The spiny dogfish made history when it was certified as the world’s first sustainable shark fishery in 2011. (Photo: Ben Nelms)

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Fisheries and Oceans Canada record of individual spiny dogfish caught between May and October from 1954 and 2007 (Map: Chris Brackley/Canadian Geographic; Source: Fisheries and Oceans Canada)

The white-sided dolphins are the first to appear. Within seconds, a humpback whale surfaces 15 metres off the starboard side of the Ocean Sunset, exhaling a guttural breath before diving back down with a mighty crack of its tail. Meanwhile, 100 or so black-footed albatrosses queue up behind us, waiting to pounce on scraps of bait or anything else we drag up from the abyss.

We’re 80 kilometres off the west coast of Vancouver Island, dropping thousands of baited hooks onto the edge of Clayoquot Canyon, a favourite seasonal gathering place for sharks. To the eyes of a landlubber like me, we are surrounded by a near-impossible natural bounty — and that’s just what we can see above the surface.

“The albatrosses look like they’re hungry,” says Captain John Planes, 56, a lifelong fisherman, as he controls a winch that is pulling up hooks from the bottom. Beside him is his son John Jr., 31, who has fished alongside his dad for nearly half his life. Skinny, wiry strong and covered with tattoos, John Jr. has spent the day with his cousin Ryan Planes cutting squid and pollock for bait, which they place on about 3,000 leadered hooks and connect to two main lines stretching nearly four kilometres along the sea floor.

There’s a white flash from below as a turbot appears, two half-moon bites torn out of its body. It’s the work of a spiny dogfish, a shark so voracious that longline fishermen never leave their baited hooks on the bottom for too long for fear the sharks will devour the entire catch, including other hooked dogfish. Before long, a dogfish rises from the depths on a hook: it’s a perfect miniature shark, less than a metre long. From pointy snout to thresher tail, the streamlined body is gunmetal grey but transitions to brown, reddish yellow and, finally, creamy white on the belly. The almondshaped eyes are enormous, filled almost entirely by black pupil, imparting a cartoonish look; if it weren’t such a nasty piece of work, it would actually be cute.

Spiny dogfish are, in many ways, an anomaly among sharks, and that’s why we’re here. In September 2011, British Columbia’s spiny dogfish fishery became the first shark fishery on the planet to earn Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification, an international certification program that promotes good management and traceability of seafood. Achieving certification was the culmination of six years of work by the tiny B.C. Dogfish Hook and Line Industry Association, which today represents 28 dogfish fishermen and a single processor on the Pacific coast of British Columbia. By pursuing the certification, the fishermen and processor hoped to differentiate themselves from the many unsustainable shark fisheries in the world, thus protecting their key markets in the United Kingdom, Germany and other European Union countries from the ire of environmental campaigners. It’s the MSC’s hope that the B.C. certification could inspire a domino effect. “On a global basis, many species in the shark family are vulnerable to overfishing,” said Kerry Coughlin, MSC regional director, Americas, when spiny dogfish certification was announced last September. “We hope this will inspire other fisheries harvesting this species to achieve this bar.”

The emergence of the B.C. dogfish as the first “green” shark is an important precedent. Of the roughly 1,050 shark species evaluated by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to date, about 20 percent (approximately 180 species) are at an elevated risk of extinction, mostly from legal and illegal industrial and small-scale fisheries. This statistic is especially alarming when you consider that sharks have thrived in the world’s oceans since before the dawn of dinosaurs — 400 million years of well-adapted existence — yet many could disappear after little more than 100 years of human mismanagement.

On that urgent note, we have come to Ucluelet, B.C., one of the province’s top three commercial fishing hubs and a popular tourist town on Vancouver Island’s western edge, to see what we can learn from the spiny dogfish fishery: does it point a way forward for the rest of the world’s shark fisheries, or is it just part of a wider problem? As we soon discover, like almost everything else to do with sharks, the answer is clouded with uncertainty.

The locals in Ucluelet laugh when we tell them we’ve come in search of spiny dogfish. “Now why would you go and do something like that?” asks our waitress with a smirk as we sit down to a last meal at a Ucluelet marina restaurant before embarking on a three-day fishing trip aboard the Ocean Sunset.

We soon learn that spiny dogfish have been considered a nuisance throughout British Columbia for the last century or so, routinely getting ensnared in fishing nets and commanding a relatively tiny price. “It’s considered a garbage fish compared with expensive salmon and halibut,” explains Ryan Planes. “People think it’s trash.”

But scientists such as Nick Dulvy, Canada Research Chair in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University and co-chair of the IUCN’s Shark Specialist Group, have nothing but awe for the fish. For one thing, it has a roughly two-year pregnancy, one of the longest in the animal kingdom. “That beats everything on land or sea, including elephants and most large whales,” says Dulvy. Unlike most fish, dogfish typically give live birth to around 12 “pups” every two years. Dogfish can also outlive humans, reaching up to 100 years old, and take as long as 30 years to attain sexual maturity. “Based on its reproductive history alone,” he says, “it doesn’t make sense that this thing could sustain fishing.” Despite his concerns, however, Dulvy remains cautiously optimistic that B.C. dogfish can be fished sustainably, in part because of their diet. Unlike many sharks, dogfish eat other creatures that are abundant and low in the food chain — in B.C. waters, they chase herring and krill — and it’s these that are believed to sustain their numbers.