Congratulations to Jeremy Powers for scoring big points with his 298-pound Hammerhead Shark at last weekend's 77th annual Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo. A feather in Jeremy's cap means one less breeding-age Hammerhead Shark in the Gulf of Mexico. Way to waste some wildlife Jeremy! However, you are still an inadequate breeding-age human being.

Think that a 298-pound Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo winning Shark is a big deal? Well it is, sort of. But not in the regular, "Golly Shucks! What a monster!" sort of way. The big deal is that this is a pretty small Shark to win a fishing contest. The Sharks in the Gulf of Mexico used to be bigger. A lot bigger. In 1986, a fisherman won the rodeo with a 805-pound Tiger Shark. In 1981 the winner was so large, it bottomed out the scale at 850 pounds.

"They bring in this 300-pound shark, and everybody is like, 'What a tremendous fish.' But the thing is, fish that were twice as big as that showed up regularly at the rodeo," said Joel Fodrie, a marine biologist. "What typically wins the rodeo now are these 300-pound sharks. The reality is a 900-pound shark would bite the 300-pound shark in half."

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What the hell happened? All the Sharks were caught and killed, duh. Records prove that large Sharks have effectively been eliminated from the Gulf of Mexico, and many scientists blame the federal government. Sean Powers, a marine biologist with the University of South Alabama's Sea Lab points to the late '70s and early '80s when the feds labeled Sharks an "underutilized resource." The government provided sweet incentives and loans to commercial fishing operations to finance longline fishing gear. Longlines stretch for miles and are studded with thousands of hooks. This is an extremely effective method of stripping wildlife from the sea. In the early 70s, before the government promoted Shark fishing, the commercial Shark haul in the Gulf was less than 200,000 pounds a year. By 1986, after the incentives, the haul went up to 2 million pounds a year. By 1989, it was more than 12 million. In 2007, the haul was back down to 2 million pounds, but not for lack of trying. There are simply less large breeding-age fish in the sea.

Nearly all the big Tiger and Bull Sharks are gone. The predominant species of Shark in the Gulf are now Blacktips and Sandbar Sharks. It would take a complete shutdown of all Shark fishing in the Gulf for the larger species to return. Why? Sharks take years and years to reach sexual maturity, and then some species only have one pup at a time. While commercial fishing is the heart of the problem, Shark fishing tournaments are not blameless at all. Most Shark fishing tournaments and all record-keeping forms of Shark fishing like the type of fishing promoted by the IGFA(International Game Fish Association) base awards and records on the big fish. The big fish are the breeding fish; these are the ones that need to remain in the ocean. When each big Shark is killed, hundreds of potential offspring are removed from the seas, and with them, valuable genetic diversity. So not only are we left with fewer Sharks, but potentially weaker Sharks.

--Ms Sharky