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Every fall, more than 900 recreational anglers in Texas gather their gear and wade into the blood-warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico for Sharkathon. In this four-day catch-and-release shark fishing tournament, anglers vie to land the biggest shark they can, seeking a share of the roughly US $80,000 prize pool. The sharks and the prize purses are huge: in 2022, the top award, worth $20,000, went to the fisher who ensnared a nearly three-meter-long hammerhead. But that year, Kesley Banks, a marine biologist at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi, went home with a prize of her own.

During that year’s Sharkathon, Banks and her colleagues shared tips with participants about keeping sharks healthy while they’re on the hook. The researchers documented how anglers handled their catches, and in a recent study, they show that the interventions worked. Sharkathon anglers took Banks’s pointers to heart, giving the apex predators a better chance of surviving the ordeal of being temporarily ensnared.

There’s a growing awareness among anglers and the general public about how important sharks are to marine ecosystems and how threatened some populations are. At the same time, Banks has seen a major shift in how recreational shark fishers operate in Texas. The fishery is one of the largest shore-based fisheries in the United States. Once a kill fishery, it is increasingly moving toward catch-and-release methods.

Of the 38 shark species regularly caught in Texas, 22 must be humanely released, according to state law. New laws focus on protecting sharks from harm—like one passed in 2019 that requires fishers to replace J-shaped hooks with circle hooks, which are less likely to kill a shark when swallowed. The state’s fishing culture is also changing, Banks says, with all shark fishing tournaments now being no-kill events. She partially attributes this change to Billy Sandifer, a popular recreational shark fisherman whose shift to practicing catch-and-release fishing has encouraged many Texans to do the same.

But Banks says fishers may not realize that even if they release a shark, being caught and temporarily restrained can still be damaging—or even fatal for certain species.

In a previous study, Banks and her collaborators looked at the factors that increase a shark’s chance of dying during or after capture. Many of these—such as high water temperatures—are out of the fisher’s control. But some tactics make getting caught less dangerous for the shark, and Banks wanted to know whether anglers would take that advice and change their methods.

So, during Sharkathon 2022, Banks’s team shared a video with the contestants about one of the most important things they could do: keep the shark’s gills underwater so it can breathe. The researchers included questions in a post-tournament survey asking whether the video influenced how participants handled sharks. A minority of shark fishers—around three percent—said they weren’t likely to keep sharks in the water. Of those, though, most said they hadn’t seen the video. The majority—71 percent—replied that they’d watched the video and tried to ensure that any sharks they caught stayed submerged.

Yet as Banks notes: “We all know saying yes and doing something are very different.”

Luckily, Sharkathon offered a handy way to follow up on how anglers really behaved. As part of the contest rules, all participants must submit a clear photo of their catch. In these images, the researchers saw a significant difference in how fishers were handling sharks. Compared with the previous five years, they found that the number of sharks being handled in the breaking waves of the surf zone—where anglers could keep some water flowing over shark gills—increased from 22 to 35 percent.

The improvement, says Banks, confirmed what she already thought.

“We already know fishermen are definitely conservation-minded,” she says. Recreational anglers are eager to act to keep sharks around, she adds, and to “leave these fish swimming for our children and grandchildren to catch.”

But there’s still plenty of room for improvement. Competitors landed around 60 percent of the sharks on dry sand, and the fraction of sharks landed with their gills completely submerged didn’t significantly change compared with previous years. Banks thinks she knows why some shark fishers may be ignoring the advice: a shark in water is way more dangerous and difficult to control, since there’s little anglers can do to protect themselves from getting bitten as they try to maneuver their hook from the shark’s mouth.

Neil Hammerschlag, a shark expert with Atlantic Shark Expeditions, says there are other things fishers can do to help sharks beyond keeping them in deeper water. Using heavier tackle, he says, can reduce fight times and significantly improve a shark’s chances of surviving, as can knowing how tolerant the different species are. Bull sharks, for example, can handle brief stays on dry sand, while hammerheads cannot.

For the more sensitive species, Hammerschlag says, it’s probably worth cutting the fishing line to keep the shark in deeper water. Leaving a fishing hook in the shark’s mouth isn’t great, he adds, but neither is “fighting an animal to complete exhaustion to get them on the sand.” Some species might not be able to recover from the stress.

In future research, Banks hopes to find out if there’s a sweet spot where sharks are out of the water enough to make them easier to control but submerged enough to keep oxygen flowing through their gills. She also works regularly with a group of recreational anglers to tag sharks they catch throughout the year so she can better understand shark behavior in Texas waters. If all goes as planned, those same sharks will stay healthy enough to thrill another angler at next year’s Sharkathon, only to swim off again and be caught another day.