Methods and Such

We have two different methods of catching sharks. The first one is called a Gill Net, which is actually illegal in the state of Florida, so we have special permits to use our equipment. It's basically an enormously long net with six different mesh sizes to catch six different size classes of fish. The mesh is clear so that fish can't see it and swim right into it, catching them on their gills and wrapping them up. This is what part of ours looks like:

The other method is long line fishing. We put out an extremely long line with a hook on it every 20 feet or so. We have four different sizes of hooks that we use. It kind of looks like this:

http://www.afma.gov.au/information/students/methods/images/pelagic_longline.jpg

Both of these methods have pretty high mortality rates for fisheries, however we only let our sets soak for an hour each in order to reduce mortality as much as possible.

When we catch sharks we measure them, tag them, take biopsies of ones that look really healthy, and genetics samples. They're only out of the water for a couple minutes and get released as soon as possible. If one comes up and looks on the brink, we release it immediately after measuring it, we won't wait and do biopsies or anything. The sharks that do come up dead we re-use as bait for some of the long line hooks, so nothing goes to waste.