Fishing For—And Saving—Sharks off the Jersey Shore
6:52 minutes
This article is part of The State of Science, a series featuring science stories from public radio stations across the United States. This story, by Alan Yu, was originally published by WHYY.
At an undisclosed beach at 5:30 p.m. in New Jersey, shark fisherman AJ Rotondella and two clients wait for beachgoers to leave. Once the beach is empty, Rotondella cuts up some chunks of fish as bait, and casts lines into the water.
“I shark fish, shark fish, shark fish, eat pizza, and shark fish … that’s pretty much it,” Rotondella said. “Waking up in the morning … wide open ocean, anything could be anywhere at any time. And I think that’s fascinating. No matter how long you’ve done this, you’ve never seen it all.”
He has always loved fishing, and got into shark fishing 13 years ago, when his brother told him they could catch sharks from the beach. They caught two on their first day and could not catch another shark for the rest of the year.
“That really got me interested because I knew it was possible, but I couldn’t do it again,” he said. “I … absolutely obsessed over this.”
But Rotondella had a steep learning curve ahead of him. By trial and error, sometimes staying on a beach for multiple days, he learned how to read the tides, water temperatures, currents, and even phases of the moon to figure out how to track the sharks.
“That’s just through sheer torture. It was horrible. But looking back, obviously it’s rewarding, because now I can just pick and choose the window that I know is gonna produce, catch a bunch, and go home, instead of having to sit out there for 60 hours and hope for a bite.”
He prefers shark fishing from the beach because it’s a challenge, even though there are bigger and faster fish, like tuna, that he could catch from a boat.
“It’s not as magical. I’m sure there are fish you can pursue that is definitely rewarding, but to catch a fish with your feet on the sand without being able to chase them down … I find that to be a lot more fun,” he said. “Also, when you catch a huge animal like a shark, you get right up next to it, instead of … looking over the boat.”
Rotondella was born and raised in N.J. but moved to Florida so he could catch sharks year-round. Now he spends the summers down the Jersey Shore and the winters in Florida. He runs the company Apex Anglers, where he guides people who want to catch sharks.
The Thrill Of The Catch
Rotondella flies a drone over the water to drop some bait off further than he could cast a line.
When the lines shake, showing that something is eating the bait, Rotondella sprints to the line to reel in whatever is on the other end.
Over the course of a few hours, this happens three times, but still no shark.
He puts in bigger bait, going from fish chunks to half a fish to a whole fish.
After 10 p.m., with the light of head lamps and buildings behind us, the lines shake once again. Rotondella reels the line in.
This time the shark is hooked. He hands the line to his client, who keeps reeling, fast.
Then, Rotondella, the client, and I walk towards the water, stopping where the water covers our feet.
We see a 7-foot-long sand tiger shark on the other end of the line. It’s grey on top, with a white belly. The hook is in its mouth, and it wriggles in the water.
Rotondella makes sure the shark is submerged so it always has water to breathe through.
He cuts the metal wire attached to the hook.
The client grabs the shark’s tail, spins it around so that it faces the ocean, and sets it free.
Rotondella warned me beforehand that we would barely see the sharks. That’s because he wants to fight them as little as possible before setting them free. He uses a barbless hook, so once he cuts the wire, the shark can just shake the hook off.
“You just want the fish to survive. That’s the end of the story. The point is for this to be a sustainable fishery, you need to have fish swimming off and living a happy life after the encounter.”
He said once he started catching sharks and being close to them, he appreciated them more.
The care that Rotondella takes with his catch is important, because many sharks are endangered, including the sand tiger.
From Catch To Conservation
John Mohan, a fish ecologist at the University of New England, said sharks get stressed from fighting an angler’s line. He has studied what helps sharks survive after being caught. He said sharks build up lactate from fighting a fishing line, just like humans do after sprinting very hard.
“You want to flush out that lactate and the only way to do that is to … get fresh water over the gills, which is going to help freshen up their blood essentially,” Mohan said.
Shark fishing has a history in the U.S. going back decades, but anglers being concerned with sharks surviving is a relatively new development.
Andy Danylchuk, professor of fish conservation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, remembers going to the Florida Keys in the 1970s, seeing “massive tiger sharks, hammerheads all staked up … outside of this fishing pier.”
But research showed that shark populations are endangered, and shark anglers became more conservation minded. Danylchuk, who fishes for sharks himself, said what draws recreational shark anglers is not a kill; it’s “immersion in the environment … the thrill of the chase, the opportunity to get close to the thing that you’re targeting.”
The more he fished, the more he paid attention to their environment and realized the need for science to help protect them.
Now, Danylchuk studies the impact of recreational fishing, and works on recommendations for recreational anglers, while balancing the competing and overlapping interests of all the people who come into contact with sharks: anglers who fish for them, anglers who don’t want sharks to take their catch, and divers and snorkelers who want to see sharks.
“We’re doing a lot of science and social science and doing that in parallel because at the end of the day, we’re not managing sharks, we’re not managing fish — we’re managing people.”
Further Reading
- Hear about the shark scientists forging her own path.
Segment Guests
Alan Yu
Alan Yu is a science reporter for WHYY’s The Pulse in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Segment Transcript
SOPHIE BUSHWICK: This is Science Friday. I’m Sophie Bushwick. And now, it’s time to check in on the state of science.
