Britain: endangered porbeagle sharks

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This video is called A porbeagle shark comes along to inspect a wellhead.

From British daily The Independent:

Endangered shark under attack from Cornish fishermen

It’s a beautiful, benign – and endangered – relative of the great white. So why isn’t more being done to stop fishermen going after the porbeagle?

By Peter Marren

Published: 05 April 2007

Three years ago a Cornish fisherman had a rare stroke of luck.

Off the coast of the county, on his 40-foot fishing boat The Prevail, he encountered a large shoal of sharks.

Their streamlined, spindle-shaped bodies and characteristic pointed noses told him this was the porbeagle, an ocean-going, cold-water relative of the great white shark.

This was lucky for three reasons. Firstly, large aggregations of porbeagle are increasingly unusual.

Secondly, the porbeagle is the most valuable shark in the ocean, worth around £2 per kilo or up to £500 per shark to the fisherman.

It is worth a lot more by the time it ends up on a plate in top restaurants as “veau de mer”. This is not a fish you can buy in a chip shop.

And, thirdly, because, despite scientific recommendations in 2005 and 2006 to close the North-east Atlantic fishery completely, porbeagle fishing is unregulated.

Any fisherman lucky enough to come across large numbers of porbeagle – or for that matter any other shark except the basking shark or the great white – can catch as many as he likes.

March 2013. A tagging study has revealed that porbeagle sharks in the Gulf of St. Lawrence could severely impact the number of migrating American eels in the region: here.

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