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NOAA Fisheries
The science behind
shark conservation and the spiny dogfish.
Introducing Tobey Curtis,
NOAA Fisheries Shark Researcher
My name is Tobey Curtis.
I'm a shark researcher and
Fishery Policy Analyst for NOAA Fisheries.
I've conducted research on the West Coast
and the East Coast on sharks.
I've studies white sharks in the past,
bull sharks in Florida.
I was a fishery observer for a number of years,
studying sharks in the long-line shark fishing
fleet off of Florida and most recently
I've been studying basking sharks here off
of New England, doing satellite tagging research.
Why is shark conservation important?
Sharks are of great conservation concern
worldwide because they've been overfished
in just about every ocean where they've
been accessible to foreign fishing fleets.
Fortunately here in the U.S.
we've got ahead of the curve
and we're trying to manage them now
and some stocks are recovering, some faster than others
but we're making progress and the U.S.
really is a world leader
when it comes to shark conservation.
What's a hot species for conservation?
Spiny dogfish
Spiny dogfish is an important fishery in New England.
It's the largest volume shark fishery
in the country.
Like other sharks, they are actually very long-lived.
They're very late to mature and they have few young.
So they're very vulnerable to overfishing
and we've done a lot of research here off
the northeast to study their population dynamics
and we monitor their population annually
with the trawl survey conducted by
the Northeast Fisheries Science Center
and that has allowed us to really do some
quite good stock assessments and over time
we've shown that the population has
definitely rebounded from the overfishing era of
the 1990s.
How did the spiny dogfish
make a comeback from overfishing?
The main focus of the spiny dogfish recovery plan
was reducing quotas and trip limits
for the fishery.
So the fishing fleet took quite a hit
a number of years early on and had very
restrictive quotas and trip limits
but towards the end of that rebuilding plan,
as of 2010 they've rebuilt
and the quotas have increased dramatically
as have the trip limits since then.
So, can we eat spiny dogfish?
People eat spiny dogfish mainly in Europe as fish and chips.
Almost all the products caught here in the U.S.
are exported to Europe.
Tobey, any final thoughts on shark conservation?
Sharks are very important
to marine ecosystems worldwide
and it's very important to
conserve them because they're top predators
in the environment,
they control fish populations that they feed on
and they're important to the balance of marine
ecosystems, so their conservation is very important
and they're very vulnerable to
overfishing, so precautionary management
is really needed for sharks.
NOAA Fisheries
www.fisheries.noaa.gov
CREDITS & COPYRIGHT
Basking shark footage:
POND 5
First underwater shot of spiny dogfish shark
(Squalus acanthias) feeding in tank:
SULIKOWSKI SHARK and FISH RESEARCH LAB,
University of New England
spiny dogfish shark: SEATTLE AQUARIUM