Sharks are under pressure from fishing, because they are caught for their fins, meat and liver oil, and for sport, and shark fins are sold for shark fin soup, mostly in Asia, while sharks grow slowly and have few young, so that fishing can wipe out a population faster than it recovers. Sharks are among the slowest-reproducing and latest-maturing of all vertebrates, and their pregnancies are long: white shark pregnancy is thought to last a year or more, and, as of November 2026, male white sharks are thought to mature at about 26 years and females at about 33, though some estimates for females say at least 30. Researchers concluded that sharks are being caught faster than they can reproduce: as of November 2026, fishing takes an estimated 6.4 to 7.9 percent a year, while the average rebound rate is about 4.9 percent, so by that arithmetic the catch is the larger figure by 1.5 to 3.0 percentage points.

The size of the catch is itself an estimate. As of November 2026, a 2013 study estimated that about 100 million sharks were killed each year, with a possible range of 63 to 273 million, and by that arithmetic the top of the range is more than four times the bottom. As of November 2026, a 2024 study found that shark fishing killed about 76 million sharks a year in 2012 and about 80 million in 2019, even though laws against finning grew more than tenfold, and those laws had little effect on the number killed. A 2024 study also found that shark deaths rose about 4 percent in coastal fisheries between 2012 and 2019, while deaths in pelagic (open-ocean) fisheries fell about 7 percent, especially in the Atlantic and western Pacific.

Rules and listings act in different ways: some say what a fishing boat or a market must do with a shark, one protects a place instead, and one governs trade between countries. As of November 2026, European Union rules since 2013 have required that sharks caught by European vessels, or in European waters, be landed with their fins still naturally attached to the body, and a US law, the Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act, signed in December 2022, prohibits possessing, transporting and selling shark fins in the United States, with a few narrow exceptions. In 2009 Palau became the first country in the world to declare its waters a national shark sanctuary, as of November 2026. A listing on Appendix II of CITES works differently from a ban on trade. As of November 2026, an Appendix II listing does not ban international trade; it requires countries to make sure trade does not harm wild populations. The basking shark and the whale shark were the first sharks listed on Appendix II, in 2003. In November 2022, at the meeting in Panama City, governments voted to list all 54 species of the requiem shark family, plus hammerhead sharks, and for requiem sharks the new trade rules began on 25 November 2023.

The scale of the risk has been assessed group by group. As of November 2026, in a 2021 global reassessment, 391 of 1,199 shark, ray and chimaera species (32.6 percent) were threatened with extinction, and overfishing threatens every one of those 391 species. Between the first global assessment in 2014 and the 2021 reassessment, the share of sharks, rays and chimaeras listed as threatened rose, but part of the rise is better data, so the two counts cannot be compared simply. As of November 2026, open-ocean sharks and rays have fallen 71 percent in numbers since 1970, and about three-quarters of those species are threatened, while in 2016 the IUCN classed the whale shark as Endangered, judging that its numbers had more than halved over about 75 years. As of November 2026, the great white is listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN, and its numbers are thought to be falling worldwide.

In some places the trend runs the other way. As of November 2026, white sharks in the northwest Atlantic have been increasing since protective rules began in the 1990s, and northeastern Pacific white sharks appear to be increasing after protections began. Along the California coast, starting in 2014 Monterey Bay in central California saw a dramatic increase in young white sharks, mostly juveniles under 2.5 meters long.

Satellite tags have shown where white sharks go. Scientists have tracked white sharks with pop-up satellite tags to the White Shark Cafe, an area of open ocean halfway between Hawaii and Mexico, where adult white sharks gather each year in the Pacific, but scientists still do not know exactly why. The same tags showed that some white sharks tagged off California swim all the way to Hawaii and back.

The fossil record holds an earlier loss. About 19 million years ago the number of open-ocean sharks suddenly crashed, and fossils from Pacific Ocean sediments show that about 90 percent of them vanished, and as of November 2026 scientists do not yet know why. As of November 2026, fossil shark scales from that die-off show a big loss in the variety of scale shapes, about 70 percent, which scientists read as a loss of about seven in every ten shark types, and the change in the fossil record took only about 100,000 years, which is sudden in geological terms.

Great white sharks are apex predators at the top of the ocean food chain, and sharks also help keep the oceans healthy. They are part of the food web and feed on sick and dying animals. Removing top sharks can ripple through an ecosystem, down to the marine plants, and one place to look is Shark Bay, Australia, where the risk from tiger sharks seems to change where sea turtles feed on seagrass, and so how the seagrass looks. Tiger sharks eat almost anything, including fish, turtles, birds and even garbage, and their strong jaws and serrated teeth can crack the shells of sea turtles. For many sharks at the top of the food web, the effects of removal are complex and hard to predict.

Words to know

• apex: at the top
• ecosystem: living community
• sanctuary: protected place