Are Mako Sharks Endangered? Their Conservation Status

Shortfin mako sharks have been classified as Endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List since 2019, and both shortfin and longfin makos were added to Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) that same year.¹ The species is in trouble across every ocean basin it inhabits, and the combination of biological traits that make makos remarkable also makes them extraordinarily difficult to protect.

Why Mako Sharks Are Built to Decline

Mako sharks are the fastest sharks in the ocean. Direct speed measurements show their burst swimming ranks among the highest ever recorded not just for sharks but for tunas and billfishes too.² That speed, combined with warm-bloodedness (makos are one of the few endothermic shark species), makes them spectacular predators. It also makes them popular targets.

But the traits that matter most for their conservation are the quiet demographic ones. Shortfin makos are long-lived, reach sexual maturity late, produce small litters, and have a reproductive cycle that stretches two to three years between pregnancies.¹ In practical terms, a female mako cannot replace herself quickly. If fishing removes adults faster than new ones are born and survive to maturity, the population spirals downward. And unlike many commercially important fish species that can bounce back relatively quickly when fishing pressure eases, makos replenish on a timescale measured in decades. That slow biology is the root of the problem and the reason every other threat hits so hard.

The Bycatch Trap

Most mako sharks that die from fishing are not targeted. They are bycatch, caught incidentally on longlines set for tuna and swordfish. The scale of this problem is immense because pelagic longline fleets operate across every temperate and tropical ocean where makos live, and the gear types overlap with mako habitat almost perfectly.

Even when fishers release makos alive, a significant number die afterward. A study using satellite tags on makos caught by U.S. Atlantic pelagic longline vessels between 2022 and 2024 found that about 87% of released sharks survived the post-release period. That sounds encouraging until you factor in the sharks that were already dead or dying at the boat. The at-vessel survival rate ranged from roughly 65% in the Gulf of Mexico to 77% in more northern waters, and it dropped with longer soak times, warmer water, and larger shark size. When all of these stages were combined, overall bycatch survival ran between about 59% and 64% depending on the region.³ The researchers noted that given how slowly mako populations grow, even that level of mortality from bycatch alone could be enough to block recovery if encounters happen in significant numbers.

In the Pacific, the picture is arguably worse. A tagging study of makos caught on commercial longlines in the Western and Central Pacific found that while 88% of tagged sharks survived until their tags popped off or reached their 60-day endpoint, that figure only counted the animals healthy enough to tag. When the full fishing interaction was considered, including haulback, handling, and release, the post-release survival estimate for makos dropped to about 49%.⁴ So roughly half the makos caught on Pacific longlines and released die anyway. Larger, uninjured sharks fared better, but the overall numbers suggest that “release” does not equal “saved” for this species.

Overfishing in Regional Hotspots

Some regions are in worse shape than others. In the waters off southern Java and West Nusa Tenggara in Indonesia, a length-based stock assessment found that the spawning potential ratio for shortfin makos was about 6%.⁵ To put that in perspective, fisheries scientists generally consider anything below 20% to indicate serious overfishing. A value of 6% means the breeding population has been reduced to a tiny fraction of its unfished size. The same study found that females were being caught more frequently than males and that the average size of females was declining, both signals that the population is being fished down hard.

Demographic modeling in the broader South Pacific reached a similarly grim conclusion: mako populations there could only sustain fishing mortality equivalent to about 20% of their natural mortality rate.¹ That is an extremely thin margin. It means even moderate fishing pressure, spread across the many fleets operating in the South Pacific, can push the population into decline. And because mako biology is broadly similar worldwide, regions that seem healthier today are not necessarily safe; they may simply not have been studied as thoroughly.

What CITES and International Rules Actually Do

The 2019 CITES Appendix II listing for both mako species passed with a strong majority: 102 parties voted in favor, 40 opposed, and 5 abstained.⁶ The listing does not ban trade outright. Instead, it requires countries to issue import and export permits for mako products and demonstrate that trade is not harming wild populations.⁷ The system is meant to force transparency and create a paper trail for mako fins, meat, and other products moving between countries.

Whether that system works in practice is another question. Some researchers have raised concerns that the CITES listing, while well-intentioned, could actually hinder collaborative science by restricting the sharing of biological samples across national borders.⁶ That is an awkward side effect: the very regulations designed to protect the species could slow down the research needed to understand how it is doing.

Meanwhile, the bodies that actually manage fishing on the high seas, the tuna regional fisheries management organizations (t-RFMOs), have been slow to act. An analysis of t-RFMO practice found that these organizations have not adequately fulfilled their responsibility to regulate commercially exploited sharks through effective measures like precautionary catch limits, harvest strategies, or total allowable catches.⁸ The central problem is that mako sharks are still treated as “bycatch” in regulatory frameworks designed primarily to manage tuna. As long as the governance structure revolves around tuna, sharks will remain an afterthought.

