By Johnny Woodlock
Sharks, Rays and Chimeras Kit’s fine specimen fish.
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020 is a year to forget for me, as with lockdowns and travel restrictions I did not get out fishing much at all. We were locked down for the fine weather in the spring and then the summer was very poor. However I did prepare this piece following a trip out in January with Wicklow Boat Charters and Kit Dunne to target spurdog. Sharks, rays and chimeras all come under the classification of Elasmobranches. They do not have bony skeletons but instead have ‘bones’ made of cartilage. They are one of the oldest groups of fish around and vary a huge amount, from tiny dogfish to the largest fish in the sea. We have three species of chimeras in European waters, also called rabbit fish they live in deep waters. While they have survived almost unchanged for millions of years, many species have come under threat in recent years, largely due to human’s increasing 32
ability to catch them in various fisheries. Often they die in nets intended for other species as bycatch, but many species are targeted for food or even like lesser spotted catshark, for pot bait. As a kid I used to fish for mackerel from my father’s boat with feathers. That was when huge schools of mackerel still abounded off the East Coast. We would often catch spurdog (spiney dogfish) on bare feathers. Spurdog were plentiful in those days all around Ireland and were a welcome catch for anglers. Indeed, I can remember the bad old days when angling contests insisted that all catches be weighed onshore, so boxes of spurdogs were brought in after a days competition. Spurdog were not eaten in Ireland, so often these dead fish were left on the pier to be put in skips and dumped. They were not eaten in Ireland, but a strong market was found in the UK, France and Germany so the commercial
Winter 2020 Irish Country Sports and Country Life
boats started targeting them. It did not take long for the stocks to be decimated. I was told that three vessels ‘cleaned them out’ of Donegal Bay. The Shannon estuary was also hit hard with refrigerated lorries waiting to take them to France to be sold to make school dinners. They are still popular in the UK as rock salmon, a name that covers everything from tope and bull huss to spotted dogfish. One of the biggest problems is that spurdog are long lived and produce relatively few young, up to 21 after a gestation period of 18-22 months, which is one of the longest of any vertebrate. One of the major issues is that they aggregate in groups of the same sex, particularly when pupping, so the nets can catch huge numbers of pregnant females at once. I did hear of a boat in the Irish Sea that caught 200 boxes in one day - probably pregnant females. Another big problem is that they tend to migrate and move
