Fishing for Answers: How Marine Wildlife and Commercial Fishing Overlap - Oceana USA

Report | November, 2017

Fishing for Answers: How Marine Wildlife and Commercial Fishing Overlap

 

Oceana’s new report shows the overlay of fishing activity with tagged blue sharks, demonstrating a cutting-edge approach to study the impacts of commercial fishing activities on marine wildlife and opening the door to inform future conservation and management efforts.

 

 

 

 

Oceana teamed with shark researchers Dr. Austin Gallagher (Beneath the Waves) and Dr. Neil Hammerschlag (University of Miami) to tag ten blue sharks off the East Coast of the United States in June 2016. Satellites collected and relayed the location information of the tagged sharks over the 110-day reporting period. The shark tracks were then added to a custom workspace in Global Fishing Watch, which provides the first global view of commercial fishing activity, to create an interactive map portraying the interactions between these sharks and nearby commercial fishing vessels. Oceana identified four occasions where a tagged blue shark was near a vessel while it was likely fishing.

Read the Press Release

Media Contact: Megan Jordan, mjordan@oceana.org, +1.202.868.4061