Nurse sharks’ mating conflicts with anglers reveal systemic failures in coastal governance and extractive economies
Original framing: “Eat, prey, love: Nurse shark mating and Northeast angler conflicts offer conservation insights” — Phys.org
The *trickster* Coyote might laugh at how humans, having invented 'Shark Week,' now complain about sharks ‘invading’ their fishing spots—only to ignore the fact that their own nets are the real invaders. Bakhtian carnival logic would invert the headline: instead of 'eat, prey, love,' it might read *'love, prey, eat'*—a call to reverse the hierarchy of who consumes whom. The absurdity lies in treating sharks as 'problems' while the system that creates these conflicts (subsidized fishing, unchecked development) remains untouched, a classic case of displacing blame onto the 'other.'
The nurse shark conflicts in the Northeast U.S.
are not isolated ecological quirks but symptoms of a deeper crisis: the collision between industrial capitalism’s extractive logic and the ecological limits of marine systems. Historical parallels—from whaling-era conflicts to the cod fishery collapses—reveal a pattern where governance fails to address root causes, instead externalizing blame onto marginalized actors like recreational anglers. Indigenous knowledge systems, such as the Taíno’s *coa* or Māori *kaitiakitanga*, offer proven alternatives that prioritize reciprocity over exploitation, yet these are sidelined in favor of technocratic solutions. The *trickster* lens exposes the absurdity of treating sharks as 'problems' while the systemic drivers—subsidized overfishing, unchecked coastal development, and corporate capture of policy—go unchallenged. Solutions must therefore be rooted in three pillars: restoring Indigenous stewardship, enforcing corporate accountability, and fostering participatory governance that centers marginalized voices. The path forward lies in treating marine conflicts as invitations to redesign human-ocean relationships, not as puzzles to be solved through incremental science alone.