Jupiter dive crew convicted of stealing fishing gear

[PBcatfish]

...About half that value is shark fin sales and the meat makes up the rest; last I looked for 2021 Atlantic large coastal shark meat prices were averaging $1.21/lb, which despite being high by historical standards is not exactly a windfall. The last few years Atlantic large coastal shark landings haven't met quota, probably because boats decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
...

There's a reason why most shark meat sells so cheap. The vast majority of sharks lack urinary tracts & therefore excrete urine through their skin, after it passes through the meat. That means that the meat is tainted by urine. Almost all of the sharks, that properly permitted vessels are allowed to keep, have this issue.

 

[PBcatfish]

... Now, either FWC's "marine shark experts" aren't the best of the bunch ... or they weighed the photos against the likelihood the well-heeled parents of those kids could afford lawyers that would push the "reasonable doubt" angle in front of a jury and decided it was easier to lie and drop the case. ...

I've only had once instance where FWC got a fish ID wrong. I was accused of taking undersized Greater Amberjacks. They were Lessor Amberjacks & in slot. When I told the kid to count the gill rakers, I got a blank stare that told me I was dealing with an under-informed person. After some discussion, everything worked out. Every other FWC officer I have encountered, got it right the first time. They generally tend to be very good.

 

[100days-a-year]

Most shark meat is delicious, only a few are inedible or taste bad.
The meat sells for as much or more than beef. Thresher and mako are particularly desirable but sandbar, blacktip and spinner great as well.
There is ton of misinformation spun about shark consumption in America based on facts that hold true elsewhere but no here.
They are sustainably managed like most of the US other fisheries with very rare occasions of of under or over protection.

 

[HalcyonDaze]

Most shark meat is delicious, only a few are inedible or taste bad.
The meat sells for as much or more than beef. Thresher and mako are particularly desirable but sandbar, blacktip and spinner great as well.
There is ton of misinformation spun about shark consumption in America based on facts that hold true elsewhere but no here.
They are sustainably managed like most of the US other fisheries with very rare occasions of of under or over protection.

The fine line though is that the fishery is sustainable at current levels (with exceptions like makos; closing the door on them was overdue). There are new stock assessments going for some species to see what the current status is, although this is somewhat complicated by the fact that most shark species are managed by group (e.g. in the Atlantic blacktips, bulls, silkys, lemons, and tigers are all managed under Large Coastal Sharks and share a pooled quota; hammerheads are a linked quota that essentially functions as a bycatch limiter - if the hammerheads get close to quota, the entire LCS gets shut down). What dings the profitability is that while the price may be similar to beef, a cattle farmer can put a ****ton of beef on the market in a year. If the entire Atlantic LCS fishery caught its annual 372,552-lb dressed weight quota (not counting hammerheads) and sold it at average price, that's $450,787.92. The cattle farmer also isn't paying for dockage and boat gas, or limited to collecting 55 head of cattle per trip. This is why the landings are dominated by a limited number of "highliners," and why the shark fin trade essentially acts to subsidize the fishery. The past several years the landings haven't met quota for Atlantic LCS, which has sparked some handwringing among those who worship at the altar of maximum sustainable yield.

What I'm hearing now when I tune into the NOAA HMS meetings is a two-pronged argument; the "Let's Tax the Tax Man" types arguing that shark fishing should be increased to knock down the populations (i.e., the opposite of sustainable fishing and undoing the last 25 years of management), and commercial shark fishermen trying to use that as an opening to get concessions like longlining in state waters or bypassing the stock assessment prerequisite to increase quotas. While NMFS has made some moves within the current regulatory framework like adjusting the opening dates and trip limits, as well as putting out the "sustainable fishery" argument (PR statements that sound like a cross between the old "underutilized resource" rhetoric and a Chick-Fil-A billboard, publicly pissing on the fin trade ban campaigns), they're also being pretty good about swatting down the nuttier suggestions. I think the last time I called into an Advisory Panel meeting one guy commented that sharks were "piling up like a cold plate of molasses an' this shark doesn't know it's supposed to be a Maryland shark instead of a Carolina shark;" I couldn't help but chime in to remind everyone that this was the Highly Migratory Species Advisory Panel and that the sharks do in fact move around quite a bit.

I don't envy NMFS for the amount of dross they have to sort through from all sides; some on the conservation side still can't seem to match their talking points to current reality (had to correct one guy recently who was referring to an Advisory Panel member as "the head of Highly Migratory Species," cue eyeroll) and if you listen to some fishermen talk, a man can't reel in a fish from Maine 'round to Texas without getting sharked (funny how I see people on the fishing forums absolutely crushing it a lot more than I see people kvetching about sharks).

 

[PBcatfish]

Most shark meat is delicious, only a few are inedible or taste bad.
The meat sells for as much or more than beef. Thresher and mako are particularly desirable but sandbar, blacktip and spinner great as well.
There is ton of misinformation spun about shark consumption in America based on facts that hold true elsewhere but no here.
They are sustainably managed like most of the US other fisheries with very rare occasions of of under or over protection.

Mako is one of the two with a urinary tract, which produces clean meat. I forget which the other is. There are different varieties of Make with different rules. I have yet to find a Mako that was legal for me to keep.

The quality of the meat in the sharks without the urinary tract varies depending on what they have eaten lately, how actively they have physically exerted themselves & other details that affect the rate of urine production.

 

[HalcyonDaze]

Mako is one of the two with a urinary tract, which produces clean meat. I forget which the other is. There are different varieties of Make with different rules. I have yet to find a Mako that was legal for me to keep.

The quality of the meat in the sharks without the urinary tract varies depending on what they have eaten lately, how actively they have physically exerted themselves & other details that affect the rate of urine production.

It's not really a urinary tract thing so much as osmoregulation - How sharks recycle toxic ammonia to keep their skin moist

I suspect the reason makos are judged to have a better taste is more because of their muscle composition than major differences in osmoregulation. Makos, whites, porbeagles, and salmon sharks all have adaptations to retain body heat, similar to tunas and swordfish; blood flow in the muscles is primarily concentrated in two bands of dark muscle surrounded by white muscle. That allows them to maintain internal temperatures above the surrounding water and keep their metabolism up (one of the Shark Week specials this past summer that had me shaking my head was a "whodunit" looking at what shark could be predating on marine mammals in Alaskan waters; we have decades of white shark sightings up there but the "revelation" that they were in the mix was held back until the credits started to roll).

The last time I ate shark was actually "roadkill;" I was a graduate teaching assistant helping with an ichthyology field course. For our lab on endothermic fishes the instructor brought out, along with some tuna and mako bits, the heart and two thick cross-sections (basically steaks) from a nine-foot juvenile male white shark that had died in a halibut net up in Ventura. Between curiosity, the grad student "waste not want not" dietary attitude (the remains were to be dumped offshore after the lab), and wanting to mess with the undergrads I grilled up one of the cross-sections for dinner. Now, it tasted good with just a little seasoning ... but I also happened to know the folks in the lab that did the tox work for that necropsy. Suffice to say I got a big load of mercury, PCBs, and DDT; between the fact that juvenile white sharks eat bottom-feeding fish from nearshore and their mothers are horking down seals and sealions with years of accumulated toxins in their blubber, the offspring tend to blow the contaminant screens off the charts.

 

[johndiver999]

did you at least keep the jaws?

 

[HalcyonDaze]

did you at least keep the jaws?

The necropsy was done at the university, so they kept those. Cal State Long Beach's Shark Lab is the primary research group on white sharks in southern CA, so in addition to their normal work any time a white shark is found dead in that part of the state it typically goes to them. At least some of the jaws are kept for classroom instruction and outreach events (e.g., they have a tent at some ocean or beach festival and can show the kids). Mostly it's juveniles that get tangled up in bottom fishing nets, and they've been able to look at the survival rates to advise fishermen on how frequently they should pull their nets to cut down on bycatch. The big ones don't get caught as often, and typically just tear straight through a net. That nine-footer was the biggest one I remember coming in during my time in grad school; most of the rest were around five feet.

I have a collection of fossil and fresh teeth from other species, but those are all individual dive or beach pickups. I need to get back over to Venice at some point.

 

[Catito]

Killing sharks for money is how populations are assessed?

Seems goofy

I agree. Does not make sense.

 

[100days-a-year]

If the population is deemed sustainable, then using a commercial fisherman to determing the catch rate per hour or per hook is fiscally more responsible that running a multimillion dollar fisheries research vessel and crew to do the same.
There are quite a few fisheries that have cooperative research that is fishery dependent as well as research that is independent.