We shouldn’t hound out Irish sharks

THE Smooth-hound shark may be in danger of being wiped out here.

I find sharks fascinating and rather beautiful creatures and, to judge by the amount of documentaries about them on television, so do a lot of other people. Most of the attention focuses on large shark species found in tropical waters. We don’t hear so much about the ones that swim off our own coast and, in fact, not a lot is known about them.

But Dr Edward Farrell of UCD, along with two other marine biologists, Dr Stefano Mariani and Dr Maurice Clarke, has been studying them for the past four years and the results of this work have just been published. They make interesting reading.