Great white sharks in California were rejected Friday for listing under the U.S. Endangered Species Act despite a vigorous campaign by environmental groups to protect the toothy predators.
The National Marine Fisheries Service declined to list the big sharks despite recent estimates showing only 350 adults and sub-adults in the two places along the West Coast where they congregate — Guadalupe Island, in Mexico, and in the area known as the Red Triangle between Monterey Bay, the Farallon Islands and Bodega Head.
The numbers are preliminary and don’t include the many juvenile sharks that are born and grow up in Southern California, a fact that prompted the fisheries service to discount the population estimates.
“They made the wrong decision. They erred on the side of extinction,” said Geoff Shester, the California program director for Oceana, one of the conservation groups that filed a petition in 2012 to list the sharks. “Clearly there are uncertainties in the population, but this is just a bad decision in our view. We protect whales, we spend millions of dollars to protect sea otters and both have numbers way greater than this.”
The finned beasts are still candidates for protection under California’s Endangered Species Act. The state Fish and Game Commission began a yearlong review in February to determine whether the sharks are sufficiently threatened to warrant a listing, which would impose more stringent regulations on activities that might harm them, including fishing.
Great white sharks, known scientifically as Carcharodon carcharias, average 15 to 16 feet in length but can grow to 20 feet. The biggest one on record, caught in 1939, was 21 feet long and weighed 7,300 pounds.
A landmark study released in 2009 by Stanford University determined that this region’s white sharks are genetically unique compared with other great whites around the world, a crucial criteria for an endangered species listing.
Shester said great whites are in danger of extinction from pollution, climate change and because they are constantly being ensnared accidentally in gillnets set for halibut and seabass.