Cash For Sharks: The Unintended Consequences Of Paying Fishermen To Release Sharks Caught In Their Nets Podcast

As Jaws marks its 50th anniversary this year, sharks continue to get a bad rap. Film after film portrays them as terrifying hunters, the bane of surfers and swimmers.

But in Indonesia, sharks are the hunted. It's the world's largest shark-fishing nation , with more species of sharks found in Indonesian waters than in any other country. It's estimated that one in three species of shark and their close relatives, including rays, are threatened with extinction.

Indonesia was the ideal place for conservation scientist Hollie Booth and her colleagues at a local NGO that she founded called Kebersamaan Untuk Lautan (an Indonesian phrase meaning“togetherness for the ocean”), to test out a new idea: would paying fishermen to release any sharks and rays caught accidentally in their nets help to keep more alive?

“ Nobody's ever done a randomised control trial of an incentive-based marine conservation programme before,” Booth, a researcher at the University of Oxford, told The Conversation Weekly podcast,“ and it is the best way to get good evidence on what is and isn't working.”

Booth and her colleagues were delighted that the vessels taking part in the trial were sending back videos of fishermen releasing sharks and rays caught up in their nets.

But when they had enough data to really analyse what had been happening, they realised that the incentive programme had some unintended consequences.“ It wasn't all quite as positive and rosy as we'd originally hoped,” says Booth.“I felt like a fraud.”

Listen to Hollie Booth and her colleague M. Said Ramdlan discuss their new study on The Conversation Weekly podcast.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Gemma Ware with production assistance from Mend Mariwany and Katie Flood. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Mixing and sound design by Eloise Stevens and theme music by Neeta Sarl.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here . A transcript of this episode is available on Apple Podcasts.

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