Human Interactions
The main conservation threat to the plain maskray is incidental capture by commercial bottom trawl fisheries. In the present day, this is mostly caused by Australia's Northern Prawn Fishery, which operates throughout its range. Although this species is discarded when caught, it is more delicate-bodied than other maskrays and is thus unlikely to survive encounters with trawling gear. Historically, this species may also have been negatively affected by Japanese, Chinese, and Taiwanese trawlers that fished intensively off northern Australia from 1959 to 1990. These factors, coupled with the plain maskray's limited distribution and low reproductive rate, have resulted in its being assessed as Near Threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Read more about this topic: Plain Maskray
Famous quotes containing the words human and/or interactions:
“The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)