A required two thirds majority of CITES members voted to extend protections to oceanic whitetip sharks, porbeagle sharks, three species of hammerhead sharks, and the two species of manta rays. This marks a major increase in the number of sharks protected by CITES from three to eight species, and could prevent a total collapse of these threatened species.

Sharks are primarily targeted for their fins, which are traded to Asia for use in shark fin soup. Manta rays are caught and killed for their gill rakers — the part used to filter their food from the water — which have come into high demand in recent years as a purported health tonic used in Chinese medicine.

More coverage of this year’s CITES: The Shark Trust, The New York Times, Pew Charitable Trusts, Al Jazeera

Many experts agree that it is necessary to monitor the trade in fins of five shark species of concern: oceanic whitetip, porbeagle and three species of hammerhead sharks (scalloped, smooth and great).  These species are globally distributed, large-bodied and their fins are traded internationally in large numbers.  Four of the species have at least one population listed as Endangered or Critically Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).  In addition, four of the species are subject to conservation and management measures in one or more regional fisheries management organizations.  All of these species have also at some point been proposed for inclusion on Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

The guide can be accessed online here, and downloadable PDF versions in several languages are also available. For more information about how healthy shark populations are vital in maintaining a healthy marine ecosystem, see our threat page on predator loss.

The term “shark attack” is typically used by the media, government officials, researchers and the public to describe almost any kind of human-shark interaction — even those where no contact or injury occurs between humans and sharks.

Now, Christopher Neff of the University of Sydney, Australia, and Dr. Robert Hueter, leader of Mote Marine Laboratory’s Center for Shark Research in Sarasota, Fla. — the only Congressionally designated national research center in the U.S. focused on sharks — propose a new system of classification to support more accurate scientific reporting about shark interactions, along with more accurate public discussion about shark risk to swimmers and divers.

The international study, published this week in the peer-reviewed Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, istitled, “Science, policy, and the public discourse of shark ‘attack’: a proposal for reclassifying human–shark interactions.” A free download of the article is available at: http://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13412-013-0107-2

In the study, the authors analyzed shark statistics from around the world and found the term “shark attack” misleading in many cases. For instance, a 2009 government report from New South Wales, Australia, documented 200 shark attacks — but 38 of those involved no injuries to people. In Florida, often called the “Shark Attack Capital of the World”because of the number of reported shark attacks, only 11 fatal bites have been recorded over the past 129 years — a lower number than several other locations in the world, and vastly lower than deaths from other types of natural events such as drowning or lightning.

“Not all shark ‘attacks’ are created equal, and we certainly shouldn’t call bites on kayaks and bites on people the same thing,” says Neff, a doctoral candidate conducting the first study on policy responses to shark bites at the University of Sydney.

Dr. Hueter adds: “Nor should we equate the single bite of a 2-foot shark on a surfer’s toe with the fatal bite of a 15-foot shark on a swimmer, but that’s how the current language treats these incidents.”

To support more accurate reporting and discussion of shark incidents, the Neff-Hueter study groups them into four categories based on outcomes that can be clearly documented, rather than speculation over what the sharks’ motives and intentions were. These include:

Shark sightings: Sightings of sharks in the water in proximity to people with no physical contact.
Shark encounters: No bite takes place and no humans are injured, but physical contact occurs with a person or an inanimate object holding a person, such as a surfboard or boat. A shark might also bump a swimmer and its rough skin might cause a minor abrasion.

Shark bites: Bites by small or large sharks that result in minor to moderate injuries.
Fatal shark bites: One or more bites causing fatal injuries. The authors caution against using the term “shark attack” unless the motivation and intent of the shark are clearly established by experts, which is rarely possible.

“These new categories provide better information to the public so they can judge their levels of risk based on local shark activity,” Neff said. “If ‘sightings’ of sharks are increasing, or if‘encounters’ with kayaks are decreasing these are important pieces of information. There simply is no value in using ‘attack’ language. It is time to move past Jaws.”

