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Environmental Science› Nature and Landscape Conservation› Ichthyology and Marine Biology

Marine conservation — Shark-finning legislation

Submitted 2026-10-22

Field: Environmental Science › Nature and Landscape ConservationType: No effect foundArea: marine conservationTarget: Shark-finning legislationStage: full study

Hypothesis

The wave of laws written to stop shark finning would reduce the number of sharks killed by fisheries.

What failed

Global shark fishing mortality rose from at least 76 to 80 million animals between 2012 and 2019 (about 25 million from threatened species). Linking mortality to regulations showed that anti-finning laws did not lower mortality; only regional fishing or retention bans showed some success.

Broken assumption

Banning the practice of finning reduces how many sharks are killed.

Why

The abstract does not give a mechanism; it contrasts finning rules, which did not cut deaths, with outright fishing or retention bans, which did help.

From the published paper: Worm et al. Science, 2024. ↗Public domain

Research ideas from this failure

Unvetted lead — read the papers

New hypotheses this failure suggests, each with a crucial experiment, a rival explanation of the original result, and the papers it rests on. Written by AI from paper titles and abstracts found on OpenAlex (and Europe PMC, for life and health sciences).

Related failures

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Links in published research

Where this experiment's genes are known to matter outside its own research area, and the papers behind those links. Sources: Open Targets Platform and Europe PMC.