Another Life Michael VineyElasmobranchs (el-az-ma-branks) are the fish with bendy bones, or rather, not bones at all, but struts and networks of cartilage.
This does not stop them growing huge, like the basking shark, or ferocious, like the great white, or small, flat and rather ugly, like the guitar-shaped angel sharks nuzzled into the sand of our western bays. Rays, skates, dogfish are all elasmobranchs, and while few of the shark family make an immediate food appeal in Ireland, fishing pressure is bringing many Atlantic stocks near to collapse.
Despite a bad press for the few dangerous sharks, there are fascinating things to know about elasmobranchs - an astonishing sense of smell, for example or the ability to pick up electrical fields from the twitch of distant prey - but the crucial characteristics are long lives, late maturity, long pregnancies and, in many species, the live birth of the young. This slow replacement of their kind has made them dramatically vulnerable.
The metre-long spurdog, for example, which the British and others happily eat as "rock salmon", has a gestation period almost as long as an elephant's - 22 to 24 months until the live delivery of, at most, half-a-dozen young. In a slow northward migration across our shelf, the females form hunting shoals of their own. Spurdog have long been valuable to Irish fishermen, but targeted gillnet fishing for large females denuded whole areas and the stock is now dangerously low.
The so-called Portuguese dogfish and the leafscale gulper shark are small, deep-sea species, first caught in the 1980s as a mix of new fish were trawled from the far ocean floor. Along with a market for their livers and fins, their fillets became a collective "siki" in the supermarkets of France and Spain. The gulper shark can live for up to 70 years, but both species have declined catastrophically. The EU ban on gillnets in depths below 200 metres, introduced in 2006, responded to the scandal of "ghost-fishing" - the death of deepwater sharks, along with anglerfish, rabbitfish and other species in the meshes of gillnets lost or abandoned in a ruthless and wasteful fishery.
Swimming into Ireland's western inshore waters just now are schools of the blue shark, one of the most handsome species of the temperate oceans of the world. They are almost all juvenile females, up to 2.5 metres long, with backs of a vivid cobalt blue. For some 30 years, they have been the prime quarry of sport anglers, fishing from charter boats with a policy of catch-and-release.
Working with the Central Fisheries Board, the skippers have tagged more than 16,000 sharks. Recoveries have shown the blues as a single stock, slowly migrating around the Atlantic. The tags have come from Spanish tuna and swordfish longliners, Japanese and Korean longliners off West Africa, Canadian longliners working off the Grand Banks, and sport fishermen off the north-east American coast. The farthest recovery was off Venezuela.
The wide travels of oceanic sharks take them into uncontrolled waters.
And while the global status of the blue shark is merely "near-threatened", some shark scientists estimate a 50 to 70 per cent fall in the Atlantic population, much of it as bycatch in long-line fisheries for tuna.
An even more crucial plight has overtaken the porbeagle, the four-metre "mackerel shark" that moves into Irish waters in summer to hunt and to give birth to its four pups after a nine-month pregnancy. This is the shark that ends up as "veau de mer" in top French restaurants, with a value to the fisherman of as much as €750 per fish.
On both sides of the Atlantic, porbeagles have been seriously overexploited by targeted longline fisheries and the north-eastern stock has crashed once already, in the 1960s. The porbeagles off Europe could take 25 years to recover, even if catches were held to the lowest possible level.
A small number of the sharks have been taken as bycatch in several Irish fisheries; there are no quota controls for porbeagles. In the stock book of Ireland's Marine Institute, the scientists support a total ban on deliberate fishing for porbeagles and tighter international controls on the trade in their meat (a loophole lets landings be reported as "various sharks", rather than disclosing the species). They also point out that porbeagles caught on surface longlines are usually captured alive and could well be returned to the sea.
The elasmobranchs form a huge share of the big predatory fish of the sea. By some recent estimates, fisheries have already removed nine-tenths of the top hunters in the food chain, with unpredictable consequences for the ocean's ecosystems as a whole. At least within the zone of Ireland's fishing control, they should be saved the limited torment of catch-and-release, either by longliners or anglers in charter boats.
EyeOnNature
On wild land nearby I have often come across what appears to be a bumble bee nest ripped open. The dry grassy structure in the ground usually has a few bees still active. What could have done this, and why?
Brian Ó Ceallacháin, Dunmanway,
Co Cork
It was a badger searching for honey.
I found an extraordinary tree in Castletown. The trunk appears to be beech, but is much smoother. The leaves are not quite as pointed as beech leaves and some branches are either beech or fern oak entirely. Its mast and nuts are the same as normal beech.
E Shirley Gibson, Celbridge,
Co Kildare
It is a beech cultivar called fern-leaved beech - Fagus sylvatica "Asplenifolia".
An owl with large brown wings perches outside my kitchen window. Some birds call to each other day and night making "eeee" sounds about five seconds apart.
Terry Lawlor, Ballyduff, Co Waterford
It is a long-eared owl, nesting nearby: its chicks are calling.