Why We Need To Think About People This Shark Week
By: Wildlife Conservation Society
Tags: Indonesia, Conservation, Shark Week, Sharks, Environment

Each year, the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week celebrates the weird and wonderful nature of sharks and their cartilaginous relatives. However, with recent news of even more of these fishes being assessed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List, perhaps we should be more worried about the rapid disappearance of sharks from our waters than we are about their pointy teeth and thrashing tails.

The primary reason for shark declines is overfishing. Sharks are susceptible to capture in a wide range of fisheries, with conservative life history strategies making many species vulnerable to overfishing. As such, there is an urgent need to reduce capture of sharks across global fisheries to prevent further population declines and species extinctions.

Indonesia is a hotspot of shark species diversity and the world’s largest shark-fishing nation. It is a global priority for protecting shark species and halting shark overfishing. However, in a country as vast and diverse as Indonesia, with a fisheries sector dominated by small-scale operators, this is no simple task.

A tricky dilemma: shark conservation objectives vs. needs of local people. Photo credit: Hollie Booth

In Indonesia, diverse shark species are caught for a variety of reasons — including for profit, for local livelihoods and food security, for cultural reasons, and as accidental bycatch. Regulatory action is complicated by the socio-economic vulnerability of coastal communities, many of which have high dependency on marine resources. Tailored approaches are required that can effectively reduce shark fishing mortality whilst enabling coastal communities to continue benefiting from the ocean.

To address these challenges, WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society) has been taking a long-term multi-faceted approach to reduce mortality of priority shark species in problematic fisheries in Indonesia. Our longest running shark project is located in Tanjung Luar, Lombok, West Nusa Tenggara. Tanjung Luar serves as a landing site for a small-scale semi-commercial shark fishery, which primarily targets pelagic sharks using longlines.

The most frequently landed species include silky, tiger, and hammerhead sharks — all of which are at risk of extinction. Current levels of fishing mortality for these species are almost certainly unsustainable. Yet, given the current regulatory and market environment, there is a lack of legal, sustainable alternatives to shark fishing that offer similar financial returns to the shark fishers.

“Shark regulation is not only for sharks themselves, but also for humans. I want my grandchildren to be able to see sharks in Indonesia before they disappear like the sawfish,” observes Pak As Syamsudin, Chief of Tanjung Luar fisheries auction place for the West Nusa Tenggara fisheries department.

Shark meat also provides a cheap source of animal protein for one of the poorest regions in Indonesia. Thus, WCS is faced with a tricky dilemma in Tanjung Luar between the conservation imperative to reduce unsustainable capture of threatened shark species, and the moral imperative to ‘do no harm’ to vulnerable coastal communities.