136 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC • AUGUST 2017
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EHFDXVHRIRYHUƃVKLQJto hide the pups from the crowd. Threshers,
like makos, are considered “vulnerable” by the
International Union for Conservation of Na-
ture, and though killing the pregnant females
of vulnerable species may be legal, it makes for
bad publicity.
I asked Harman about the pregnant shark. He
denied the story, so I asked one of the guys clean-
ing the fish, and he said yes, there had been three
or four pups, each two to three feet long. I went
back to Harman to ask him why he denied it. He
got a little flustered and told me he was afraid of
being the “bad guy” in the story. “We’re following
the law, according to what the law says is sustain-
able,” he said. “If they make it illegal, we’ll stop.”
THE CAPTAINS OF THE BOATS I went out in for
those tagging operations in Maryland and Rhode
Island are both longtime shark fishermen. They
are not reflexively against the capture and killing
of fish, and they are not squeamish about what
deep-sea fishing entails. But both men have
qualms about how sharks are being fished.
Mark Sampson, the Maryland captain, started
a prominent shark-fishing tournament in Ocean
City in 1981 and ran it for more than three dec ades.
But he became increasingly concerned about the
conservation of shark populations, so he made his
size limits more restrictive to reduce the number
of sharks caught. He also insisted that anglers use
“circle hooks,” which, in contrast to conventional
“J-hooks,” don’t lodge in a shark’s stomach when
swallowed and result in fewer unnecessary kill-
ings. Some fishermen balked, participation de-
clined, and because of the higher size limits, he
said, “we had days in our tournament where not a
single shark was brought back to the dock.
“That’s not the recipe for a successful tourna-
ment, because people want to see those fish be-
ing brought in and weighed,” Sampson said. He
shuttered his tournament in 2014, and he doesn’t
accept charters for anglers who want to use his
boat to participate in other shark tournaments.
Charlie Donilon, the Rhode Island captain,
has run shark-fishing charters since 1976. Where
Sampson is quiet and circumspect, Donilon is
talkative and emotional, and on one of those days
in August when we were on the boat waiting for
the fish to bite, he told me about the time a client
reeled in a mako that refused to go gently.
“I threw a harpoon in it, then I hit it with a fly-
ing gaf, and then tied it down to a side cleat, and
the thing is scratching and blasting blood every-
where, and it’s all being recorded by the client.
The guy sent me the video, and I watched it with
my wife, and she asked, ‘Does that bother you?’ ”
It did, he said, and he started trying to persuade
his customers to release the sharks they caught.
“I’d tell people, a 100-pound mako is just a tot, just
a kid, because they have the potential to grow to
1,000 pounds or more. So I’d really like to let it go,
because it’s an immature fish.” But since almost
all the makos they catch out there are juveniles,
it stopped making sense to even ask the anglers.
So in 2015 Donilon instituted a catch-and-release