Over 15 countries have established shark sanctuaries prohibiting commercial fishing of sharks in their territorial waters. These sanctuaries provide welfare and conservation benefits to multiple shark species.
Shark sanctuary welfare benefits operate through protection from the severe welfare harms of finning and commercial fishing. Sharks caught in longlines experience acute stress from restraint, struggling, and the physical stress of being held out of water during retrieval. Finned sharks returned alive to the ocean face a prolonged death from inability to swim and subsequent suffocation or predation. Sanctuary protection eliminates these welfare harms for sharks within protected waters. The additional welfare benefit of reduced fishing pressure includes reduced incidental capture in gear targeting other species. The conservation benefit of recovering shark populations in sanctuaries also restores their ecosystem engineering role, improving habitat quality for the many species whose welfare depends on healthy reef and pelagic ecosystems.