Ill 



management plan. It was not compelled by the law or by custom to do so. Nor 

 was any federal data collection program on shark landings or shark population 

 sizes or trends begun until the late 1980s, when overfishing for sharks was 

 already in full swing. By then, unsustainably large numbers of fins and tails were 

 being exported to China for soup, and the live animals (minus their fins and tails) 

 dumped overboard to sink to the bottom and die. In 1989 the National Marine 

 Fisheries Service scrambled to tack together a draft "emergency" management 

 plan to deal with the problem. But the paucity of baseline data exposed the draft 

 emergency plan to a feeding frenzy of attack from all directions. It was delayed 

 for two years, then shelved. When a management plan was finally implemented 

 in 1993, the first six-month catch quota (which conservation groups argue is 

 much higher than existing scientific information could justify) was caught in 

 under a month, suggesting that the fishing power of the fleet is more than six 

 times that necessary to take the quota. The plan was too little and too late to 

 prevent severe depletion. A twenty year monitoring study by the Virginia 

 Institute of Marine Sciences indicates several important shark species have 

 declined 85 to 90 percent since the early 1980s, as fishing continues under the 

 new quota. It is significant that shark overfishing began after the Magnuson Act 

 was in place for nearly a decade and that the Act failed to prevent the problems 

 that subsequently occurred. (No management plan currently exists for Pacific 

 sharks, eighteen years after the Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management 

 Act first became law.) When a group of animals that has dominated the seas for 

 sixty million years begins to falter and disappear within a decade, despite the 

 existence of a law that contains both the words "conservation" and "management" 

 in its title, something is horribly wrong. 



Ironically, some species are overfished by people who are not even trying to 

 catch them. The capture of unwanted sea life is called bycatch, incidental take, or 

 bykill. Bycatch comes in many forms: unwanted or prohibited species (including 

 seabirds, seaturtles, marine mammals, etc.), unmarketable or undersized fish, and 

 creatures killed in lost nets or abandoned traps. For some animals, such as sea 

 turtles and albatrosses, bykill has been the main source of adult mortality. The 

 problems of bykill are twofold: it can overfish non-target species and it can 

 produce extraordinary waste. Estimates of discarded bycatch in Alaskan fisheries 

 in 1990 range to well over half a million metric tons annually. Currently, 

 incidental kill of unwanted animals, especially fish, is a legal and nearly universal 

 aspect of fishing. Yet bycatch has been almost entirely overlooked by the 

 Magnuson Act. In some fisheries, bykill vastly exceeds catch. For example, ten 

 pounds of unwanted fish are killed for every pound of shrimp caught in the 

 southern U.S. The Gulf of Mexico shrimp fishery kills and wastes enough 

 juvenile snappers and groupers to ruin those fisheries through severe depletion 

 and economic dislocation. Total discard in our shrimp fishery is estimated at 

 175,000 tons of juvenile fish a year; fish that would otherwise grow to support 

 other important fisheries. This bycatch, according to the President's Council on 

 Environmental Quality, has contributed to an 85 percent decline in the Gulf 

 population of bottom fish like snappers and groupers over the last 20 years, 

 making the real cost of a shrimp dinner expensive indeed. 



The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council warned in 1990 that "Red 

 snapper are severely overfished in the Gulf of Mexico and the spawning stock is 

 so reduced that the population may either be in a state of collapse or dangerously 

 close to collapse," and that "Rebuilding the red snapper population cannot be 

 effected without protecting juvenile snapper from harvest as bycatch in the 

 [shrimp] trawl fishery. An estimated 12 million small red snapper are killed 

 annually by trawls." NMFS predicted that reducing shrimp boat bycatch could 

 almost double the red snapper fishery's productivity. Congress, which has grown 



