By Mary Kate McCoy
April 19, 2023
Indonesia protects ‘walking sharks.’ Are other sharks next?
4 min
“Walking sharks are small, charismatic and absolutely harmless to humans. Our hope is that they will be ambassadors for the conservation of their toothier cousins,” said Iqbal Herwata Putra, a scientist with Konservasi Indonesia, Conservation International’s main partner in the country.
“This is a big step that culminates years of effort,” he added. “We hope it will give walking sharks the chance to thrive in a changing climate.”
A leopard epaulette shark in the Milne Bay region of eastern Papua New Guinea.
The Indonesian government and Konservasi Indonesia worked to show that the protections — which ban all fishing and collecting of walking sharks — support the survival of a species that’s important to Indonesia’s biodiversity and benefit local communities because of the ecotourism that walking sharks attract.
The second is their tendency to stay very close to home. Most walking sharks live out their lives within a mile of where they hatched. And they are only found in a relatively small area circling Northern Australia and New Guinea. Within that ring, individual species of walking shark, also known as epaulette sharks, occupy very specific habitats, with no two species of walking sharks overlapping in any given area. For example, the Cenderawasih epaulette shark (Hemiscyllium galei) is only found in Cenderawasih Bay, northwest of the Indonesian province of Papua — an extremely small area for a shark species distribution.
Species with more limited ranges are often more vulnerable to localized threats such as pollution, overfishing or natural disasters. The fact that walking sharks live in small, isolated groups puts even healthy populations at risk.
“If anything goes wrong — say a tsunami or volcanic eruption — an entire species could be knocked out in one go,” Erdmann said.
“Walking sharks tend to spend their entire lives on the same reef,” said Iqbal. “When that gets degraded, they have nowhere else to go.”
“There's something symbolic about ensuring that we are protecting the most recently evolved sharks out there,” Erdmann said. “And as the climate changes, hopefully this is a group of sharks that has the ability to keep evolving to survive new threats.”
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