAA Fisheries a Final Rule Regarding the 2016 Atlantic Shark Commercial Fishing Season :: Office of Sustainable Fisheries

Even then, there are some exceptions - on the Pacific coast blues and makos are not seen in anywhere near the numbers as they were 30-40 years ago, and by some estimates the oceanic whitetips in the Gulf of Mexico are down to ~0.7% of their historic population levels. In Florida, for whatever reason we're not seeing the number of lemons we used to ten years ago; there's some belief that they got hit hard by fishing in that timeframe. I think a lot of the "too many sharks" rhetoric is because most fishermen and divers on the water now weren't active before the population crash that started to bite during the 1980s; what they're seeing as "a lot of sharks" probably isn't as many as one would have encountered in the 1950s or 1960s. We also may not have the same population structure; for the most part the tigers I run into around Jupiter are relatively young 9-10 footers that are kittens compared to the big mommas out in the Bahamas (where they've been protected for longer).

Globally speaking, shark populations have gotten whacked hard in areas where there are not effective or meaningful fisheries regulations; pelagic species on the open ocean have probably taken the worst hits.

 

[drbill]

Even then, there are some exceptions - on the Pacific coast blues and makos are not seen in anywhere near the numbers as they were 30-40 years ago...

Indeed, when I began diving Catalina waters back in the late 1960s, blues were VERY common. You might see dozens of them from the boat on the way to the next dive site and we occasionally played a "game" of counting the blues we saw on the cross-channel boats. A while back local boats stopped doing shark dives out in deep water because even chumming for hours they were lucky to bring in a few blues and possibly a mako or two.