Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Lemons - Action Alert!

Source - click for detail.

This is urgent.

Please read this post.
Those Lemons are the very same individuals one experiences at Tiger Beach and throughout the Bahamas but also along the whole eastern coast of the US from Florida all the way up to the Carolinas. They are particularly vulnerable to over-exploitation when they aggregate in spring off Jupiter, and although they are protected in Florida, the aggregation straddles the boundary between state and federal waters and is thus subjected to federal regulations.
The numbers have already been declining substantially since 2007 as regulatory measures implemented in 2006 to protect Sandbar Sharks have increased the fishing pressure on other large Sharks including those Lemons - and last year's change of the opening date for commercial fishing to January 1st appears to have had a devastating effect.


Please post your comment here.
In doing so, please follow the suggestions in the post linked above - comments must be pertinent to this specific issue and basically recommend that the opening of the 2014 Atlantic Shark Commercial Fishing Season be moved back from January to July.
With that in mind, please refrain from posting statements like Please help support anything and everything that will help keep shark populations healthy. We love our sharks. as they are of no use whatsoever. This on the other hand is an excellent comment.
Should you not know what to write, e-mail Hannah and she will be happy to assist you.
Comments close on September 23.

Thank you!

4 comments:

Johann Mourier said...

As there are no doubt that lemon need better protection and consideration at the Jupiter aggregation, I don't really know how to interpret the figure with detection numbers as the decline of detection numbers may be also due to tag failure and death of batteries ... however I do not have the tagging information so it is just some discussion...
Anyway an aggregation such as Jupeter has to be protected for sure!

DaShark said...

Indeed!

Tags or no tags, divers who went checking report seeing an alarmingly low number of Sharks.

Johann Mourier said...

Ok if diving surveys support it... and I trust and support my colleagues in Bimini.
And as I said, anyway such aggregation has to get some protection.

DaShark said...

Absolutely - like they do with teleost Fish aggregations, there should be a general fishing ban during the mating aggregation period!