THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

(though typically less), having a gestation period of up to twenty two months, which is the longest in
the entire animal kingdom, only exacerbates the problem.
For those reasons, not too many current generation anglers will be that familiar with the species. Not
that this will affect identification in any way, as this is the only home waters shark to have a large
prominent sharp spine in front of each of its two dorsal fins.
Colouration is some shade of grey on the back and upper flanks with a scattering of white spots which
may not always be immediately noticeable.
I remember once writing that anglers don't so much find spurdogs as spurdogs find anglers, after which
it was often a struggle to shake them off.
You sometimes had to move literally miles to be in with a chance of catching anything else, as the huge
grey swarm of aquatic locusts went about its business of cleaning up everything edible in its path.
Sometimes they would even swim up to the surface in their dozens following one of their hooked
compatriots to the boat.
Obviously, those days are long gone, and certainly won't be back within my life-time, if ever at all. It
would be nice if they were, even at a fraction of the numbers back then, but most unlikely ever again to
be so.
Hopefully they would get a much better deal this time around, including from anglers, many of whom,
myself included, treated not only the spurdog shoals, but all species back then as if stocks were
inexhaustible, which we now know only too well is not the case.
In embarrassingly scant defence of that snippet of history, quite frankly, we didn't know any better, so
we'd keep pretty much every one that came into the boat, which if you happened to be over a shoal of
pregnant females, as spurdogs tend to knock around in same sex shoals, the whole deck could be awash
with aborted yolk sac pups further adding to the carnage.
I'm told that if the pups aren't aborted too prematurely and are handled carefully they can survive if put
into the water straight away, though I don't have any direct evidence for that. But shamefully, I'm not
even sure we did that.
We just took everything for granted, which
combined to what the long-liners would
later ultimately do once they cottoned on to
their commercial value, plunged sea
angling into a dark period of not seeing a
single spurdog from one season to the next
for the best part of two decades and more.
There were still a few small isolated pockets
just about managing to hang on here and
there. But it was quite literally just a few.
Mainly in Scotland in the Firth of Lorne and
Sound of Mull area, with Loch's Etive and
Sunart, which are part of this system, in
particular acting as pupping and nursery
Dorsal fin spur
areas, which thanks to sustained pressure
from the Scottish Sea Angling Conservation Network (SSACN) have now become conservation zones
from which hopefully the species might be able to re-establish itself.
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