Earthlaw defended the new protections on behalf of the Center for Marine Conservation, Biodiversity Legal Foundation, National Audubon, and Environmental Defense Fund. Sharks are cool. Their basic body plan, perfected when the ancestors of lawyers were slimy creatures in the Permian swamps, has remained largely unchanged over the last 400 million years. One reason it hasn't changed is that, with few exceptions, sharks are very effective predators. After spending 400 million years as a top predator, sharks are not equipped to survive as prey, and in the 1980's, humans started to prey on sharks as never before.
Sharks are relatively rare, slow to breed, and take a long time to reach sexual maturity.
Although sharks reproduce slowly, they normally live a long time. Unfortunately, shark fishing took off in the 1980's. In response to extreme overfishing of formerly common fish species, the Federal government instituted a subsidized marketing program to encourage people to eat sharks instead. International demand for shark fins, to make shark-fin soup, also grew. By 1987, fishermen were killing more large coastal sharks than were being born.