Abstract
Sharks and rays are sentinels of the state of the ocean. Since the mid-twentieth century, overall abundance has declined by nearly 65% and over one-third (37.5%) of species are threatened, causing widespread changes in community structure. This crisis stems from unregulated fisheries expansion coupled with inadequate catch-and-trade monitoring that fail to account for the complexity of shark and ray products, their use and global trade flows. In this Review, we assess the state of shark and ray populations worldwide, remedies to reverse their decline, and challenges and barriers to conservation. Stark geographic and taxonomic biases persist in essential data, requiring integrated species distribution modelling, data mobilization, trait prediction and new threat maps of fishing mortality. Addressing management gaps requires regulatory and market-based approaches that must ultimately reduce fishing mortality, link international frameworks to national fisheries management tools, and implement a mitigation hierarchy of management actions through sound compliance management across supply, trade and demand chains. Case studies reveal strengths and weaknesses in management effectiveness and demonstrate successful recoveries for wide-ranging and restricted-range species. Finally, we identify 6 key challenges and propose 25 research questions and actionable recommendations to bend back the curve of shark and ray biodiversity loss.
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Acknowledgements
H.B. acknowledges the Darwin Initiative (project ref: 30-008) and the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery. N.K.D. was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canada Research Chairs Program. P.C. acknowledges the FUNCAP visiting researcher grant (#PVS-0215-00123.02.00/23) and The Save Our Seas Foundation Conservation Fellowship (SOSF588). This work was supported by ISblue Project, Interdisciplinary graduate school for the Blue Planet (ANR-17-EURE-0015) and co-funded by a grant from the French government under the programme “Investissements d’Avenir” embedded in France 2030, and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no 101208931. This is a contribution from the “Baited Switch: Is global trade driving unsustainable fisheries?” working group, sponsored by the Morpho programme of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), Santa Barbara, USA.
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Around Us Project: www.seaaroundus.org
Australian Shark and Ray report card: https://www.fish.gov.au/shark-and-ray-reports
Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna: https://cites.org
Convention on Migratory Species of Wild Animals Sharks Memorandum of Understanding: https://www.cms.int/sharks
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: https://www.fao.org/
International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List: https://www.iucnredlist.org/
IPOA-Sharks: https://www.fao.org/ipoa-sharks
Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework: https://www.cbd.int/gbf
Sustainable Development Goals: https://sdgs.un.org/goals
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Dulvy, N.K., Aitchison, R.M., Arnold, A.E. et al. Bending back the curve of shark and ray biodiversity loss.
Nat. Rev. Biodivers. (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44358-025-00120-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44358-025-00120-2
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