In 2021, faced with an economy battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, the island nation of Maldives considered lifting a ban on shark fishing that had been in place since 2010. A global outcry followed, and the government quickly abandoned the idea.
The 2010 ban effectively turned Maldivian waters, a marine area the size of Portugal, into a shark sanctuary, the first of its kind in the Indian Ocean.
But whether it remains that way is far from certain, a new paper in Conservation Letters shows. Discontent is festering among both small-scale fishers and commercial tuna fishers, with fishers blaming sharks for stealing their catches, eating into their earnings, and damaging their fishing gear. This threatens what conservationists see as a successful intervention to slow this iconic fish’s decline.
“There was quite a lot of anger and resentment towards sharks,” Danielle Robinson, a marine conservationist at Newcastle University, U.K., who led the research, told Mongabay. Many fishers blamed the creation of the shark sanctuary for a worsening of the problems.
While there’s no authoritative data showing that sharks are now more abundant in Maldivian waters, that doesn’t mean we should ignore the disaffection among local communities, Robinson said.
“In human-wildlife conflicts, people often focus on collecting data, for example, whether sharks have increased or depredation has increased,” she said. “But what we need to understand is human perception.”
Sharks in the Maldives do appear to have a public relations problem. Fishermen who see them as detrimental to their livelihoods are less inclined to support shark conservation measures, interviews with about 100 fishers revealed.