Last week, the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission held their annual meeting in Sri Lanka. As one of the few international fisheries policy organizations in the region, the IOTC is also responsible for management of billfish and sharks. Several new shark conservation policies were proposed this year. These included species-specific protections for hammerhead and oceanic whitetip sharks, closing loopholes in existing policies that ban finning sharks and discarding the bodies at sea, and requiring fishermen to collect and report more types of data on their shark bycatch. All of these proposals were rejected.
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