After he saw the 1975 movie Jaws as a child, Rick MacPherson was probably the only one in the audience who wanted to run for the water.
“I was fascinated,” he said Tuesday afternoon. “I just needed to know more about sharks and the ocean.”
Mr. MacPherson, an ecologist and conservationist, is currently in the territory on behalf of The Pew Charitable Trusts to work with government on an issue some may not see as an urgent one: the conservation of sharks.
The need to protect the apex predators is sometimes overlooked, partly because of the fear that surrounds them, he said. But to Mr. MacPherson, and many other scientists and conservationists throughout the world, the issue is pressing, as shark populations continue to decline rapidly.
“They’re being pulled from the ocean so rapidly that it’s far from sustainable,” he said. “The mortality rate for sharks is something like 100 million a year are being removed from the system.”
Mr. MacPherson has nearly three decades of research and conservation experience in the region. The founder of a small consulting company, he acts as an advisor to the Pew on their efforts to see strong shark protection throughout the Caribbean.
Pew’s Global Shark Conservation Campaign has provided outreach, education, training and support to governments all over the world. In recent years, the group has helped create shark sanctuaries in Palau, the Maldives, Honduras, the Bahamas, Tokelau and the Marshall Islands.
The Pew Environment Group is currently considering different ways that it might assist the Virgin Islands in doing the same, Mr. MacPherson explained. But nothing will happen until government’s Cabinet decides how it wants to proceed.
“We’re here to assist, raise awareness, and dispel any myths or misconceptions,” Mr. MacPherson said. “There’s no specific measure of how this is going to shape up from us. What we do is underscore the importance of shark protection globally and here in the Caribbean.”
Data lacking
There haven’t been any official studies on sharks specifically in the VI, and there isn’t much anecdotal evidence about what species exist here or migrate through the area, according to Dr. Shannon Gore, an environmental scientist and former employee of the Conservation and Fisheries Department.
“Like any fishery in the world, unless you have the facts, managing the fishery can be pointless, as you don’t have reliable information to measure its success,” she explained in an e-mail Monday.
VI fishermen, biologists and divers report seeing everything from bull, tiger and lemon sharks, to the more common Caribbean reef sharks and nurse sharks.
Biologist Clive Petrovic, who has been diving in the VI for more than 35 years, said he even saw a hammerhead once off Cooper Island.
Although there isn’t much data available, Mr. MacPherson said conservation is often about preventive measures.
“Really, shark populations are hard to measure. There aren’t really stock populations because they don’t stay in one place,” he said, later adding, “The point is the numbers aren’t sustainable given the high number of extraction of sharks globally.”
Sharks have been swimming the oceans for more than 400 million years, since before the dinosaurs. As a top predator, they play an important role in balancing the marine environment, according to Mr. MacPherson: “Healthy sharks mean a healthy reef.”
Summit
During the Caribbean Summit of Political and Business Leaders on Necker Island last March, Deputy Premier Dr. Kendrick Pickering, the minister of natural resources and labour, announced government’s intention to protect sharks and rays in the territory.
The summit was convened as part of The Nature Conservancy’s Caribbean Challenge Initiative, which aims to set aside 20 percent of the region’s coastal habitat for conservation by 2020.
“Dr. Pickering has really been leading this,” Mr. MacPherson said Tuesday. “He has a very holistic approach about shark conservation.”
Fishing for sharks is relatively uncommon in the territory, according to Dr. Gore. But it does happen. On Tuesday morning, for example, Dean Soares, a fisherman in Anegada, hooked a 12-foot lemon shark.
“I’ve been catching them on and off for years,” he said. Although Mr. Soares doesn’t necessarily target sharks, protection laws could possibly impact his business, he said, adding, “I mostly use them to bait lobster traps.”
According to Mr. Soares, sharks are abundant, and he hasn’t noticed any decline in recent years. The fisherman catches sharks — most often tiger sharks — right off the beach near his hotel, Neptune’s Treasure.
