A recent Scientific American article, “Shark Species Thought to Be Extinct Found in Fish Market,” highlights how researchers have “made many discoveries relevant to the conservation of threatened shark and ray species by studying the catches in fish markets in Kuwait, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.”
In this article, KAUST PhD student Julia Spaet is quoted, commenting on using this method as part of her research.
Fish market surveys of the kind that resulted in the rediscovery of the smoothtooth blacktip are an increasingly common research tool that offers many advantages over traditional scientific field sampling.
Julia Spaet, a researcher at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, says that “the resources dedicated by a fleet of fishermen will always outmatch any scientific efforts to assess abundances. In other words, the fishing industry is more efficient at finding sharks where there are not much left.”
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