LONDON: In popular lore they’re the most fearsome killers in the sea, but for decades sharks were playing the role of the victim. Culled and targeted for their fins, sharks in United States waters were in serious decline in the 1990s and early 2000s.
But a recent government study gives researchers hope that shark populations may be creeping upward, including off of Southeastern North Carolina.
This week, the Fisheries Service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration publicized its 2015 Coastal Shark Survey, during which more than 2,800 sharks were tagged. That’s the most in the survey’s 29-year history, and a thousand-shark increase from the last survey in 2012.
Lisa Natanson, a NOAA research fisheries biologist and the survey’s chief scientist, has been on every study but one since 1986 — the survey is conducted every two to three years.
“I started noticing right off an increase,” she said of this year’s survey. “Usually, our really huge catches are farther north, and we started getting huge catches right away.”
The survey works sort of like a shark census; instead of knocking on doors, between April and May scientists visited 52 research stations from Florida to North Carolina. Each station has 300 long lines that researchers bait with spiny dogfish before dropping to the ocean floor — anywhere from 30 to 240 feet below. When sharks are caught, they’re brought aboard, tagged and released.
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