ENVIRONMENT : Great Predator of the Sea Finds Itself a Victim of Predation : Despite federal controls on overfishing, sharks in the Atlantic are under threat. Scientists urge placing some species on the endangered list.

Two years after the imposition of strict federal quotas on shark fishing and a ban on the related practice of “finning,” there is little evidence that the depleted population of large coastal sharks in the Atlantic Ocean is recovering from years of overfishing.

In fact, many scientists say that the threat to the ocean’s most fearsome fish, including the great white shark of “Jaws” fame, is so severe that some species should now be listed as endangered and given the same type of global protections that apply to whales and dolphins.

Driving the commercial market for sharks is the Asian demand for fins, used in a soup believed to act as a sexual stimulant. Florida-based brokers pay up to $24 a pound for top-grade shark fins. That price makes finning--cutting off the shark’s dorsal fin and dumping the wounded animal in the sea to die--highly profitable.

But a growing U.S. taste for shark meat has also helped spawn a directed fishery so vast and efficient that some prized species of large coastal sharks could be wiped out, scientists warn.

Beneath the waves, the disappearance of the marine world’s top predator would ripple down the food chain, triggering catastrophic fluctuations in entire populations of stingrays, octopuses, bait fish, lobsters, sea birds and even mammals.

“I don’t think most people understand what happens when you drastically reduce an apex predator population from the environment,” said shark expert Steve Branstetter, who notes that the numbers of some heavily fished shark species have declined by as much as 75% in the last two decades.

“There are no good examples in the marine world. But we know that on land, if you remove coyotes or wolves from the environment, you see rabbit populations go wild. They eat all the vegetation, then the deer population crashes and you have cycles of rise and fall.

“The worst part is that I don’t think anybody cares,” said Branstetter, a biologist with the Gulf and South Atlantic Fisheries Development Foundation in Tampa, Fla. “To many people, a good shark is a dead shark.”

Indeed, 19 years after the movie “Jaws” reduced an age-old human fear to a two-hour horror story, shark hunting remains popular as sport and rite of passage. Photographs of beaming fishermen standing next to dead makos and hammerheads are still a sports page cliche.

But recreational fishing is no longer the chief threat to large coastal sharks. The U.S. commercial catch of sharks topped 15 million pounds in 1994, producing a harvest valued at $20 million.

Last year a shark-management plan drawn up by the National Marine Fisheries Service set quotas for 39 species of shark found in the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, and banned the practice of finning. When this year’s quota of 3,060 metric tons was met Aug. 10, the commercial season closed.

The 1995 quota is supposed to rise to 3,800 metric tons. However, two Marine Fisheries Service advisory committees, alarmed by the sharks’ slow recovery rate, have recommended that next year’s quota be held at the 1994 level. The U.S. Commerce Department is expected to approve the lower limits.

“I think we overestimated the potential for the stock to recover,” Branstetter said. “It’s going to take a decade or more even to get sharks back to the level of 1986, when they were already reduced from 1970s levels by as much as 50%.”

(There is no quota on sharks caught in the Pacific Ocean, although a 1994 California law prohibits the taking of great white sharks without a permit from the state Department of Fish and Game.)

The U.S. shark catch began to grow exponentially in the early 1980s, first behind a burgeoning recreational interest fueled by a post-”Jaws” mystique of sharks as the grizzlies of the deep and a glut of big-money tournaments. But by the late 1980s, when consumers began discovering shark meat as table fare and as the Asian market for fins continued to build, the commercial catch on longlines and in gill nets far outstripped the recreational take.

In 1979, the total commercial shark catch on the East Coast was 135 tons. Ten years later the total was 7,122 tons, an increase of more than 5,000%.

While several states and a few other countries have passed laws to regulate shark fishing, some scientists favor global actions to protect shark species that are in decline. That issue is expected to be taken up in November when representatives of more than 120 nations meet at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.

International laws protecting sharks are still years away, scientists say. But according to Sonja Fordham of the Center for Marine Conservation in Washington, “it’s definitely time for international management. Because of their slow growth rate, late maturity and small number of young, sharks cannot withstand intense fishing pressure. When that happens, the populations just collapse.”

The notion that sharks--sleek, efficient predators that have ruled the world’s oceans for 400 million years--could themselves be the victims of predation is difficult for many to accept. Sharks do occasionally bite people--an average of 23 shark attacks in U.S. waters, mostly off Florida, are reported each year--and some commercial fishermen say that they catch as many sharks as ever.

Rusty Hudson, who brokers shark fins for a Hong Kong dealer from his home in Port Orange, Fla., says government bureaucrats use inaccurate catch data and are “playing politics with science” to keep quotas too low.

But most commercial fishermen and scientists agree: Shark stocks have plummeted in recent years. In Chesapeake Bay, studies by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science show that numbers of sandbar sharks, a large-finned species that accounts for the bulk of the East Coast commercial catch, have declined by as much as 80% over the last 20 years.

Virginia Institute biologist John A. Musick says declines in populations of dusky sharks, another commercially valuable species, are similar.

Eric Sander, 37, who operates the 40-foot commercial boat Marsea out of Daytona Beach, Fla., also has noticed. A few hours and several miles off Florida’s east coast, Sander and his crew throw out 600 baited hooks on longlines that can stretch over eight miles of ocean floor.

“We used to catch 40 to 50 sharks a night,” he said. “Now it might be eight or 10. There has been a definite decline.”

To enable independent fishermen like Sander to compete with bigger commercial fleets, a 4,000-pound “trip limit” was imposed this year, meaning that every boat must return to the dock when that quota is met.

But Sander sees the day approaching when each fisherman, in addition to the federal license now required, will also be issued an individual seasonal quota on sharks. “As restrictive as that is, it’s probably the only way to get a handle on the overfishing,” he said.

Since sharks reproduce slowly--at a rate of only 2% annually--more restrictions are likely. Fordham is lobbying the Marine Fisheries Service to ban fishing in known shark pupping grounds during the months of April, May and June. She said she favors drastically reducing the number of shark-fishing licenses issued, a figure that now exceeds 1,500. A shark-management plan for the Pacific has also been discussed.

“The management plan we have now is a start, but it’s not strong enough,” she said. “Sharks are extremely vulnerable, and a sustainable fishery may not be possible.

“At least people are looking at the big picture now. People see that footage on the Discovery Channel of sharks being finned and they are appalled. I’d like to think that the tide is turning.”