Greenland fishermen have called for the removal of 1,000 Greenland sharks, animals that can live for more than 400 years and are considered the longest-living vertebrates on Earth. One municipality even proposed paying $45 for each shark heart before the plan was blocked.
Avannaata municipality, on Greenland’s west coast, approved the mass-culling proposal in February after local fishermen said the slow-moving, 20-foot sharks were repeatedly becoming tangled in fishing lines. The damage, they said, was costing tens of thousands of dollars.
“This year I’ve lost around 6,000 hooks in total. Sometimes we lose 30,000 Danish krone a day,” 27-year-old fisherman Henrik Jensen told The Guardian.
That daily loss of 30,000 krone amounts to roughly $4,500 in fishing equipment, prompting local leaders to put the proposed Greenland shark cull to a vote earlier this year.
“We need to safeguard the income of fishers and the catch so that we can continue to eat the foods that we have relied on for generations,” Avannaata Mayor Lars Erik Gabrielsen said.
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The proposal was soon blocked by opponents who warned that killing the sharks could cause lasting damage to an exceptionally vulnerable species. Greenland sharks do not reach sexual maturity until about 150 years old and are believed to carry their young for more than a decade, leaving populations extremely slow to recover.
“They are probably — biologically — the most sensitive species in the ocean to overfishing,” said Nick Dulvy, a marine conservationist at Simon Fraser University.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature listed Greenland sharks as “vulnerable” in 2020, PEOPLE reported.
The sharks primarily inhabit the frigid coastal waters surrounding Greenland, northern Canada and Europe. They can travel about 1,240 miles a year, leading Oceans North Kalaallit Nunaat (ONKN) to argue that culling them would not solve the problem because other sharks could simply move in to replace those killed.
“Initiating a bounty system of this magnitude is a risky path,” ONKN said of the proposal, warning that the idea could return in the future even though it was blocked this time.
ONKN director Jenseeraq Poulsen said the sharks were only the most visible sign of deeper issues in Greenland’s fisheries. “The shark is the visible, tangible version of a problem whose real drivers are structural,” he said, pointing instead to overfishing and the presence of too many boats.