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Local science stories of national significance. Sharks face a lot of challenges in our modern world. There’s climate change, of course, and then there’s overfishing. Unless you live on a coast, it might surprise you to learn that shark fishing is alive and well. But it’s not always a bad thing.
An increasing number of shark fishermen are chasing sharks with the goal of conservation. My next guest tagged along with a conservation oriented shark fisherman in New Jersey. He joins me now to talk about it.
Alan Yu, reporter for WHYY and the Pulse, based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Welcome back to Science Friday.
ALAN YU: Thank you very much for having me on.
SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Alan, you got to go on a trip chasing sharks at the Jersey shore. Tell me about that experience. What was it like?
ALAN YU: So one shark fisherman told me beforehand, and I think it captures it perfectly, is that for a long time, nothing happens, and then everything happens at once in the space of a few minutes.
So we waited for everyone to clear the beach first. So there was no one in the water, no one on the boat. So no humans in the water. And then there was a lot of setup because they need to have really sturdy fishing rods that can handle a shark, because sharks can weigh hundreds of pounds.
And then, there are some lines that the shark fisherman AJ manually cast, and then there are some lines that he actually uses a drone to fly offshore so he can cast them further out. And then, once those are set up, you basically just wait.
Every time you see a line shaking, AJ will sprint across the sand to see if there’s something at the other end. And we got a few bites every now and then. Sometimes a shark would bite half a fish and then leave the other half.
But it took more than three hours before we caught a shark. But once we had a bite, then it made for an action packed one minute.
[LAUGHTER]
SOPHIE BUSHWICK: And to me, it just seems a little counterintuitive that fishermen are catching sharks with the intent to save them. So can you explain that to me?
ALAN YU: Yeah, so the fishermen I went out with, AJ, says that he likes to catch sharks because of the challenge. And he likes to do it from a beach because he can get right up next to a shark. Whereas if he did it from a boat, he would be looking down on them.
And he says that that contact makes him appreciate and respect sharks more because it’s so hard to catch one. When he was starting out more than 10 years ago, he said that he would spend multiple days on a beach before he could catch a shark.
And so he really respects these as apex predators that are not easy to catch. He’s very committed to doing catch and release fishing. So he says that he does everything he can to make sure that the sharks are not harmed and that they experience the least stress possible. And we have a clip of him saying that.
AJ: You just want the fish to survive. That’s the end of the story. The point is, for this to be a sustainable fishery, you need to have fish swimming off and living a happy life after the encounter.
ALAN YU: And the other thing is that shark anglers like AJ, they also work with shark researchers, because the people who are fishing for sharks are often out there far more often than the researchers are.
And so it’s a convenient way to get sharks. And then the researchers can tag them, sample them, and then release the sharks back out again. And AJ does work regularly with a shark researcher at Monmouth University in New Jersey.
SOPHIE BUSHWICK: AJ said that it’s good to have the sharks living a happy life after the encounter. So how are shark populations doing in that region?
ALAN YU: The research shows that shark populations are rebounding in the Northeastern US and in the Atlantic Ocean, but quite a few species are still endangered. So they’re not quite as endangered. But you know that they are making a bit of a comeback, at least in the Atlantic.
SOPHIE BUSHWICK: And what about conservation biologists? Do they have any thoughts about this new twist on Shark fishing?
ALAN YU: Yes, they do. So, first of all, it’s certainly an improvement over the past when people would fish for sharks like it was a trophy hunt. I talked to a professor of fish conservation, Andy Danylchuk, who remembers going out to piers in the 1970s and seeing dead bodies of sharks being hung up as actual trophies.
That has long passed now, and most people who fish for sharks do catch and release like AJ does. So Andy Danylchuk, he likes shark fishing himself, and he became interested in conservation partly because he liked shark fishing. Here’s some tape of him.
ANDY DANYLCHUK: But then the more that I fished and then the more that I was observant of what was going on in the environment, I started to realize that in order for us to have a future for being able to fish for these animals, we need to think about how we can use science to better inform their conservation and management.
ALAN YU: So the research focus now is actually working with the shark anglers to make sure that they do what they can to make sure that sharks can survive being caught, and that they’re not harmed by it. Because even though people like AJ will do whatever they can to minimize the stress, it is still stressful for a shark to be yanked out of the water for a minute before they get put back in.
SOPHIE BUSHWICK: I know a lot of people who like to fish, but not everyone is fishing for sharks. And then you have recreational activities like diving, where people do want to see sharks, and then surfing where they don’t. Which is to say that there’s a lot of interaction between people and sharks, whether it’s wanted or not, or intentional or not. Do scientists think we could all live in harmony?
ALAN YU: I think yes. But it’s a complicated way to reach that. Andy Danylchuk talked about this before. He said that because you have people with these competing and overlapping interests, and you can’t control the sharks, right? All you can do is control the people.
And so that’s why he says that he sees his work in fish conservation as much as a social science as it is a science, because he can study the sharks, he can see where they are. But then at the end of the day, it’s about figuring out how do you work with the people who are interacting with the sharks in one way or the other so that you can protect the shark populations, but then people can also still get to do the fishing that they like to do.
SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Alan Yu, reporter for WHYY and the Pulse, based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Thanks for joining us.
ALAN YU: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be on, as always.
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