“Our contemporary scientific understanding of sharks paints a very different picture than that current public discourse and even early research,” says Hueter, who is known worldwide for his expertise in shark biology, behavior and ecology. “Few sharks look like the large great whites you might see on the movie screen; of about 500 shark species on earth, most grow to less than 3 feet long. In addition, most shark species rarely, if ever, come into contact with humans. When they do, serious bites are the extremely rare exception rather than the rule.”

Despite these facts, the term “shark attack” has dominated the language due to outdated historical perceptions of sharks, the researchers say.

Sharks were labeled “man-eaters” two centuries ago by scientists who had a limited understanding of shark behavior and biology, and a researcher in the 1950s wrongly suggested sharks could go“rogue,” developing a taste for human flesh.

These concepts inflamed public concern and resulting government responses. Multiple nations have used shark hunts and intensive commercial fishing targeting sharks — and even deployed naval depth charges — to kill supposed “rogue” sharks and protect the public.

Popular culture — especially the novel and film Jaws in the 1970s — has strengthened rogue shark legends. News media reports also have contributed to misperceptions of human-shark interactions. The current study reviewed Associated Press articles in Florida during 2001 — known as the “Summer of the Shark” because of shark incidents ranging from minor to severe — and found that 79 percent of these stories used “attack” in the headline, even in the case of non-serious injuries.

Indiscriminate use of the term shark attack“can create a perception of a premeditated crime, lowering the public’s threshold for accepting shark bite incidents as random acts of nature. The narrative establishes villains and victims, cause and effect, perceptions of public risk, and a problem to be solved,” the authors say in the study.

In contrast, the Neff-Hueter naming system would provide an accurate and balanced way to describe shark risks, significantly adjusting reported statistics, the authors say:

In the government report from New South Wales, Australia, the new naming system would reclassify 200 shark “attacks” between 1900 and 2009 as: 56 fatal shark bites, 106 shark bites, 37 shark encounters and 1 shark sighting.

In Florida, the 637 confirmed cases of unprovoked shark “attacks” since 1882 would be reclassified as 11 fatal bites and 626 other interactions including bites, encounters, and a small fraction of sightings. (Shark incident data from the International Shark Attack File.)

“When public discussion centers on the idea that sharks are out there attacking humans, it doesn’t reflect the reality of what we have learned over the past 40 years about shark behavior and biology —sharks are not man-eaters, and in fact, many shark species are threatened by humans who overfish them. Using the ‘attack’ language really hinders public discourse about the need to protect shark species, especially those vulnerable to depletion or even extinction,” says Dr. Hueter.

The authors write: “In short, this is a call to scientists, public officials, and the media to reconsider their discourse on the subject of sharks and to improve the accuracy of information provided to the public.”

The researchers described their findings in a paper published online January 28 in PLOS ONE (http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0055048). The study was conducted in False Bay, South Africa where the scientists tracked 56 tagged white sharks of both sexes ranging in size from 1.7 to 5 meters over a period of 32 months.

“We found that white sharks showed high levels of residency to the seal colony over autumn and winter as expected, but we were very surprised to learn that female sharks showed equally high residency at inshore areas during spring and summer and that males were notably absent,” said Alison Kock, who led the study as part of her PhD research at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Kock explains that “the shift from the island in autumn and winter to the inshore region in spring and summer by female sharks mirrors the seasonal peaks in prey abundance including juvenile seals at the island in winter and a range of migratory fish along the inshore during the warmer months”.

White sharks are threatened apex predators and despite South Africa enacting protective legislation in 1991, there is limited knowledge available on how best to make such protection effective. Currently no critical area conservation plans exist for False Bay, or anywhere in South Africa. This study confirms False Bay as a critical area for white shark conservation and identifies that females are particularly at risk, due to their frequent use of the inshore areas of the Bay, which are impacted by fishing, pollution, and damage to natural habitat from coastal development.

