Ocean Sentry
Shark-fishing tournaments don”t pose a serious threat to the survival of sharks as a species. The problem is that these annual events, which on Long Island have become highly publicized, outsized celebrations of man”s triumph over a fearsome predator, tend to trivialize the plight of sharks.
Sharks ought to engender fear. But not so much because of their teeth, their size or, in the words of Capt. Quint”s character in the movie “Jaws,” their “lifeless … black eyes, like a doll”s eye.” The fear is we”re losing them.
Today, shark tournaments on the eastern end of Long Island draw hundreds of fishing boats and thousands of onlookers, all vying for a glimpse of this man-eater of legend wrestled from the deep, dark sea. Cash prizes are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars: Star Island Yacht Club in Montauk offered $1 million in prizes for its tournament last weekend.
A team of Canadian and U.S. scientists reported in the journal Science last year that, from 1970 to 2005, the number of scalloped hammerhead and tiger sharks in the northwest Atlantic may have declined by more than 97 percent; populations of bull, dusky and smooth hammerhead sharks may have dropped more than 99 percent.
That same year, a U.N. report concluded “more than half of highly migratory oceanic sharks … are either depleted or at high risk of collapse.”
Large-scale commercial fishing practices bear much of the blame. Sharks are often killed as an incidental part of the catch. Sharks are also targeted for their fins, which fetch high prices on East Asian food markets out of the mistaken belief that they are an aphrodisiac.
The loss of this top predator has implications for the ocean ecosystem. The Science article noted that populations of rays, skates and smaller sharks — which larger sharks eat — have boomed in the last three decades and may be destroying stocks of North Carolina bay scallops and Chesapeake Bay oysters.
These tournaments are a celebration of sharks, the people who catch them and the history of Montauk. But as these contests have gotten bigger and purses have swelled, the plight of the shark has gotten dire.
