August 5, 2013 — I tried to eat a shark last week and couldn’t find one. Recent estimates suggest that as many as 100 million sharks are killed by man each year whereas fewer than 20 people are killed by sharks. That means that I had about a 5,000,000:1 chance of being the eater, not the eaten, but I still struck out.
My plan was to kick off Shark Week by feasting on Squalus acanthias, aka Spiny Dogfish, and reporting my impressions. A local chef achieved minor celebrity status last year by feeding one of the omnivorous TV cooking show hosts the “best dogfish” he’d ever eaten. While this particular diner’s habits must be approached with caution– he pretends to like beetles and calf brains, for example–I thought this would be a fish I could try in good conscience.
Spiny dogfish are one of the few fish populations in good biological condition that New England fishermen can still catch, having recovered from a crash back in the early 1990’s. Once a fish despised because of the havoc it caused with fishing gear and its voracious predation on more valuable commercial fish, many fishermen who can no longer find cod or other prime species are turning to dogfish out of financial desperation. Eating shark for one meal seemed the least I could do to stimulate market demand.
Spiny dogfish has cycled through fish markets several times in the past. Stuck with a name that reminds many consumers uncomfortably of their cherished canine at home, dogfish mechandisers have resorted to various aliases over time, from “rock salmon” to “mud shark” to “Japanese halibut” (seriously!). The most recent New England marketing label is “Cape shark,” a reference to the swarming abundance of these sharks off Cape Cod.
While most sharks are decidedly more valuable left in the oceans, I was willing to make an exception for dogfish, at least in the short run. They, together with their cousins, the skates, have moved into the vacuum created by overfishing of cod and a number of types of flounder. More than “moved in” to that niche, they seem to have almost overrun it. Without some focused removals of dogfish and skates, some scientists think it might be difficult, if not impossible, for a number of groundfish species to recover.
Read the full story at Talking Fish