Furthermore, the finding that female sharks frequent the inshore regions during spring and summer when recreational use peaks highlights the need for ongoing shark-human conflict mitigation strategies such as the Shark Spotter program in Cape Town, for which Kock serves as the research manager. The Shark Spotters aim to improve public safety while simultaneously conserving this vulnerable shark population.

Although the study focused locally, its findings have broad conservation and management implications because it highlights the need for understanding how behavioural patterns differ between sexes of the same population as this can influence a particular sex’s susceptibility to threats.  Co-author, Justin O’Riain, Associate Professor of behavioural ecology at UCT welcomed the findings as an important contribution to the broad field of predator spatial ecology,  “We have a wealth of such information for land predators and these results provide an important step in narrowing the knowledge gap between marine and terrestrial systems and assessing the extent of our generalities”.

In addition to Kock and O’Riain, the co-authors of the paper are Katya Mauff, a statistics professional at UCT, Michael Meÿer and Deon Kotze from the Department of Environmental Affairs, Oceans and Coasts Branch and Charles Griffiths, Professor of marine biology at UCT. This research was funded by the Save Our Seas Foundation and the Department of Environmental Affairs provided research equipment and ship time. The National Research Foundation (SA) provided bursary funding for Alison Kock.

Although researchers have observed that certain corals withstand stresses better than others, the molecular mechanisms behind this enhanced resilience remain unclear. For their study, Palumbi, lead author Daniel Barshis, a Stanford postdoctoral scholar, and other researchers looked at shallow-reef corals off Ofu Island in American Samoa to determine how they survive waters that often get hotter than 32 degrees Celsius / 90 degrees Fahrenheit during summer-time low tides.

Utilizing cutting edge DNA sequencing technology, the scientists examined the corals’ gene expression when subjected to water temperatures up to 35 degrees Celsius / 95 degrees Fahrenheit. “These technologies are usually applied to human genome screens and medical diagnoses, but we’re now able to apply them to the most pressing questions in coral biology, like which genes might help corals survive extreme heat,” said Barshis.

Heat-resistant and heat-sensitive corals had a similar reaction to experimental heat: hundreds of genes “changed expression” or turned on to reduce and repair damage. However, the heat-resistant corals showed an unexpected pattern: 60 heat stress genes were already turned on even before the experiment began. These genes are “frontloaded” by heat resistant corals – already turned on and ready to work even before the heat stress began.  “It’s like already having your driver’s license and boarding pass out when you get close to the TSA screener at the airport, rather than starting to fumble through your wallet once you get to the front of the line,” Palumbi said.

The findings show that DNA sequencing can offer broad insights into the differences that may allow some organisms to persist longer amid future changes to global climate. “We’re going to put a lot of effort into protecting coral reefs, but what happens if we wake up in 30 years and all our efforts are in vain because those corals have succumbed to climate change,” Palumbi said.

Learn more about the effects of climate change and habitat destruction on corals and the rest of the marine environment.

The results of the study, which includes lead co-author Dr Cathy Lucas, a marine biologist at the University of Southampton, appear in the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The key finding of the study shows global jellyfish populations undergo concurrent fluctuations with successive decadal periods of rise and fall, including a rising phase in the 1990s and early 2000s that has contributed to the current perception of a global increase in jellyfish abundance. The previous period of high jellyfish numbers during the 1970s went unnoticed due to limited research on jellyfish at the time, less awareness of global-scale problems and a lower capacity for information sharing (e.g. no Internet).

While there has been no increase over the long-term, the authors detected a hint of a slight increase in jellyfish since 1970, although this trend was countered by the observation that there was no difference in the proportion of increasing vs. decreasing jellyfish populations over time.

Dr Cathy Lucas, who is based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, says: “Sustained monitoring is now required over the next decade to shed light with statistical confidence whether the weak increasing linear trend in jellyfish populations after 1970 is an actual shift in the baseline or part of a larger oscillation.”

