Sharks are endangered because industrial fishing kills roughly 80 million of them a year — for fins, for meat, and as bycatch in gear set for tuna and swordfish — while their biology leaves them almost no way to replace the losses.
The global assessment published in 2021 found that more than a third of all sharks, rays and chimaeras are threatened with extinction, and work published in Nature the same year put the fall in oceanic shark and ray abundance at 71 per cent since 1970. Pollution, habitat loss and beach control programmes add to the damage, but none of them is close to fishing in scale.
- Sharks and rays threatenedMore than one third (2021 assessment)
- Killed in fisheries each yearAbout 80 million (2019 estimate)
- Oceanic decline since 197071 per cent
On this page
What the Red List actually shows
The number people quote most often is the one from the 2021 global assessment of cartilaginous fishes: of the 1,199 sharks, rays and chimaeras evaluated, more than a third qualified as threatened, meaning Vulnerable, Endangered or Critically Endangered. That is a far heavier burden than land mammals or birds carry, and it was reached in a single human lifetime.
The IUCN Red List is a risk register rather than a law, and reading it properly matters. A Critically Endangered listing does not mean a species is nearly extinct in the counting sense; it means the population has collapsed against a published threshold, usually a decline of 80 per cent or more across three generations. For a shark that matures at fifteen years, three generations can be the best part of a century, so the listings describe long, slow crashes rather than sudden ones.
The second figure worth knowing came out of Nature in 2021: the global abundance of sharks and rays living in the open ocean fell by 71 per cent between 1970 and 2018, and fishing pressure over the same period rose eighteen-fold. Those two numbers together are the whole argument. The animals did not become fragile. The gear became efficient.
Fishing is the cause, and the rest is a footnote
Estimates of how many sharks fisheries kill each year sit around 80 million, with roughly a quarter of that total made up of species already listed as threatened. Three routes account for almost all of it.
The first is the fin trade. Fins are worth many times the rest of the carcass by weight, which for decades made it rational to keep the fins and throw the body overboard — the practice described on our page about shark fin soup. The second is meat. As fin markets came under pressure the meat market grew, and shark is now sold in Europe, Brazil and Australia under names that rarely mention a shark: rock salmon, flake, cação. The third is bycatch, the sharks that die on longlines and in purse seines set for tuna and swordfish. Blue sharks alone are landed in the tens of millions a year as a by-product of other fisheries.
Everything else is smaller. Plastic and chemical pollution, coastal development that removes mangrove nursery grounds, beach nets and drum lines, and the warming of the water all cost sharks, and some of them matter intensely to individual species. None of them removes tens of millions of animals a year. The detail of how the gear does it is set out in the danger fishing presents to shark populations.
Why sharks cannot replace what is taken
A cod lays millions of eggs. A shark does not. Sharks fertilise internally and invest almost everything in a handful of large, fully formed young, which is a superb strategy in a stable sea and a disastrous one under industrial pressure.
The numbers are stark next to any bony fish. A sand tiger shark produces exactly two pups per litter, because the first embryo to develop teeth eats its siblings inside the uterus. A basking shark carries a pregnancy of two to three years for a litter of about six. Many species breed only every second year, and females of the larger sharks do not reproduce at all until they are fifteen, twenty or thirty years old.
That combination — late maturity, long pregnancy, small litters — sets a hard ceiling on how fast a population can grow back. A depleted shark stock may need decades of protection to recover even if fishing stops completely, and if it does not stop, the arithmetic never closes. It is also why fishing pressure that a herring fishery would shrug off can empty a coastline of sharks within twenty years.
The species closest to the edge
Extinction risk is not spread evenly. It concentrates in three groups: sharks confined to rivers and estuaries, flattened bottom-dwellers that sit in the path of trawls, and the large coastal species whose fins are worth the most.
The Ganges shark lives in a handful of Indian river systems and was assessed as Critically Endangered in 2021. The Pondicherry shark, a small requiem shark of the Indo-Pacific, went essentially unrecorded for decades and carries the same listing. So does the daggernose shark of the muddy north-east coast of South America, which lost the great majority of its population to gillnets in roughly a decade.
