Greenland's Avannaata municipality approved a plan to cull 1,000 Greenland sharks earlier this year, offering 300 Danish krone per heart — roughly £34. The rationale: protect inshore halibut fishers losing thousands of kroner in gear to the deep-water predators. The government eventually questioned the cull's legality and the plan was shelved, but the political appetite remains. The Greenland shark is a spectacularly poor target for population management. It reaches sexual maturity at approximately 150 years old, lives past 400, and the global population — still recovering from industrial-era harvesting that peaked at 58,000 landings in 1948 — loses an estimated 3,500 individuals annually to bycatch alone. Marine conservationist Nick Dulvy calls them "probably the most sensitive species in the ocean to overfishing." A cull of even 1,000 would hit a population with functionally zero capacity to rebound on any human timescale. Conservation group Oceans North Kalaallit Nunaat points out the obvious flaw: Greenland sharks are migratory, swimming up to 2,000km per year. Remove a thousand from Baffin Bay and replacements swim in from elsewhere — the gear losses continue, but the broader population takes a hit. A similar bounty scheme in the former Uummannaq municipality collected 19,697 hearts between 1986 and 2001 with no documented improvement in fishing conditions. The deeper story is structural. Fishing accounts for roughly 25% of Greenland's GDP, and the inshore fleet in Avannaata is squeezed from multiple directions. Halibut prices are rising but average fish size is declining annually, according to the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources. Fisher Henrik Jensen describes putting out fewer hooks and bringing in fewer fish, attributing the decline to offshore trawlers. Ghost gear — lost or discarded lines too heavy for small-boat equipment to retrieve — is another culprit Jensen names ahead of sharks. Jenseeraq Poulsen, director of ONKN, frames the economics plainly: "If every Greenland shark in Baffin Bay vanished tomorrow, the inshore fishery in Avannaata would still face too many boats working a quota under pressure, rising costs and no alternative employment." The shark is the tangible, politically convenient target for pressures that are actually about fleet overcapacity, shrinking catch per unit effort, and an economy with no fallback. More promising interventions exist and are already partially underway. Halibut Greenland, the cooperatively owned processor in Ilulissat, funds ghost gear cleanup. ONKN proposes a gear-loss compensation scheme and funded trials of acoustic shark deterrents. Rebekka Nygård Bak of Greenland's fisheries ministry suggests bycatch-friendly equipment regulations and better reporting. None of these are as politically simple as a bounty, but none risk collapsing a 400-year-old species to avoid confronting a quota problem. The cull debate is a case study in misattribution — blaming a symptom while the structural disease goes untreated. When margins narrow, a longstanding nuisance becomes intolerable, and the political reflex is to kill the nuisance rather than fix the margins. If Greenland follows that reflex, it risks destroying a biologically irreplaceable species while solving nothing about the fishery's actual trajectory.
