Sarah Fowler, marine zoologist, author of the book Field Guide to the World’s Sharks, has been dedicated to the conservation of these species for 30 years. In the 1990s, she was one of the first people to warn about the increase in finning (cutting off precious shark fins and throwing the body into the sea), a practice in the service of Asian cuisine that was banned in Europe. “37% of shark and ray species are critically endangered”, she explains after speaking at the International Shark Congress, which was held at the Oceanogràfic de València. “The situation of these species is especially worrying in coastal areas, in shallow areas of the ocean, where there are more threat factors.”
What are those threats?
Above all, fishing. All species, to a greater or lesser degree, are threatened by fishing, whether commercial or accidental. It is a tremendous overfishing.
Where are these threats most serious? Is there more risk of local extinction?
One of the areas with the greatest threat is the Mediterranean because it is a closed sea and fishing has been going on for a long time here; but now the threat is moving towards the tropics.
Because?
Tropical areas have temperate waters, where the greatest diversity of these species is found, and where we see the greatest pressure from small fishing fleets. There are two species that we haven’t observed for decades and that we believe are extinct in these areas. One of them is the lost shark
(Carcharhinus obsolerus) and the other is the blacktip smoothtooth shark (Carcharhinus leiodon).
Are there shark species that have disappeared locally or globally?
We know of many extinctions locally. A very clear example is the angelshark (Squatina squatina), an ambush predator that normally lives buried in the sediments of the seabed. It had a very wide distribution in the northeast Atlantic (Norway, the North Sea, Ireland, France and Spain) and one of the last places where it can now be seen is in the Canary Islands. It was commercially exploited, it was used for fish and chips, and now it has been replaced by other species. Today it has disappeared and most of its population is found in the Canary Islands.
When you started, was the risk of extinction for these species that great?
We didn’t know. When I started working at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in the 1990s, we did the first investigations to find out their situation. But there was no awareness of this degree of threat. So no one was interested in sharks. Now there is more interest than ever, there are foundations dedicated to sponsoring projects, more documentaries… Social concern has grown.
What three priority actions should be taken to protect sharks?
The first thing would undoubtedly be to have more sustainable fisheries; that fishermen have a way of life that can be sustained for many years and that at the same time we can keep fish stocks of all kinds at adequate levels. Secondly, it is necessary to recover the populations that have disappeared in some parts. And there should be a political will to pass laws that protect them.
Any more?
We also need marine protected areas. For some of these species there is no sustainable fishery because their biological characteristics do not match this concept, they allow it. (They breed little and are slow growing). If we capture them we have to be clear that they are going to disappear.