Angel sharks are the clearest case of all. There are more than twenty species in the genus Squatina, they lie buried on soft bottoms, and bottom trawling catches them whether or not anyone is looking for them. The sawback angelshark has been assessed as Critically Endangered, and the family has been wiped out across most of the Mediterranean, where it was once ordinary. Among the big coastal sharks, the scalloped hammerhead holds the same listing, and the sand tiger was moved to Critically Endangered in 2020.
Are great white sharks endangered?
This is the question the whole subject gets reduced to, and the honest answer is narrower than most articles admit. The great white is listed as Vulnerable, one step below Endangered, on an assessment made in 2018. It is not Critically Endangered, and it is not Near Threatened either, whatever older pages say.
The figure of three to five thousand great whites left in the world, which circulates endlessly, is not a global population estimate. No defensible global count exists. What does exist is a set of regional studies: a few hundred adults off central California, a low-thousands estimate for eastern Australia and New Zealand, and roughly comparable orders of magnitude off South Africa. These are honest local numbers from tagging and photo identification, and they cannot be added together into a world total.
What threatens the species is the same thing that threatens the rest: entanglement in nets, hooking on longlines set for other fish, beach control gear, and the depletion of the seals and fish it eats. Protection has come slowly — South Africa listed it first, in 1991 — and the population trends that are being watched most closely, off California and eastern Australia, are broadly stable rather than collapsing. The animals with no protection anywhere, like the river sharks, are in far more trouble than the one on the poster. If you want the practical response, it is set out in ten easy ways to help save sharks and in the record of what law and trade rules have achieved in endangered sharks, shark fin soup and conservation efforts.
The great white is listed as Vulnerable, assessed in 2018. 
Nets, longlines and beach control gear account for most known great white deaths.
Frequently asked questions
How many sharks are killed every year?
The best current estimate is about 80 million a year, calculated from reported landings, trade data and fishery observers for 2019. Roughly a quarter of those animals belong to species already listed as threatened. Earlier work put the figure near 100 million for the year 2000, within a range of 63 to 273 million.
What percentage of sharks are endangered?
The 2021 assessment of 1,199 sharks, rays and chimaeras found that more than a third qualify as threatened, which covers the Vulnerable, Endangered and Critically Endangered categories together. The share is higher among large coastal and open-ocean species and lower among small deep-water sharks that fishing gear rarely reaches.
What is the single biggest threat to sharks?
Fishing, by a wide margin. It reaches sharks three ways: fisheries that target them for fins and meat, bycatch on longlines and in purse seines set for tuna and swordfish, and illegal fishing inside protected waters. Pollution, habitat loss and beach nets are real problems but operate on a much smaller scale.
Are great white sharks endangered?
They are listed as Vulnerable, assessed in 2018, which is one category below Endangered. The often-quoted total of three to five thousand animals left worldwide is not a real global estimate; no such count exists. Regional studies off California, Australia and South Africa give local numbers in the hundreds to low thousands.
Which shark is closest to extinction?
The river sharks and the angel sharks are in the worst position. The Ganges shark, the Pondicherry shark and the daggernose shark are all Critically Endangered with tiny remaining ranges, and several angel shark species have been effectively lost from the Mediterranean, where they were common within living memory.
Why can't shark populations recover quickly?
Because sharks reproduce like large mammals rather than like fish. Females mature late, sometimes after twenty or thirty years, carry long pregnancies and produce only a few young at a time. A sand tiger has two pups per litter and a basking shark about six after a two to three year pregnancy, so recovery takes decades.
Does shark finning still happen?
Yes, although less openly. Most fishing nations now insist that a shark reach port with its fins still joined to the body, which takes away any reason to throw the carcass overboard, and the fin business has shrunk accordingly. Overall mortality has not followed it down: the meat market grew into the space the fin market left.
What happens to the ocean if sharks disappear?
Removing a top predator releases the animals below it. Studies of reefs and coastal shelves where sharks have been fished out record rises in mid-sized predators, falls in the herbivores that keep algae off coral, and slower recovery after bleaching or storms. The effects are uneven, but they run in one direction.
References
A small team focused on researching sharks and making marine biology easy to understand. Every page is reviewed against current species records and the SharkSider attack database, and updated when new incidents or research appear.
Published December 12, 2025 · Last updated September 23, 2026 · Filed under Shark Conservation.
