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“The fishermen are going to close the door on us. They further worry that the exposure of these practices may jeopardize their relationships with the fishermen on whom they depend for information. This uneasiness is echoed by Felipe Galván-Magaña, Luis Malpica-Cruz, and other prominent Mexican scientists who study the white shark. But once I had that information, I felt obligated to put it out there.” “I didn’t love the potential side effects of publishing the paper. “It was an ethical dilemma for me,” Madigan explains. Yet with shark meat selling for pesos per kilogram, white shark fishing is barely worth the effort.īecause of this, the researchers were initially hesitant to publicize their findings, fearing the consequences for the economically vulnerable poachers. Indeed, as stocks of reliable commercial species continue to plummet, fishermen increasingly turn to less conventional sources of income-like the great white shark. Some 80 percent of fishing in the Gulf of California is considered unsustainable. Their reliance on the Gulf’s resources is taking a toll.

Many operate illegally, and most of the fishermen who pilot them eke out a living at or below the poverty line. Most of the 26,000 boats operating in the Gulf are pangas like the ones used by the poachers working out of Isla San Esteban. But the Gulf of California is large, and resources to monitor impacts on fish populations are scant. Harvesting great white sharks of any age is prohibited by Mexican law, as well as by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. The Gulf-with its long stretches of continental shelf and abundant fish-may be an additional birthing ground, or at least a nursery for growing youngsters. Newborn sharks are relatively common on the western coast of Baja California. The large number of adult females captured, combined with the timing of the entry of tagged females into the Gulf, also indicates something particularly exciting: the area may be a great white shark pupping ground. But scientists have tracked a few tagged females from Isla Guadalupe, and one tagged juvenile released off the coast of California, moving into the Gulf. The extent to which the sharks found in the Gulf are connected to the greater ENP population, which is divided between aggregations at Isla Guadalupe, Mexico, west of the Baja California peninsula, and the Farallon Islands, off the coast of San Francisco, California, is unknown. “Clearly there are more of them than has been acknowledged in the literature and in the popular press,” says study coauthor Aaron Carlisle, a shark specialist at the University of Delaware. Though there have been sporadic reports over the years, there hasn’t been strong evidence that they frequent the area in great enough numbers to support a fishery of this size. The study reveals how little is known about great whites in the Gulf of California. The death of even a handful of mature white sharks is cause for concern, as there are thought to be only a few hundred adults in the eastern North Pacific (ENP) population. If accurate, these recently published findings are alarming. Local reports and internet postings collected by Madigan’s collaborator Natalie Arnoldi, a marine ecologist at Stanford University in California, indicate that similar illegal fishing is likely occurring at Isla San Ildefonso, Mexico, 250 kilometers to the south. Using models based on known white shark measurements, he and his colleagues determined that four of the 14 sharks were juveniles and more than half may have been mature females. While interviewing fishermen about their practices and the species they encountered, he heard rumors of shark poaching.Īfter gaining the trust of the poachers, he was allowed to examine the teeth they had collected and was given copies of graphic photos and video depicting their harvest. Madigan, now with the University of Windsor in Ontario, was setting up a research project in the area at the time.

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From one, they extracted a full set of jaws. From each shark the fishermen kept a tooth. To conceal their activity, they mixed the flesh in with their legal catch. Plying the waters of the Gulf of California in small boats known as pangas, they hunted down the enormous fish, hauled them to remote beaches, and dismembered them. Read more stories like this at .īetween June and December 2017 alone, eight fishermen operating out of Isla San Esteban, Mexico, illegally caught and killed as many as 14 great white sharks. This article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems.

Gulf of california map