The Ministry of Fisheries and Hunting has finalized a marine management framework to systematically eliminate a species of half-blind, centuries-old shark that commercial halibut fishers claim has been relentlessly outmaneuvering them at a top speed of one mile per hour.
Greenland's Ministry of Fisheries and Hunting has finalized a sweeping marine management framework to cull the world's slowest shark, citing the urgent need to protect modern commercial fleets from being relentlessly terrorized by the 400-year-old, half-blind animals.
The regulatory action centers on the halibut-rich waters near Ilulissat, where the Greenland shark—a species that requires a century and a half to reach sexual maturity and tops out at a cruising speed of roughly 0.7 miles per hour—has repeatedly ambushed diesel-powered fishing vessels. Under the newly published guidelines, the practically immobile scavengers will be formally classified as a targeted threat to the sustainability of the local export market.
According to the public comment record, commercial operators submitted hundreds of formal grievances stating that the ancient creatures actively "bully" the fleet by being too heavy to easily remove from the industrial longlines they accidentally swallow. The ministry's environmental impact report concluded that the sharks' consistent failure to quickly flee the path of heavily mechanized winches constitutes an aggressive disruption of the local economy.
Conservationists noted that the sharks are largely lethargic scavengers suffering from debilitating eye parasites, but regional authorities argued that the animals have exhibited a clear pattern of malicious loitering, hovering near nets for weeks at a time and refusing to get out of the way of progress.
You cannot expect a multi-million-dollar trawling operation to simply evade an animal that has been drifting in the exact same spot since the Thirty Years' War.
The finalized lease sale for new halibut quotas includes provisions for fishers to continue feeding the culled sharks to local sled dogs, a disposal method regional regulators plan to classify as a circular-economy offset in their upcoming quarterly ESG filings. A formal review of the cull's impact on the broader Arctic ecosystem will be presented at COP30, assuming the remaining sharks have managed to swim far enough to be counted by then.