The angel shark, formerly known as the monkfish (a name now used for a similar-looking but biologically very different fish) is one of the rarest animals in the sea around Ireland and is officially classified as critically endangered.
Desmond Brennan, in his 1965 book The Sea Angler – Ashore and Afloat, described it as “an ugly and rather extraordinary looking fish” which was “in general appearance […] not unlike a large base fiddle”.
Unlike the classic shark profile, the angel shark has a flattened body, allowing it to lie perfectly concealed on the seafloor, lunging at approaching fish and swallowing them whole in its cavernous mouth.
At the time of Brennan’s writing, angel sharks were found all around the Irish coast, but they were particularly fond of “large shallow bays and estuaries, and in many places can be taken from the shore”.
RM Block
Locally, he noted, they can be “plentiful ... I know of one catch of thirty-seven Monkfish ranging from 40-63 lbs [18 – 29 kilos] made by a party of four anglers during a few hours fishing in a depth of 10 feet [3 metres] off Fenit in Tralee Bay.”
A large gaff hook was used to haul the fish on board, where they were taken to the pier to be photographed and weighed before being dumped, by now long dead, back into the sea. Photos from the Kennelly Archive from this time show heaps of angel sharks piled up on the pier at Fenit along with other now-endangered sharks and rays.
Data from the Irish Specimen Fish Committee and Inland Fisheries Ireland show a spike in the number of angel sharks caught by anglers in the late 1970s, dwindling to one or two per year in the 1990s, before being removed from the listing in 2005.
So rare have they become that in 2023, the appearance of a single angel shark in Oranmore, Co Galway, made headline news on RTÉ, helped by social media-friendly phone footage.
Ken O’Sullivan is an underwater film-maker whose documentaries, such The North Atlantic, and Ireland’s Deep Atlantic, have been bringing the wonders of our marine life to a popular audience for nearly 20 years.
O’Sullivan’s programmes have not shied away from emphasising conservation messages, and he has consistently highlighted the ongoing destruction of ocean life, particularly due to poorly regulated fishing activities.
His father was from Fenit Island in Kerry, with a fishing history stretching back 250 years. As a child, O’Sullivan remembers summers hauling in nets full of fish, but angel sharks were not targeted by fishermen. Despite his years in the waters around Fenit, he has never seen one.
He recalls the angling business out of Fenit in the 1980s, which attracted anglers from across Europe “because the fishing was great”.
The angling community themselves pioneered the notion of “catch and release” when it became clear that numbers were declining.
But, he says, “the real trouble came in the late 1980s, after Bord Iascaigh Mhara [a State agency promoting seafood], in an effort to improve the efficiency of crayfishing, [or spiny lobster, a very valuable species], started using tangle netting, which is basically any old net you have lying around, and they were very efficient in catching crayfish, as they live on the bottom. But, of course, the other bottom-dwelling species are the various skates and rays and the angel shark.”
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The incredible efficiency of the tangle nets was bad news not only for the angel shark and other threatened species that got caught in them, but it also resulted in overfishing of the crayfish themselves.
In 2006, the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine took action and closed the inner area of Tralee Bay to netting – by then the last place where these species were still recorded in any number.
Tralee Bay is also home to the last remaining commercial native oyster fishery in Ireland. Around that time also the area was designated as a Special Area of Conservation under the EU Habitats Directive, for a range of important marine features (though not the angel shark). After decades of mismanagement, things appeared to be looking up.
In 2013, O’Sullivan, along with a number of anglers in the Tralee Bay area, started a “tag-a-ray” angling competition in an effort to raise awareness of the incredible, if seriously depleted, biodiversity of the bay.
The effort, which continues to this day, has scientific value, through cataloguing of the skates and rays and tagging of them – something which can provide valuable information on the fish if they are recaptured at a later date.
O’Sullivan recalls the conflict between the commercial and recreational anglers in the early years, but feels this has diminished and there is now “really good buy-in” from the community.
But while the use of nets was prohibited in the inner part of Tralee Bay, it continues in the outer bay, and because angel sharks and other endangered species are large and may migrate between the shallows and the depths offshore, accidental catch (referred to as by-catch) in tangle nets is still a problem.
Data from the Marine Institute, a State scientific body, shows that 24 angel sharks and 339 flapper skate (also critically endangered) were caught as by-catch between 2021 and 2024 across a broad area from the Blasket Islands in Kerry to Loop Head in Clare.
Their report states that angel sharks “continue to be depleted through fishery by-catch mortality” and that “there is a high risk of extinction of this species […] if fishery by-catch generally continues”.
The report also estimates the capture and drowning of 1,161 grey seals over the four-year period, in contravention of protections under the Habitats Directive.
The Marine Institute has been gathering data and publishing reports on this issue for many years. In 2024, two angel sharks were tagged with sophisticated tracking devices in Tralee Bay in what they described as a “a ground-breaking development for marine conservation”.
O’Sullivan notes that, “in terms of the current research, that is ongoing; what’s going to be key now is what happens with it”.
In 2021, the Department of Agriculture issued a public consultation on the management of crayfish fisheries “to protect critically endangered species”, which proposed closing the fisheries altogether for a period of three years and reopening with pots to catch the crayfish rather than nets, something that would prevent by-catch of sharks, seals and rays.
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The area included was to be significant, stretching from Mizen Head in west Cork to Loop Head in Clare and out to a distance of 12 nautical miles from the coast.
However, the results of this consultation were never published, and no action followed.
In a statement, the Marine Institute told me that “our objective remains as it was in 2021 – to develop a sustainable management plan for the crayfish fishery that has minimum impacts on other species and that enables an increase in the status and productivity of crayfish populations in Irish coastal reef habitat”.
The Department of Agriculture was also contacted, saying that “the results of the [2021] consultation have been evaluated” and pointing to ongoing data collection.
It added: “On completion of the current research project, both updated scientific advice from the Marine Institute and the results of the previous public consultation will be considered together in determining any future policy decisions on the management of the crayfish fishery.”
In 2025, the area around Tralee Bay was declared an "important shark and ray area" by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, including for angel sharks, naming it the “Bay of Angels”.
It follows hopeful new findings of young and pregnant female angel sharks in recent years, including unprecedented film footage of the fish in Tralee Bay.
Louise Overy, wildlife biologist at Munster Technological University and collaborator on this research, says “this designation internationally recognises Tralee Bay as a critical habitat for threatened shark and ray species and underscores its unique ecological importance”.
This recognition is important, as is the work of scientists, communities, local activists, anglers and commercial fishermen in the area, and the footage may help to raise the profile of this unusual fish through social media.
But what is urgently needed is action from the Department of Agriculture to properly regulate fishing in the area, something that has not been forthcoming despite 50 years of warnings, data and reports.
