It is found that large sharks have been “eliminated” from the Gulf. Such sharks were the Gulf’s top predators until about 1988, when rodeo records indicate that they abruptly vanished. The scientists blame the federal government. Sean Powers, a marine biologist with the University of South Alabama’s Sea Lab, told that the National Marine Fisheries Service identified sharks in the late ’70s and early ’80s as an underutilized resource in the Gulf of Mexico.
According to Sean Powers the government provided loans and other incentives to encourage commercial fishermen to angle for the big sharks. Those fishermen, outfitted with longline gear paid for with federal funds, proved adept. Longlines — consisting of a main line five or more miles long festooned with thousands of hooks — are among the most efficient of all commercial fishing methods.
In the early 1970s, before the government promoted shark fishing on a grand scale, all commercial fishermen in the Gulf brought in less than 200,000 pounds per year. By 1986, the commercial haul was around 2 million pounds, and by 1989 more than 12 million pounds. Then it crashed, falling year after year. In 2007, the most recent data is available, the total harvest was around 2 million pounds.
The scientists observed that big sharks, including tiger sharks and bulls, each of which routinely reached 800-plus pounds, are now functionally extinct from the Gulf of Mexico. They said that learning shark life history is very important as they are particularly vulnerable to overfishing. Powers said that rodeo records published in the Press-Register showed the situation perfectly. The big ones disappeared from the rodeo leaderboards in the late ’80s, according to the research, just as the commercial harvest was at its peak.
