As part of the generation that grew up watching Deadly 60 on television, sharks have long since been one of my favourite animals. But like many others, I’ve never had the chance to see them in the wild.
The closest I came to shark sightings during my teenage years was my work on egg cases of cartilaginous fish. This group includes sharks, skates, rays and a type of deep sea fish called the chimaeras. Their bones are composed of cartilage, the same rubbery material that our ears and noses are made out of. This gives them a lighter and more flexible skeleton in comparison to bony fish, enabling them to support a much larger frame. This is why the largest fish species are sharks.
Though many cartilaginous fish give birth to live young, some are oviparous (egg-laying). Rather than laying hard calcium shells like birds or reptiles, oviparous cartilaginous fish lay tough, plastic-like capsules or ‘egg cases’. After hatching, the newly emerged fish swims outwards into the water, and empty egg cases regularly wash onto the shore at the high tide line. When I was thirteen, I wrote a few articles on the topic, including my ‘top tips’ for egg case hunting or my findings of thornback rays cases around the Kent coast.
I recently had my first sighting of not a case, but a cartilaginous fish. There’s a catch to this excitement, though. It was dead.
Finding the shark
It was during my visit to Sandwich Bay Bird Observatory on Kent’s east coast that I decided to take a walk along the beach. This area lies a few miles south of the River Stour estuary. After a rather uneventful few hours on the nature reserve, I made my way to what looked like Sandwich’s very own Millionaire’s Row – a road filled with impressive houses overlooking the beach. After briefly walking along the shingle and seeing nothing of note, I made my way back inland. Before re-joining the road, I had a peculiar urge walk back to the beach. Through some intuition, I felt as though something was drawing me back to the water’s edge.
Upon reaching the high tide line, I immediately noticed something tossed amongst the litter (strangely a normality on the beach nowadays) and knots of seaweed. A sandy-brown fish, about a metre in length, was dead on the shore. This was a small-spotted catshark, previously known as the lesser-spotted dogfish (Scyliorhinus canicula).
Not far from the carcass I noticed the egg case of the small-spotted catshark. This was a strange life-and-death juxtaposition, a stark reminder of the cycle of life – seeing both the shell from which this species is born, and a dead specimen on the shore beside it. I also noticed the bone of a common cuttlefish, indicating yet another species living in the waters here.
It’s often hard to be 100% certain when determining a cause of death, but a bit of wildlife detective work goes a long way.
Fishing for answers
The fresh appearance indicated that this catshark had only been here a few hours. The eyes had been removed, and I noticed a small hole on the side of the fish, the cause of which is likely to be one of four possibilities:
- Predation.
- Caught by anglers and discarded.
- Caught by commercial fishing.
- Post-mortem predation (scavenging).
Commercial fishing is the least likely cause out of the three. There were very few boats on the horizon that day. While the sea here stretches far out into the north sea, it’s unlikely a fish discarded far out to sea would’ve remained so intact by the time it reached the shore.
Predation also seems unlikely. Natural predators for this species include larger sharks, of which there are few in these waters, and seals (though I’ve even read an eyewitness testimony of one being swallowed whole by a gull). A mile or so up the coast is the well known seal colony at Pegwell Bay, where I saw both common seals the following week. It’s unfathomable, however, to think that a seal would leave its prey so immaculately and carefully discarded with a mere slice down its body, if it would even leave it at all.
The obvious causes, therefore, are that it was caught and discarded by anglers (hence the lateral incision), and then scavenged by birds (hence the missing eyes) after it washed up on the tide line. Though it was strange to see my first ever live wild shark in this way, it demonstrates just how rich the seemingly empty seas around us are. When looking out to the vast, murky expanse from the Kentish coastline, it can be easy to think of these places as barren and empty. Such an attitude mobilises the destruction of our marine ecosystems, as there is no incentive to protect something if we don’t value it.
The experience was also thought-provoking in terms of the ethics of fishing. Fishing for recreation for the purposes of eating or selling is one thing, but fatally removing your catch from the water and leaving it to die is a pointless waste. And that is what it looks like happened here.
But let’s be honest. Such isolated events of anglers killing and discarding their catch poses no threat to our global or even national ocean ecosystem. It is the large-scale, unsustainable commercial fishing practices that we should seek to change, as explored on Netflix’s 2021 Documentary Seaspiracy.
The bigger issue
Fish provides more than 3.3 billion people with over 20% of their daily protein intake.1 More than a third of the world population (2.75 billion people) live near the coast, and fishing is a necessary means of survival for many around the world.2 But careful management of fishing practice is needed. That does not mean not fishing, or even necessarily fishing less, but changing the way we fish.
In particular, this would involve using more selective nets to reduce bycatch (the killing of unwanted fishing targets, such as turtles being caught in a net intended for tuna). Creating no-fishing zones and Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in vital breeding location would also be an effective way to bolster populations by allowing fish to replenish their numbers.
In his timely book, A Life on Our Planet, David Attenborough discusses the problems of commercial fishing (p. 83):
‘We have become too skilled at fishing. And we have done so, not gradually, but – as with whaling and the destruction of rainforests – suddenly. Exponential gains are characteristic of cultural evolution. Invention accumulates. If you combine the diesel engine, GPS, and the echo sounder, the opportunities they create are not just added to one another, they are multiplied. But the ability of fish to reproduce is limited. As a consequence, we have now overfished many of our coastal waters.’3
Tackling this issue isn’t easy, and implementing restrictions in areas where fishing provides economic growth will invariably gather criticism. But the trajectory is clear. Without changes to commercial fishing practices that prioritise sustainability, we risk depleting the global fish stocks for future populations and their sustenance, especially in developing areas. Fishing doesn’t have to cease, and long-term profits and yields will be higher if populations are allowed to recover. But without change, our oceans will inevitably become a barren, lifeless abyss, haunted by the silence of a shoal that once was.
- Viana, Daniel et al. (2023) ‘Nutrient supply from marine
small‑scale fisheries’, Scientific Reports, 13(11357). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-37338-z.
[Scientific Reports has a 2-year impact factor of 4.6, and is the 5th most-cited journal in the world, with more than 738 000 citations in 2022.] ↩︎ - Reimann, Lena. et al. ‘Population development as a driver of coastal risk: Current trends and future pathways’, Cambridge Prisms: Coastal
Futures, 1, e14, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1017/cft.2023.3.
↩︎ - Attenborough, David. A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future. (London: Ebury, 2020), p. 83. ↩︎
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