![]() ![]() In total, they surveyed 391 coral reefs in 67 nations and territories using 22,756 cameras-generating three-years-worth of raw video. In the shark study, scientists used baited remote underwater video stations (BRUVS)-cameras with a small amount of oily fish hung placed on arm-to draw out and observe sharks in deployments that lasted an hour. Allen Family Foundation, which was responsible for the Great Elephant Census, a pan-African aerial survey of Earth's largest land animals. Simpfendorfer added that the overwhelming factor in the decline was overfishing, both targeting sharks for their fins and meat, and unintentionally killing them as bycatch.įunding for the project came from the Paul G. The findings should help update the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list, with more species qualifying for "endangered" status, an important step towards conservation action. "But when you sat down and looked at the overall results, it was quite stunning," he said. Lead author Colin Simpfendorfer of the James Cook University and the University of Tasmania told AFP that prior to the study, coral reef sharks-unlike their bigger cousins that dwell in deep oceans-were not thought to be doing badly. ![]() Sharks were entirely absent in 14 percent of reefs where they had been previously documented. The depletion data was derived from a computer model that estimated what shark numbers would have looked like without human pressures. The research, published in the journal Science, is the result of the Global FinPrint project, which collected more than 22,000 hours of video footage from reefs across Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australasia and the Americas.Ī team of more than 100 scientists found that five of the most common coral reef shark species-gray reef, nurse, Caribbean reef, blacktip reef and whitetip reef-declined by 70 to 60 percent. ![]() That matters to humans because the species act as managers of their marine ecosystems, maintaining delicately balanced food webs on which hundreds of millions of people rely. ![]()
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