Sea anglers at Looe, Falmouth and Brightlingsea are being asked for their historical catch records and local knowledge as part of a near-£1 million, three-year project to protect England's blue shark, porbeagle and tope

What makes this project structurally different from most shark research is where the data comes from. Blue shark, porbeagle and tope are wide-ranging, elusive species that are genuinely difficult to study through conventional survey methods alone, but recreational anglers who've spent decades fishing for them hold exactly the kind of long-run, location-specific catch history that a three-year research programme can't generate from scratch. Running structured interviews with at least 45 anglers at established shark-fishing hubs is a direct acknowledgement that the Angling Trust's membership already possesses data the scientific record is missing.

The tagging programme itself is substantial: 75 electronic tags, including long-term satellite units tracking individual sharks for up to two years, will map movements and, alongside non-invasive ultrasound work to identify pregnant animals, help locate pupping and nursery grounds without the more invasive sampling that kind of identification traditionally required. Finding nursery grounds specifically is often the single most useful thing a conservation programme can establish, because protecting a breeding ground does more for a population's future than protecting adult habitat alone.

The conservation stakes explain the near-£1 million in Natural England funding behind it. Porbeagle is currently classified Critically Endangered in Europe and tope Vulnerable, which means the England Red List assessments this project's findings will feed into aren't a paperwork exercise, they're the evidence base regulators use to decide what protections these species actually get. Better data changes what's possible to justify, in either direction, tighter protection or a more accurate picture of where pressure genuinely needs targeting.

For anglers targeting these species specifically, the most immediately useful output may be the best-practice release guidance the project is committed to producing. Post-release survival for large pelagic sharks depends heavily on handling time, hook type and how a fish is played and released, and guidance built from this project's tagging data, which can actually confirm whether a released shark survived rather than assuming it did, will carry more weight than existing general advice. Anyone fishing for blue, porbeagle or tope around the English coast over the next three years is fishing inside a live data-collection window, and catch records from ordinary sessions, not just notable captures, are part of what the project is asking for.