The sea air isn’t all that’s salty when fishermen in this Cape Cod town talk about the hated spiny dogfish.
Fishermen consider the small shark, renowned for its stunning appetite, the vermin of the ocean. They say the once-threatened dogfish has rebounded under federal protections to an insatiable mass that’s devouring more valuable and scarce fish that regulators are trying to restore, such as cod, while it destroys nets, steals bait and eats catch right off their hooks.
"It’s a [expletive] plague of locusts is what it is," hook fisherman Peter Taylor said. "I don’t care if I make a penny on dogfish, we just need to kill them."
Fishermen want to catch more of the ornery, schooling predator to dent its population and make more money off it, but rules forbid that.
Federal regulators say though fishermen see dogfish everywhere, "they’re not seeing the whole picture," said Maggie Mooney-Seus, a National Marine Fisheries Service spokeswoman.