To date, media and scientific opinion for the current perception of a global increase in jellyfish was evidenced by a few local and regional case studies. Although there are areas where jellyfish have increased; the situation with the Giant Jellyfish in Japan and parts of the Mediterranean are classic examples, there are also areas where jellyfish numbers have remained stable, fluctuated over decadal periods, or actually decreased over time.

Increased speculation and discrepancies about current and future jellyfish blooms by the media and in climate and science reports formed the motivation for the study. “There are major consequences for getting the answer correct for tourism, fisheries and management decisions as they relate to climate change and changing ocean environments,” says Dr Lucas. “The important aspect about our work is that we have provided the long-term baseline backed with all data available to science, which will enable scientists to build on and eventually repeat these analyses in a decade or two from now to determine whether there has been a real increase in jellyfish.”

“The realisation that jellyfish synchronously rise and fall around the world should now lead researchers to search for the long-term natural and climate drivers of jellyfish populations, in addition to begin monitoring jellyfish in open ocean and Southern Hemisphere regions that are underrepresented in our analyses,” says lead author Dr Rob Condon, marine scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab (DISL) in Alabama.

Given the potential damage posed by jellyfish blooms to fisheries, tourism and other human industries, the findings of the group foretell recurrent phases of rise and fall in jellyfish populations that society should be prepared to face.

Over the past century, mercury pollution in the surface ocean has more than doubled, as a result of past and present human activities such as coal burning, mining, and other industrial processes. The research findings by C-MERC published December 3 also examine the effects of local mercury inputs that dominate some near-shore coastal waters. The research is presented through nine scientific papers in Environmental Health Perspectives and is the culmination of two years of work by approximately 70 mercury and marine scientists from multiple disciplines including biology, ecotoxicology, engineering, environmental geochemistry, and epidemiology. The research provides a synthesis of the science on the sources, fate, and human exposure to mercury in marine systems by tracing the pathways and transformation of mercury to methylmercury from sources to seafood to consumers.

The team’s findings are especially timely, as the U.S. and other nations prepare for the fifth session of the United Nations Environment Programme’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC5) on January 13-18, 2013 in Geneva, Switzerland, which is working to prepare a legally binding instrument to control mercury releases to the environment.

“Despite the fact that most people’s mercury exposure is through the consumption of marine fish, this is the first time that scientists have worked together to synthesize what is known about how mercury moves from its various sources to different areas of the ocean and then up the food chain to the seafood most people eat,” said Celia Y. Chen, Ph.D., Research Professor of Biological Sciences at Dartmouth. She is a co-author of the new Environmental Health Perspectives papers on nutrient supply and mercury dynamics, and mercury sources in the Gulf of Maine, and authored an editorial on the subject in the journal, and is also a lead author of “Sources to Seafood.” Chen will represent Dartmouth as an accredited non-governmental organization at INC5 in an observer status. Copies of C-MERC’s Sources to Seafood report will be made available to INC5 attendees.

C-MERC research suggests that mercury deposited from the atmosphere ranges from 56% of the mercury loading to several large gulfs to approximately 90% in the open ocean.

“Oceans are home to large tuna and swordfish, which together account for more than half of the mercury intake from seafood for the overall U.S. population,” said Elsie M. Sunderland, Assistant Professor of Aquatic Science at Harvard University. She is a lead author of an Environmental Health Perspectives paper on mercury sources in the Gulf of Maine and a lead author of “Sources to Seafood.”

Model estimates from the report indicate that methylmercury concentrations in marine fish will decline roughly in proportion to decreases in mercury inputs, though the timing of the response will vary.