Recreational Fishing and the Illusion of Catch-and-Release

Commercial bycatch dominates the conversation, but recreational fishing contributes too, especially in the United States. U.S. regulations have tightened over the past several years, and the number of makos kept by recreational anglers has decreased. However, thousands of makos continue to be targeted by catch-and-release anglers or caught incidentally, and there is a real need to understand how those practices affect overall fishing mortality and stock recovery.⁹

Catch-and-release is often framed as harmless, but the bycatch survival research discussed earlier makes clear that handling and release do not guarantee survival, particularly for a species sensitive to stress and prolonged fight times. How an angler handles the shark at the boat, how long the fight lasted, and whether the animal is injured during hook removal all affect whether it swims away and actually lives. The assumption that a released mako is a saved mako is a comforting simplification, not an established fact.

One Global Population, One Global Problem

Unlike many marine species that have distinct regional populations with limited contact, mako sharks appear to form something close to a single global gene pool. Microsatellite analysis of makos sampled from the North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific, and both coasts of South Africa found extremely weak evidence of population subdivision.¹⁰ More recent phylogeographic work confirmed a pattern of high genetic connectivity across hemispheres and ocean basins.¹¹

This has a double-edged consequence. On one hand, high connectivity means that recovery in one region can eventually benefit others as individuals migrate. On the other hand, it means there is no hidden, untouched reserve population somewhere keeping the species safe. Overfishing in the western Pacific and overfishing in the North Atlantic are drawing from the same genetic pool. And it means that conservation measures need to be global, or at least coordinated across the major ocean basins, to be effective. A fishing ban in one country’s waters does little if the same animals swim through another country’s unregulated fleet a few months later.

Climate Change Is Shrinking Their Habitat

Mako sharks prefer water above about 16°C and spend most of their time in well-oxygenated layers of the open ocean. In the Eastern North Pacific, researchers found that low-oxygen zones in the deep ocean act as a hard boundary on mako distribution, essentially compressing the sharks into a thinner band of usable habitat.¹² As climate change warms the oceans, these oxygen minimum zones are expected to expand. That means the available habitat for makos could shrink, concentrating them in smaller areas and potentially making them even more vulnerable to fishing gear. It also could shift their seasonal distribution patterns in ways that are difficult to predict and harder to manage.

Satellite tracking work in the western North Atlantic has shown that makos already follow complex seasonal migration routes.¹³ If their preferred thermal and oxygen conditions shift poleward or become patchier, those migration patterns could change, potentially bringing them into new conflicts with fisheries or out of the boundaries of current marine protected areas. For a species managed through geographically defined regulations, this kind of habitat shift is a governance headache on top of a biological one.

What Happens When Apex Predators Disappear

Makos are not just another species on a conservation list. As large pelagic predators, they sit near the top of oceanic food webs and help regulate the populations of the species below them. Research on the broader consequences of shark declines has shown that removing large predatory sharks reduces natural mortality for a range of prey, contributing to changes in abundance, distribution, and behavior of smaller sharks, marine mammals, and sea turtles. In some coastal ecosystems, the loss of top predators has produced cascading effects through the food web. In open-ocean (pelagic) systems, there is growing evidence of mesopredator release, where mid-level predators boom when the big predators that kept them in check vanish.¹⁴

For mako sharks specifically, their role as a fast, wide-ranging predator means they interact with prey communities across vast stretches of ocean. The full ecological fallout of losing a predator like this is hard to predict precisely because the open ocean is so much harder to study than a coral reef or a kelp forest. But the direction is clear: fewer makos means a less regulated open-ocean food web, with effects that ripple outward in ways we are only beginning to document.

Mercury, Mislabeling, and Why You Might Be Eating Mako Without Knowing It

There is a consumer dimension to this story that most people are unaware of. Mako meat is sold and consumed around the world, but because the species sits high on the food chain, it accumulates toxic metals in its muscle tissue at concerning levels. A study of 61 shortfin makos caught off southeastern Brazil detected levels of arsenic and mercury that exceeded food-safety thresholds, raising public health concerns for people who eat mako regularly.¹⁵ Separate research in the northeastern Atlantic confirmed that mercury concentration in mako muscle increases with the size of the shark, at a steeper rate than in blue sharks, and correlates with trophic position in makos specifically.¹⁶ In short, the bigger the mako, the more mercury it carries.

On top of the health risk, there is the problem of mislabeling. DNA barcoding of fish sold in New England markets found that products labeled as “swordfish” were, in some cases, actually mako shark and other threatened or endangered shark species.¹⁷ That study, conducted just before the implementation of major import monitoring programs and a U.S. shortfin mako fishing ban, serves as a baseline to see whether those new rules actually reduce mislabeling. But the implication is stark: you may have eaten an endangered shark without realizing it, and the market incentives that create mislabeling also undermine conservation by hiding the true volume of mako being consumed. If demand for mako products persists invisibly, under false labels, it becomes much harder to track or reduce. For the species, being disguised as swordfish on a restaurant menu is one more way the real toll gets hidden from view.