August 2, 2012
By Samantha Whitcraft, Shark Savers International
Florida like South Africa and Australia, is synonymous with sharks. With recent but rare sightings of white sharks off the Florida coast, media coverage of uncommon bites and a constant barrage of photos from bloody catch & kill tournaments, one might believe there is a thriving shark population swimming in Florida’s coastal waters. But the reality is that Florida’s rich coral reefs and dense coastal mangroves were once far richer in large sharks than they are now.
Scientists estimate that between 1981 and 2005 hammerhead populations declined by more than a 90 percent in the northwest Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. While, recreational divers in Florida report seeing nurse sharks fairly regularly, they rarely see a tiger shark or a hammerhead species of any kind. The declining population of Florida’s hammerheads is part of an overall decline registered not just in Florida but across the world due to overfishing and demand for their fins on the international markets.
However, Florida’s shark populations were once so abundant that it spawned at least two significant shark processing factories, which extracted the fishe’s Vitamin-A rich cartilage along with leather, meat and jaws for commercial sale. By 1946, at the height of its production, one factory located in Florida’s Martin County used 12 boats to catch and process 25,000+ ‘tigers of the sea’ per year. While this – and other Florida factories eventually went out of business, because cheaper sources of vitamin A came on the market, their large-scale production likely led to major declines in local shark populations.
Today, in the same waters that these former Florida shark processing factories used to pull up sharks by the hundreds from, it can take days for researchers to find one large tiger shark.
To begin to recover Florida’s population of large sharks the state’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) has, over the years, listed 25 species of elasmobranchs as completely protected from harvest on their ‘Prohibited Species’ list. Most recently, FWC added three species of hammerhead sharks to their ‘prohibited list’ and became the first state to specifically protect tiger sharks. Once on the list, the FWC rules prohibit the harvest, possession, landing, purchase or sale of these species or any part of them. The complete list of protected species includes charismatic species, like white sharks and whale sharks, but also species that are less well known, such as sawfish and basking sharks.
“Sharks have been strictly regulated in Florida since 1992, with a one-shark-per-person, two-shark-per-vessel daily bag limit for all recreational and commercial harvesters and a ban on shark finning,” said the FWC, in a prepared statement. “Roughly two-dozen overfished, vulnerable or rare shark species are catch-and-release only in Florida waters.”
There is no doubt that these are important measures for both sharks and for Florida’s waters, given their often key ecological roles in the marine ecosystem. However, there remains a gap in the protection of these large apex predators — many of the species protected at the state-level do not have the same protections in adjacent federal waters. This means that Florida’s sharks can be harvested, within the limits of federal laws, just outside of Florida’s state waters (only 3 nautical miles offshore in the Atlantic and 9 nautical miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.)
(This feature is an edited story taken from a Mission Blue blog post published July 23, 2012. This story was edited by Mera McGrew)