From the corner of its tooth-lined mouth protruded a black hook and two feet of trailing braided line. She lifted the line in her hands disapprovingly. The red marks around the shark’s nose were likely caused by the steel line scraping across its skin as it thrashed.

“Snapped, not cut,” Mark said, hopping out of the cab and coming to stand next to her. He was a fit young man in his mid-twenties, cleanshaven, with short, black hair parted neatly on the left, and a curl that had a habit of dangling across his forehead. His broad mouth was often spread in a confident, carefree smile, as it was now. Nothing ever seemed to get him down, making him pleasant to work with.

Elsa said, “I’ve never heard of anyone catching a great white on a line before.”

Mark nodded. “It’s not common, but it happens.”

“You think whoever caught this one was fishing specifically for sharks?”

“We won’t know until we look inside and see what kind of hook is in her belly.”

Back inside the shed, Elsa climbed into the cramped cab of a mini-crane and drove it over to the flatbed so the short boom angled above the shark. Mark secured the cable around its caudal fin. When he gave her a thumbs up, she maneuvered the monster specimen to the stainless-steel table. They hosed it off, then collected parasitic copepods that liked to attach themselves to areas of low velocity on the body, particularly behind the pectoral fins and on the ventral side of the tail. They placed them in a dish (and would later send them to a laboratory for identification), then performed a morphometric assessment of the shark, which involved measuring nearly every inch of its torpedo-like body. Given that scientists rarely had the opportunity to examine great whites up close (in large part because the animals didn’t float when they die and thus don’t get washed up on shore), measurements were vital to gathering a better understanding of the growth and evolution of the species.

As she worked, Elsa lamented the slow progress of shark conservation in Sri Lanka. While efforts had been made to combat unregulated overexploitation, the country still lagged years behind the conservation efforts undertaken by neighboring countries such as the Maldives. The biggest impediment was the world’s demand for shark fins, meat, and liver oil. Over the past ten years alone, Sri Lanka exported fifty-nine metric tons of shark fins annually. However, that was only the official report. There was also a flourishing black market, with many more tons of fins being exported as dried fish.

The cruelty, greed, and ignorance boiled Elsa’s blood. She didn’t want to put an end to the country’s shark fishery altogether, yet it wasn’t sustainable in its current form. This was the reason she joined SBMC in the first place. It was an opportunity, however small, to educate regulators and fishermen about the need for conservation while also promoting the ecotourism of sharks as an alternate revenue model to fishing for the local economy.