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([SORUHURIWKH<HDUIRUpolicy, no exceptions. His business has taken a hit.
“I’m way of what I used to be,” he said.
Donilon accepts the loss of business because
it doesn’t seem to him that the fishing is sustain-
able, no matter what the government says. “The
sharks we tag, there’s like a gantlet they have to
go through coming up the coast. They’ve got to
go through Maryland, New Jersey, Long Island,
Massachusetts—and everyone in the world is out
there fishing,” he said. “They’ve got to be at least
15 years old in order to reproduce, the females.
Now what are the odds of that shark making it up
here 15 times without being caught? Pretty slim.”
I thought of all the blue sharks we’d seen with
hooks in their mouths, and it seemed to me he was
right: pretty slim. Although most of the tagging
study’s casualties had been killed by commer-
cial fishermen in international waters—not by
recreational fishermen—the Fisheries Service’s
statistics attribute the majority of the mako kills in
the U.S. to recreational fishermen. So who is fish-
ing too much, and where? Empirically, it’s still too
soon to say. But Donilon, at least, doesn’t need to
wait for more data to render his verdict.
“I did my share of killing,” he said one after-
noon on the boat. “You know how there might be
a guy in Africa who used to be a poacher, and he
used to kill all the lions ...” And as he said this, his
eyes teared up and his voice started quivering, and
finally he choked out a half whisper: “You’ve got
to give back. We just take, take all the time ...” j