A Cultural Myth
When Steven Spielberg’s Jaws was released in the summer of 1975, it fundamentally reoriented public perception of the ocean’s apex predators. The film’s depiction of a great white shark as a singular, motivated predator, stalking human victims with something approaching malice, was scientifically inaccurate but culturally indelible. The resulting fear shaped public attitudes toward sharks for generations, and those attitudes, in turn, have had measurable policy consequences: reduced public support for shark conservation, tolerance for commercial practices that would otherwise provoke outrage, and a persistent legal and regulatory environment that has failed to adequately protect a group of animals in genuine ecological crisis.
The reality of the relationship is the inverse of what Jaws portrayed. Sharks do not threaten human survival. Humans threaten shark survival, and the consequences extend well beyond the fate of any individual species. Sharks are ecologically foundational. Their decline has spiraling effects on marine biodiversity, fishery health, reef stability, and global carbon cycling. The legal frameworks ostensibly designed to protect them are riddled with enforcement gaps, jurisdictional limitations, and, in the current U.S. regulatory environment, active rollback. Understanding this landscape is essential for today’s practitioners working at the intersection of environmental law, international treaty obligations, and conservation policy.
Jaws movie poster (Credit: https://pixy.org/1455710/).
Anthropogenic Threats to Shark Populations
A. The Scale of Shark Mortality
The aggregate scale of human-caused shark mortality is difficult to overstate. Current estimates indicate that humans kill approximately 100 million sharks per year, an average of nearly 274,000 per day, more than 11,000 per hour, and roughly three per second. These figures represent both targeted take and incidental mortality across commercial and recreational fisheries, and they substantially exceed sharks’ reproductive capacity. Sharks are characterized by slow growth, late sexual maturity, and low reproductive rates. These biological constraints make populations acutely vulnerable to sustained removal pressure and severely limits recovery potential once populations are depleted.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has assessed that more than one-third of all shark and ray species currently face some risk of extinction, a proportion that reflects the cumulative impact of decades of unsustainable takings across multiple categories.
B. Shark Finning
Shark finning is among the most well-documented and well-studied sources of shark mortality. The practice involves removing the fins from a live shark, typically aboard a fishing vessel, and discarding the body at sea. Deprived of its fins, the shark is unable to swim effectively and dies from drowning, blood loss, or predation. The fins are dried and traded, primarily for use in shark fin soup, a dish associated with wealth and social status in several East Asian traditions.
An estimated 73 million sharks are killed for their fins each year. A single dried shark fin can command several hundred dollars in wholesale markets; fins from larger species, such as the whale shark, have been valued in the tens of thousands. Studies have found that shark fins are high in mercury and can contain other neurotoxins, which can cause permanent nerve and brain damage in humans, an irony largely unappreciated by consumers.
Between 2012 and 2019, shark finning bans increased tenfold, likely due to increased public visibility on the nature of finning. Yet the expansion of legal prohibitions has not eliminated the practice. As Shark Angels and other conservation organizations have documented, loopholes in the laws, lack of enforcement, insufficient penalties, and continued illegal activities result in a staggering number of sharks still being killed every year.
A 2024 study found that one-third of sharks killed annually are members of a species threatened with extinction. This figure underscores that finning pressure is concentrated disproportionately on already-vulnerable populations, compounding the conservation challenge.
C. Bycatch
Bycatch, the incidental, accidental capture of non-target species in commercial fishing operations, constitutes a second major pathway of shark mortality. Longline fisheries targeting tuna and swordfish are particularly implicated; miles of monofilament line carrying thousands of baited hooks are indiscriminate in the species they attract. Sharks that take the bait are frequently dead or severely stressed by the time gear is hauled.
The legal characterization of bycatch as “incidental” or “unintentional” has historically afforded fishing operators’ considerable latitude under domestic and international fisheries management frameworks. However, that framing increasingly strains credibility. Bycatch mortality is a predictable, documented, and quantifiable outcome of industrial fishing methods, well known to operators and regulators alike. The question of whether bycatch constitutes a legally cognizable “take” under international wildlife protection treaties—a question with significant implications for the oceanic whitetip shark and other migratory species—is actively being litigated before treaty bodies.
D. Commercial and Recreational Fishing
Beyond finning and bycatch, sharks are subject to direct commercial take for their meat, liver oil (squalene), skin, and cartilage. Shark meat is sold under a range of commercial names, “flake,” “rock salmon,” “ocean whitefish,” that obscure its origin and complicate consumer awareness. Shark liver oil is used in cosmetics and nutritional supplements. Shark cartilage has been marketed as a cancer treatment despite a lack of credible scientific support.
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After the Credits Roll: The Horror Jaws Left Behind for Sharks
