Fishing Limit Cited in Shark Attacks

As beach-goers warily eye East Coast waters where shark attacks claimed three more victims over the Labor Day weekend, a critic of government regulation has caused a stir by arguing that tighter limits on shark fishing may be one factor behind such attacks.

Shark experts call the arguments of author Sean Paige “baloney” and note that there have been fewer shark attacks this year than last. But they don’t dispute statistics showing a clear increase in shark attacks since 1993, when the National Marine Fisheries Service began enforcing a quota on shark fishing.

“It’s pretty simple,” said Paige, author of a controversial report on shark regulations. “If you cut the number of sharks allowed to be caught, you increase the amount of sharks in the water. And when there’s more sharks swimming around, there’s going to be more shark attacks.”

The latest strikes killed David Peltier, 10, of Richmond, Va., who was attacked Saturday while he was surfing with his dad off Virginia Beach. At a beach 130 miles south, near Cape Hatteras, N.C., Sergi Zaloukaev, 28, was killed Monday and his girlfriend, Natalia Slobonskaya, 23, was badly bitten.

She lost her left foot and a huge chunk of her hip. She is listed in critical condition.

Since 1993, the fisheries service has gradually tightened its shark quota, to the ire of commercial fishermen who haul in the fish primarily for shark fin soup, popular in China. Last year, the fisheries service established a moratorium for 19 species of shark, including the great white.

Government officials say they were responding to overfishing, especially off the coast of Florida. The warm Atlantic waters are home to hundreds of types of sharks. Shark fin soup and shark-based medicines became popular in the late 1970s, and since then Florida’s shark population has plummeted by up to 75%, said Gordon Helm, a fisheries service spokesman. The annual catch went from 300,000 pounds in 1979 to 16 million pounds a decade later.

Sharks reproduce slowly. They don’t lay eggs and they have a long gestation period. Aggressive fishing was threatening to wipe them out, Helm said.

Paige, who published his report in the conservative National Review earlier this month and is a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, disagrees, and the federal government has been scrambling to rebut his claims.

“The science is soft,” said Paige, who is writing a book on the fishing industry. “The government will admit there’s no way to tell exactly how many sharks are out there.”

Nationwide, the number of attacks averaged 23 per year from 1990 through 1993. Since the quota was established, the number of attacks has averaged 35. The statistics for Florida, where state officials have added their own restrictions to protect the shark population, are more dramatic.

The pre-quota average in Florida was 11 attacks per year. Since 1993, the annual average is 25. Attacks in Hawaii and California, states with less-stringent shark fishing regulations, did not increase over the same period. The data are from the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville and are considered authoritative.

Conservation experts say Paige, and his supporters in the shark fishing industry, are skewing the numbers. “This is baloney,” said Robert Hueter, the director of the Center for Shark Research at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla. “His argument looks like it makes sense, but the statistics jump around year to year and shouldn’t be used to draw such conclusions.”

The two debated live on CNN on Tuesday, with Hueter saying the increase in shark attacks is the result of more people in the water, not more sharks. A strong economy over the last several years and a rising population have sent more tourists to the beach.

Sharks have been big news this year, despite the fact that attacks in the United States are running behind last year--39 so far compared to 53 in 2000.

It started with the dramatic rescue of an 8-year-old boy whose arm was snapped off by a bull shark July 6 near Pensacola, Fla. Then a Wall Street banker lost his leg after being bitten in the Bahamas and several surfers were attacked near Daytona Beach.

Saturday’s attack off Virginia Beach was the first shark-caused fatality in the United States this year. Richard Peltier pulled his son from the animal’s jaws, but the boy bled to death from a huge gash in his leg. He was supposed to start fifth grade Tuesday.

On Monday, a group of Russian nationals from the Washington area went for a holiday to North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Several people watched in horror as Slobonskaya and Zaloukaev thrashed in the water with a large animal, thought to be a bull shark.

On Tuesday, while Slobonskaya was awaiting more surgery in a Norfolk hospital, Coast Guard helicopters searched the waters off Cape Hatteras for sharks. About 20 were spotted.

Times researchers Edith Stanley and John Tyrrell contributed to this story.

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