“It’s interesting to think about how close they come in. You could be on the beach and they’d be right there,” he said.
The fear surrounding sharks can be a major obstacle in conservation efforts, according to experts.
“Humans have this primordial fear of being eaten,” Mr. Petrovic said Tuesday. But attacks are incredibly rare, he added: “If you were out swimming you’d be more likely to get hit by a speedboat.”
Reef Guardians
On Tuesday afternoon, Mr. MacPherson sat at a Road Town café next to Kate Brunn, founder of Reef Guardians BVI and owner of UBS Diving. Ms. Brunn said she hopes her organisation can act as a liaison to the public in helping to introduce the idea of shark conservation.
“Using the Reef Guardians as a focal point just made sense,” she added. “It was a very natural partnership.”
The Pew Charitable Trust isn’t leading the effort — only facilitating it, Mr. MacPherson stressed.
“We’re here to assist and offer any technical support we can,” he added. “We offer to assist with education and outreach; we offer materials to help educate the public. But the BVI government is leading this.”
Notwithstanding, Mr. MacPherson was clear about one thing: “We are interested in the strongest protection possible. And that means permanent and full conservation.”
Branson tweets
Last year’s climate summit was hosted on Necker Island by Virgin Records founder Sir Richard Branson, who has also been involved in shark conservation “for years,” according to Joanna Morris, a manager at Necker Island.
On Tuesday afternoon, Sir Richard made an announcement to his roughly 3.8 million Twitter followers: “We’ve become the first people to ever tag a shark in the BVI,” he posted on Tuesday afternoon. “Great news for shark conservation.”
The shark tagging was unrelated to the Pew Charitable Trusts’ work with government, according to Mr. MacPherson.
That effort, initiated by Sir Richard, was headed by Dr. Neil Hammerschlag, who runs the shark research programme at the University of Miami’s Dunlap Marine Conservation Program.
Dr. Hammerschlag rounded up a team of shark experts, invited them to the VI, and took a vessel to the same waters fished by Mr. Soares.
“We went out onto the water off Anegada filled with anticipation, hoping we didn’t get seasick and desperate to tag some sharks,” Sir Richard wrote in a post on Virgin’s website. According to him, the day was a success: Eventually the team hooked a metre-long reef shark and successfully tagged it.
“What should we name the first shark tagged in the BVI?” Sir Richard asked his Twitter followers Tuesday. “Ideas so far: Pickles, Lucky or Huckleberry.”
Shark fin soup
On a global scale, shark populations are crashing rapidly.
They’re often killed for their fins to make soup, a dish that has been extremely popular in China for centuries. Getting the featured ingredient often involves a controversial practice wherein fishers saw off the fin of the shark and toss back the living body.
A study of the Hong Kong shark fin market found that humans kill up to 100 million sharks each year, according to Pew Charitable Trusts.
The result of such intense fishing is that, of 1,045 species of sharks found in the world, roughly 30 percent are threatened or near threatened with extinction, Mr. MacPherson said.
Sharks are particularly vulnerable to overfishing because their sexual reproduction rate is relatively low. “They’re similar to humans in that respect,” he said.
Along with their importance to the health of the reef, sharks could be extremely beneficial to the tourism industry, according to Ms. Brunn.
Off the coast of Florida in the Bahamas — an archipelago of about 700 islands that claims to be “The Shark Diving Capital of the World” — shark tourism has brought in more than $800 million in the past 20 years, according to Pew.
Similar shark tourism could be possible in the VI, Ms. Brunn said. However, both Ms. Brunn and Mr. MacPherson said letting sharks exist in their natural habitat, without chumming the waters to attract them, is crucial.
In his 20 years working with sharks, Mr. MacPherson has never been bitten or even threatened by one of the predators.
“I’m not food,” he said. “They know I’m not food.”
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