In September, the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO), an intergovernmental organization that uses science to manage fisheries, made a historic decision: it prohibited the retention of Greenland sharks in international waters.“It was a long time coming, but not a long time in the life of a Greenland shark,” Sonja Fordham, president of Washington, D.C.-based Shark Advocates International, who attended the recent NAFO meeting in Portugal, told Mongabay.However, such exceptions would only apply to the accidental catching of the sharks — not to deliberate fishing.Brynn Devine, an Arctic fisheries adviser at Oceans North, a marine conservation NGO based in Halifax, Canada, said Greenland sharks tend to get caught as bycatch most often in bottom trawling gear, but that they’re also susceptible to other kinds of fishing, such as gillnetting.And it can also be hard to get them out of the net.” Susanna Fuller, the vice president of operations and projects at Oceans North, who also attended the NAFO meeting, said the decision to protect Greenland sharks was a “huge breakthrough.” On the other hand, she said, NAFO has more work to do to align fishing quotas, such as for the quota for cod, with the prevailing science, and to further protect vulnerable ecosystems."