User:2335 G10/sandbox
Description
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Geographic Range
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Development and Reproduction
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Human Interaction
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Fishing and Bycatch
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Consumables
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Ecology
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Life History
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Conservation Efforts/Legislation
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Issues for Effective Conservation
While conservation attempts are being made, certain issues like fishery guidelines and catch verification pose problems for furthering conservation attempts.
The fisheries concept is a closely regulated way to harvest gulpers, while monitoring the species population to ensure it does not crash. They generally use body mass as an indicator of when to harvest the sharks to allow growth of the population. When these ratios are incorrect, the fishery can easily crash because sharks are harvested before they can reproduce. This is especially true with the gulper shark, which has a two year long gestational period and a twelve to sixteen year maturity for females. Biery and D. Pauly from The University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre in Vancouver, Canada executed a review on species-specific fin to body-mass ratios in 2012. Their paper concludes that current regulated ratios are not appropriate for all species and that regulations based off a general ratio for all species is inadequate and may be harming fisheries. The ratios used by many fisheries were originally compiled by a politically affiliated group calledThe Regional Fishery Management Organizations, RFMO. Biery and Pauly collected fin to body-mass ratios for 50 different species and eight different countries and observed that actual fin to body-mass ratios varied by species and location. Species specific mean ratios ranged from 1.1% to 10.9% and estimated mean ratios by country ranged from 1.5% to 6.1% indicating that current regulations will crash fisheries and not promote population growth (1).
Away from the commercial side of conservation, there are tagging efforts to monitor gulper populations. Tagging is a common ecological tool to study the species characteristics. A large problem with monitoring the populations of Australian and Indonesian dogfish is that discriminating between the seven local species by morphological attributesalone is unreliable. In 2012 a study conducted by Ross Daley, Sharon Appleyard, and Matthew Koopman from the CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research Center in Hobart, Australia aims to help monitored recovery plans by implementing a new catch data verification plan. Their study focuses on using the 16s mitochondrial gene region to differentiate these species and when sequenced, all but C. harrissoni and C. isodon were distinguishable (2). They concluded that 16s gene is a strong marker suitable for fishery catch verification and that using this technique is a reliable and efficient system for routine testing. However, specialized primers needed for trials are sensitive to decay. Therefore, preservation problems need to be researched to further the prospective use of a 16s mitochondrial classification. This system for routine testing is only available to scientists and would require substantial training for fishermen to be able to use this technique. (2)