Sharks are caught as bycatch in longline, trawl, and drift net fisheries at enormous scale. The welfare costs of capture, handling, and discard mortality interact with critical conservation concerns for many threatened species.
Shark bycatch causes both significant individual suffering and population-level conservation harm. Captured sharks experience exhaustion, physical injury, and in many cases fatal physiological stress during and after capture. The welfare implications are compounded when sharks are finned while still alive — a practice that causes prolonged suffering. Conservation and welfare concerns align here: protecting threatened shark populations requires reducing bycatch mortality, and reducing bycatch mortality requires gear modifications and regulatory frameworks that also reduce individual suffering. These twin imperatives make shark bycatch reduction a high-priority issue.