Elasmobranch Research in the Northeast Pacific

Moderators: Ken Goldman and Jack Musick
Emails: ken_goldman@fishgame.state.ak.us and jmusick@vims.edu

Date: Monday, September 12 and Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Time: 1:20 pm to 5:40 pm Mon and 8:00 am to 12:00 noon Tues
Location: Elvira Voth Hall

Elasmobranchs were largely ignored by fisheries scientists for many decades. This situation was mitigated by the relatively low value of elasmobranchs flesh and other fishery products, and their “different” biology. Techniques to determine age and growth in elasmobranchs have come into wide use only in the last two decades. Because their specialized dermal denticles cannot be used to determine age as can scales in bony fishes, and because they lack otoliths and bone in their skeletons. As world fisheries have depleted teleost stocks, elasmobranchs have attracted increasing attention from commercial and recreational fisheries. In addition the international market for shark fins has virtually exploded, due to economic expansion in the Asian community where shark fins are consumed, and the development of the infrastructure to deliver fins from fisheries around the world to processors in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. As fisheries scientists devoted more study to elasmobranchs and became familiar with their demographics it became increasingly clear that most elasmobranch species have slow growth, late maturity, lengthy gestation periods and low fecundity. This combination of demographic factors results in low intrinsic rates of population increase, and low resilience to fishing mortality. Elasmobranch stocks that have been subjected to directed fisheries without stringent management have usually collapsed within a few years. In addition some elasmobranches taken as bycatch in fisheries have been driven to the brink of extinction while the teleost target population of these fisheries remained robust. Several species of elasmobranchs have been listed by the World Conservation Union (ICUN) as threatened with extinction, and Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) recently has listed three sharks species and outlawed trade in their products. Thus, rapidly developing elasmobranch fisheries, extreme vulnerability to overharvest, and multiple stock collapses and even local exploitation have stimulated rapid expansion of research on this group by fisheries (and other marine) scientists during the last decade. Elasmobranch research in the eastern North Pacific and Bering Sea is a good example of this expansion. This symposium will bring together a large number of researchers who are at the forefront of studying chondrichthyan fishes in this area of the world. It is the objective of this symposium to present recent results of a wide mosaic of research efforts focused on elasmobranchs in the eastern North Pacific and Bering Sea.

Link to list of presentations in this symposium on Monday
Link to list of presentations in this symposium on Tuesday