Discovery of a multispecies shark aggregation and parturition area in the Ba Estuary, Fiji Islands

  • Vierus, Tom
  • Gehrig, Stefan
  • Brunnschweiler, Juerg M.
  • Glaus, Kerstin
  • Zimmer, Martin
  • Marie, Amandine D.
  • Rico, Ciro
Publication date
January 2018
Publisher
Wiley

Abstract

Population declines in shark species have been reported on local and global scales, with overfishing, habitat destruction and climate change posing severe threats. The lack of species-specific baseline data on ecology and distribution of many sharks, however, makes conservation measures challenging. Here, we present a fisheries-independent shark survey from the Fiji Islands, where scientific knowledge on locally occurring elasmobranchs is largely still lacking despite the location’s role as a shark hotspot in the Pacific. Juvenile shark abundance in the fishing grounds of the Ba Estuary (north-western Viti Levu) was assessed with a gillnet-and longline-based survey from December 2015 to April 2016. A total of 103 juvenile sharks ...

Extracted data

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