A controversial plan to pay fishers to kill 1,000 Greenland sharks in northwestern Greenland was scrapped earlier this year after the national government determined the municipality lacked legal authority to carry it out, but local fishers continue to press for relief from shark-related losses.
The dispute returned to public attention this week as fishers described damaged gear, lost catches, and mounting costs from shark encounters in an October 5 account by The Guardian, which examined the continuing debate.
The municipal council in Avannaata Kommunia decided in February to offer 300 Danish kroner for each Greenland shark heart, targeting 1,000 sharks and setting aside a total of 300,000 kroner from a pest-control account, Oceans North Kalaallit Nunaat said.
The municipality later abandoned the plan after Greenland’s government determined it lacked a legal basis to establish the bounty, Sermitsiaq detailed.
Fishing Losses Drive the Dispute
The fight reflects the importance of commercial fishing to Greenland’s economy, where seafood exports play a dominant role.
Fishers say Greenland sharks become tangled in longlines, damage expensive equipment, and take hooked halibut and cod.
Henrik Jensen, a halibut fisher in Ilulissat, said he had lost around 6,000 hooks this year and sometimes lost 30,000 kroner in a single day because of shark encounters, The Guardian found.
“This year I’ve lost around 6,000 hooks in total,” Jensen said. “Sometimes we lose 30,000 Danish krone a day.”
Avannaata Mayor Lars Erik Gabrielsen defended the municipality’s push to address the problem.
“We need to safeguard the income of fishermen and the catch so that we can continue to eat the foods that we have relied on for generations,” Gabrielsen told The Guardian.
Conservationists Warn Against a Cull
Scientists and conservation groups argue that a large-scale cull could pose unusual risks because Greenland sharks grow and reproduce extremely slowly.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature classified the Greenland shark as Vulnerable in a 2020 assessment.
Greenland sharks are believed to reach sexual maturity at roughly 150 years old, Oceans North states.
Greenland shark researcher Julius Nielsen separately warned against the proposed bounty.
“Initiating a bounty system of this magnitude is a risky path,” Nielsen said in the Oceans North release.
He added that the population “is likely still recovering from the big commercial harvest in the last century.”
The species was heavily harvested during the 19th and 20th centuries for shark-liver oil before commercial demand declined, The Guardian noted.
Killing sharks in one area would likely provide only temporary relief because tagging research indicates the animals can travel as much as 2,000 kilometers in a year, Oceans North argued.
“Sharks removed in north-west Greenland would quickly be replaced by individuals arriving from other regions,” the organization said.
Discarded shark carcasses and other fish waste could also attract additional sharks to fishing grounds, Oceans North warned.
Debate Continues Despite Bounty’s Collapse
The cancellation did not resolve the underlying conflict.
The possibility of a future cull remains under discussion even after the original bounty was dropped, The Guardian noted.
Fishers continue to argue that shark encounters impose significant costs on small fishing operations, while conservation advocates are pushing for alternatives.
Those proposals include compensation for damaged or lost gear, removal of abandoned “ghost” fishing lines, better bycatch reporting, new fishing equipment designed to reduce shark entanglements, and trials of acoustic shark-deterrent technology.
Improved bycatch reporting and bycatch-friendly gear regulations could be part of future efforts, Rebekka Nygård Bak, an adviser to Greenland’s Ministry of Fisheries, Hunting, Agriculture and Self Sufficiency, told The Guardian.
For now, the 1,000-shark bounty is dead. The dispute over how Greenland should protect both its fishing economy and one of the ocean’s slowest-reproducing predators is not.
