June 10, 2019 — Say the word “shark” to a New Englander these days and the mind jumps straight to great white sharks, which have seen a remarkable increase here in recent years.
But great whites aren’t the only sharks around. And it turns out we know little about many of the sharks that frequent New England’s waters.
Now there’s a new effort to understand how catch-and-release fishing of sandbar sharks impacts their survival.
“We want to know if the catch and release processes is harming the fish in any way, and if it is, we want to work with fishermen to try to figure out what is it about the capture event that is causing the sharks to die,” Jeff Kneebone told Living Lab Radio.
Kneebone is a fisheries scientist with the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at the New England Aquarium and much of his research focuses on figuring out where sharks are and what they’re doing as they move around the region.
Twenty years ago, Sandbar sharks had a large population off the mid-Atlantic coast. When the population dropped, it became illegal to catch and keep them. But fishermen still are allowed to pursue them using catch-and-release fishing.
Given the sharks’ susceptibility to population declines, Kneebone wants to know more about what happens after they are caught and released. When they die, why?
“Is it how long they’re being fought? Is it how they’re being handled when they’re landed on the beach? Is it where they’re being hooked?” he said.