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He had served on the delegation’s animals committee since 2000, guiding governmental actions to protect mako sharks, iguanas, and Mexican crocodiles.

“A few years ago there was a pesky mako shark that kept circling in on a few paddlers,” Gair recalled, “but it just lost interest eventually and turned away.”

Moreover, if the restrictions are enforced, “mako sharks are fighters,” he says, and they will be so stressed and exhausted fighting the line or the net that they’ll die anyway after they’re caught.

Brazil's environmental protection agency, Ibama, estimated that approximately 11,000 blue sharks and shortfin mako sharks were killed to make up a haul of that size.

But the observation came back to him around 2011, when he was tracking blue and shortfin mako sharks traversing the eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean.