A survey on shark fishing denounces the worrying decline of these predators.
|A hammerhead shark (Sphyrna lewini), whose populations have decreased by almost 90 percent.
© Philip Colla / OceanLight.com-Science.
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Massacres on the high seas. Hammerhead shark populations, for example, have fallen by at least 89 percent, and the white shark by 79 percent. The authors strongly argue that overfishing is threatening the survival of most sharks in the northwestern Atlantic. Not even closing to fishing large areas could be useful, because the fishing effort would simply have moved further, and the sharks move a great deal, ending up sooner or later in the nets. The only solution would be to close most of the Atlantic areas in front of the American coasts and decrease fishing, so as to have an ecosystem approach (that is, that keeps in mind the survival of many species), rather than trying to safeguard a species by time.
(News updated January 20, 2003)