The researchers, with their colleagues in North Africa are monitoring several fishing ports in the region. Our work, with the BBC Forensics team, also shows that protected sharks are caught, landed and offered for sale in countries including Tunisia and Algeria.
We found footage – posted on social media – of a great white being landed in a fishing port in Algeria and another large shark that appears to be a protected short-finned mako, being prepared for sale on a trolly in a fish market in Tunisia.
The rules that protect sharks are complicated. Currently, 24 threatened species have international legal protection – including mako, angel, threshers and hammerheads.
The EU and 23 nations around the Mediterranean have signed an agreement, external, which states that those species cannot be “retained on board, transhipped, landed, transferred, stored, sold or displayed or offered for sale”.
The international agreement states “they must be released unharmed and alive [where] possible”. Those rules do not tackle accidental bycatch and enforcement is variable from country to country.