London, Europe Brief News – Almost two-thirds of sharks and rays living on world’s coral reefs at risk, with 14 of 134 species reviewed critically endangered
An international team says the predators are continuing to struggle, while populations of tuna and billfish are coming back from the abyss.
“These sharks and rays have evolved over 450m years and survived six mass extinctions but they can’t deal with this fishing pressure,” said Prof Colin Simpfendorfer, a global expert on sharks and rays and one of the study’s main authors from Australia’s James Cook University.
“This is not just a few species. This is a broad extinction crisis.”
As sharks and rays disappeared, the study said there would be cascading effects on other species with “growing ecological consequences for coral reefs, many of which will be hard or impossible to reverse,” a team of more than 30 researchers wrote.
As global heating risks the future of coral reefs around the world, the pressures facing shark populations would only get worse, the authors said.
Without broad-scale and urgent global action to cut the numbers of sharks and rays being caught, there would be “increasingly dire consequences for the ecosystem health of coral reefs and coastal communities that rely on them.”
The new study, in the journal Nature Communications, builds on findings from a 2020 study that concluded sharks were “functionally extinct” on 20% of the world’s coral reefs.
