Shark fishing in New Zealand
There are 112 species of sharks that are recorded in New Zealand and about 70 of these are caught by fishers.
Sharks are predators and many are the top of their food-chain. As a result, sharks are often less abundant than smaller fish that are lower down the food-chain. Many sharks are slow growing, mature later than other species and lay a small number of eggs or give birth to live young. These factors make them susceptible to over-fishing.
Elephant shark, ghost shark, pale ghost shark, rough skate, smooth skate, school shark, spiny dogfish and rig make up 85 percent of the annual shark catch by weight. These species are all managed under the QMS.
Shark-finning – New Zealand’s response to a controversial issue
In some nations sharks are caught specifically for their fins and are finned live at sea. It is an offence to remove the fins from a live shark at sea in New Zealand waters under the Animal Welfare Act.
Finning of dead sharks happens in some New Zealand fisheries - for example in the tuna long-line fishery. Tuna are targeted with baited hooks and sharks are sometimes caught by mistake. Storing shark with the tuna in the hold has the potential to spoil the tuna flesh, so the sharks may be brought on board, killed and finned, and their bodies dumped back into the sea. The fins can then be sold.
Around seven percent of commercially caught sharks in New Zealand are finned (based on data from the 2003/4 and 2004/5 fishing years).
Some countries, such as Australia, have chosen to put in place measures to limit shark finning. These measures typically require fishers to take the whole shark back to land, including the fin and the body, rather than landing only the fin and discarding the body at sea. Storing the bodies of sharks onboard limits the storage space available for other more valuable fish species. These measures are intended to encourage fishers to develop markets for the bodies or to avoid taking the sharks in the first place.
New Zealand has taken a different approach, by setting sustainable catch limits, as with all other fish stocks, to ensure sharks are not over-fished. This means that each major shark fishery has a Total Allowable Catch (TAC) set in tonnes to allow for fishing while leaving enough of each species in the water to breed and replace themselves. Fishers are required to report all fish caught to MFish and in this way each TAC is monitored.
How fishers process the fish they have caught is their decision, but if they choose to land only shark fins, they must report the entire weight of the shark caught for monitoring against their annual catch entitlement and the relevant TAC.
To make this process more practical ‘conversion factors’ are used to work out the weight of sharks caught from the weight of fins landed. For most sharks the conversion factor is 30. This means 10kg of fins landed, multiplied by a conversion factor of 30, equals 300kg of shark reported against that fisher’s annual catch entitlement. Some sharks have a different conversion factor – porbeagle shark (45), blue shark (48) and mako shark (59). Conversion factors do not apply just to sharks, but to all fish species that are landed in a filleted or processed state.
Analysis shows that between 21-27 percent of total shark catch in New Zealand is reported as discarded dead at sea. Between 68-73 percent of total shark catch is landed as processed meat. Approximately seven percent of the total shark catch is reported as being landed as fins only.
MFish links
Environmental - Sharks
The Quota Management System
Press Releases
Draft plan to further protect sharks from over-fishing