“Our model estimates show that for the North Atlantic Ocean, a 20% cut in the amount of mercury deposited to the ocean from the atmosphere would lead to about a 16% decline in mercury levels in fish… But it is important to realize that achieving a 20% decrease in mercury deposition will require substantial cuts in current anthropogenic emissions, given the already very sizeable build-up of mercury in terrestrial environments and ocean waters,” said Robert P. Mason, Ph.D., Professor of Marine Sciences at the University of Connecticut. Mason is a lead author of the Environmental Health Perspectives paper on mercury biogeochemical cycling in the ocean and a lead author of “Sources to Seafood.”

The researchers estimate that river inputs can be as much as 80% of the total mercury inputs to some estuaries. “The impact of mercury released to coastal waters from watersheds via rivers has been a somewhat underappreciated aspect of the problem. Yet, these bays and estuaries can be important sources of fish for local anglers, thus controls on these sources can have substantial local benefits,” explained Driscoll.

“C-MERC’s synthesis of research identifies the most important drivers of mercury pollution to different oceans and coastal waters, and can help policymakers understand the links between environmental processes, methylmercury levels in marine ecosystems, human exposure, and the human health effects—all of which are critical to the discussion of how local, regional and global mercury pollution affects the world’s supply of seafood,” said Chen.

Approximately one-third of all mercury emissions are associated with current industrial sources and other human activities that can be controlled. “The good news is that the science suggests that if mercury inputs are curtailed, mercury levels in ocean fish will decline and decrease the need for warnings to limit consumption of this globally important food source,” added Chen.

For more information, visit the Coastal and Marine Mercury Ecosystem Research Collaborative site at Dartmouth University.

“Parliament’s overwhelming support for strengthening the EU finning ban represents a significant victory for shark conservation in the EU and beyond,” said Ali Hood, Shark Trust Director of Conservation. “Because of the EU’s influence at international fisheries bodies, this action holds great promise for combating this wasteful practice on a global scale.”

The EU banned finning in 2003, but the associated regulation includes loopholes that allow shark fins to be removed on board and landed separately from shark bodies, which hampers enforcement. 

“We owe so much of our success to the tens of thousands of divers across Europe who voiced their concern for sharks,” said Suzanne Pleydell, Director for Project AWARE Foundation in Europe. “By demonstrating the economic benefits of sound shark stewardship, divers brought new EU Member States to the debate to support a stronger finning policy that reflects the values of the entire European Union, not just its shark fishing powers.”
Parliament’s final report now goes to the EU Council of Ministers and Commission as part of the process to finalize the regulation. Conservation groups stressed that finning bans alone are insufficient to save sharks.

“Strong finning bans are fundamental to effective shark fisheries management and particularly important for shark fishing powers like the EU, but our work is far from done,” said Sonja Fordham, President of Shark Advocates International. “We urge swift finalization of the amended finning regulation, and remain committed to securing additional, complementary safeguards including science-based limits on shark catch and trade.”

The groups are turning their sights to the next big battleground for sharks: the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) whose Parties meet in March to consider proposals to list commercially valuable, threatened shark species, including porbeagles, hammerheads, and oceanic whitetips.

His team developed a guide for law enforcement personnel and customs agents to be able to distinguish fins of oceanic whitetip, porbeagle and three species of hammerheads from other species in trade. This guide (versions in English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese and Arabic) is primarily designed to help with the implementation of ICCAT and other RFMO protections for these species, as well as CITES appendix II listing should the votes be there in March 2013. The team are currently developing an app for this as well. In any event, it is all part of their efforts to improve international management for oceanic whitetips.

You can see Demian’s video about tagging oceanic whitetip sharks here:
http://youtu.be/207s61M_AQc

Ryan updates us: “After a frustrating summer of not seeing any sharks, we managed to get all our tags deployed (7 tags) and 2 CEFAS tags two weeks ago. We got our two SPOT tags away and we now have an interactive map on our websites where you can follow the sharks movements. This work made the national news, and the full article can be read on the website of the Irish Times.

You can track the porbeagles on the site of the Irish Elasmobranch Group.