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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Andrew Temple, Professor Per Berggren, Professor Selina Stead
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND).
To achieve sustainable shark fisheries, it is key to understand not only the biological drivers and environmental consequences of overfishing, but also the social and economic drivers of fisher behavior. The extinction risk of sharks is highest in coastal tropical waters, where small-scale fisheries are most prevalent. Small-scale fisheries provide a critical source of economic and nutritional security to coastal communities, and these fishers are among the most vulnerable social and economic groups. We used Kenya’s and Zanzibar’s smallscale shark fisheries, which are illustrative of the many data-poor, small-scale shark fisheries worldwide, as case studies to explore the relationship between extinction risk and the economic and nutritional value of sharks. To achieve this, we combined existing data on shark landings, extinction risk, and nutritional value with sales data at 16 key landing sites and information from interviews with 476 fishers. Shark fisheries were an important source of economic and nutritional security, valued at >US$4 million annually and providing enough nutrition for tens of thousands of people. Economically and nutritionally, catches were dominated by threatened species (72.7% and 64.6–89.7%, respectively). The most economically valuable species were large and slow to reproduce (e.g. mobulid rays, wedgefish, and bull, silky, and mako sharks) and therefore more likely to be threatened with extinction. Given the financial incentive and intensive fishing pressure, small-scale fisheries are undoubtedly major contributors to the decline of threatened coastal shark species. In the absence of effective fisheries management and enforcement, we argue that within smallscale fisheries the conditions exist for an economically incentivized feedback loop in which vulnerable fishers are driven to persistently overfish vulnerable and declining shark species. To protect these species from extinction, this feedback loop must be broken.
Author(s): Temple AJ, Berggren P, Jiddawi N, Wambiji N, Poonian CNS, Salmin YN, Berumen MN, Stead SM
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Conservation Biology
Year: 2024
Pages: ePub ahead of Print
Online publication date: 16/05/2024
Acceptance date: 12/03/2024
Date deposited: 23/05/2024
ISSN (print): 0888-8892
ISSN (electronic): 1523-1739
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, Inc.
URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.14292
DOI: 10.1111/cobi.14292
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